Who's deceiving now?

Ever since Bjorn Lomborg came on the scene the Green Left has hated him. I don't. Certainly not as a person, any interactions we have had have always been pleasant. I liked him when we meet and still like him, which is not to say I always agree with him. The Green Left does not share my opinion, but that is not surprising.

So they are quite excited that one of their own has penned an attack on Lomborg, merely because it attacks Lomborg. It is being hyped and praised by all the usual suspects. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation claims that Howard Friel, author of The Lomborg Deception, has "read Lomborg's books and thoroughly checked hundreds of Lomborg's sources and references" and "has concerns." Actually he wrote a hatchet job, which is more than being concerned. George Monbiot, in an attack on science writer Matt Ridley says that that Lomborg made so many errors "that an entire book—The Lomborg Deception by Howard Friel—was required to document them." That's an implicit endorsement of Friel's work though Monbiot's logic is bad. That an entire book was written doesn't mean that an entire book was needed to document errors. In fact, it is clear that Friel spends a great deal of time rebutting things Lomborg didn't say, or going off on tangents unrelated to what Lomborg actually did say. Newsweek gave The Lomborg Deception a less than rousing endorsement but said people should read it if they read Lomborg, much the way if you read the Talmud you ought to have Mein Kampf on hand, I guess.

This is just a blog, not an encyclopedia, so I can focus only on a small portion of Friel's "rebuttal" to Lomborg. Friel was particularly upset that Lomborg had said that the glaciers in the Himalayas would run down toward the end of the century, not much earlier. And he claimed that Lomborg only referenced the decline of the glaciers as being the result of the end to the Little Ice Age. Lomborg had quoted a scientific source for the claim that the end of Ice Age started the decline of the glaciers butFriel says that Lomborg "chopped' off the quote to delete a reference to human caused warming being involved. The problem was that the entire quote from Lomborg actually did mention global warming. Lomborg is less of a skeptic than I am, he does think there is human-induced warming and has said so. He even says it may have serious impact on humans, even though Friel claims to the contrary.

Friel quite specifically says that Lomborg was guilty of "misstating the projected life expectancy of the glaciers" in the Himalayas. Friel then goes on to say that Lomborg ignores the fact that: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of the disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate." Friel, in his "scientific" rebuttal to the bad science of Lomborg makes this claim repeatedly.

He says: "the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high," and "the Himalayan glaciers will disappear 'by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner,' and not 'toward the end of the century,' as Lomborg wrote." And Friel claimed "the glaciers may disappear by 2035...." Four times in his rebuttal he attacks Lomborg for not saying the Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035 or sooner. And his source for this claim is the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change itself along with the World Wildlife Fund. Actually the IPCC was quoting the WWF so there weren't two sources and it is a tad bit dishonest to pretend there were.

Of course, Friel's "scientific" rebuttal falls apart because even the IPCC was forced to admit that the 2035 melt date was grossly in error and wasn't based on a peer-reviewed paper. It was a typographical error that just kept getting repeated by the alarmists. Let me recount the story of the 2035 claim. New Science magazine, it turns out, was the original published source used for this claim and they confessed that the claim was a "speculative comment" never submitted to peer review. And they were horrified that the IPCC printed the claim, second hand from the WWF without bothering to check it. They said: "We are entitled to an explanation" as to how this could happen, saying this was further damaging the reputation of the IPCC.

It also appears that the 2035 claim was floating about because of a paper by one V.M. Kotlyakov which estimated the shrinkage of the glaciers and said it expected them to melt by the year 2350. Someone, somewhere along the line, transposed the year 2350 into 2035. In fact, major glaciologists had all attacked the figure as being grossly out of line with the facts. The BBC reported that Michael Kemp of the World Glacier Monitoring System said that it is "not plausible that that Himalayan glaciers are disappearing within the next few decades."

The IPCC eventually admitted that the claim they had made was unfounded and unscientific. They released a statement saying that "clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by IPCC procedures were not applied properly" allowing "poorly substantiated estimates of rate and recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers" to appear in their publication. The Guardian newspaper reported the "IPCC has said it regretted the mistake" and blamed it on "human failure."

So, according to Friel, one of Lomborg's major egregious "deceptions" was that he didn't realize the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, as was documented by WWF and the IPCC. But Friel is the one who is wrong and not even the primary source he uses, to prove Lomborg was deceptive, actually thinks the evidence is accurate. Certainly on these claims Friel was wrong and Lomborg was right to not use the discredited claims.

I should note that this blog first reported on this error in 2009. I covered it again earlier this year, and then again a little later in 2010. Yale University Press published Friel's book in March, 2010. This means that it was already public knowledge that Friel's claim was wrong three months prior to the publication of his book, at the very least. Yet it was still published with Friel's accusations, based on totally bogus data, in place. Newsweek's review of Friel, the one that said people should keep the book on hand when reading Lomborg, says Friel got "tripped up" over the glacier assertion, acknowledges the IPCC admits they were wrong and says: "Friel criticizes Lomborg for saying they would disappear by the end of this century, arguing that he should have accepted the IPCC's date of 2034. Oops."

In reply to the "oops" comment from Newsweek, allow me to quote Arnold Beckoff, the main character in Torch Song Trilogy, in relation to "whoops," which is close enough for the point I want to make:

Whoops?
Ed, did you say "Whoops"?
"Whoops" is when you fall down an elevator shaft.
"Whoops" is when you skinny dip in a school of piranha.
"Whoops' is when you accidentally douche with Drano.
No, Ed.
This was no "Whoops."
This was an "AAARGH!".

But this "oops" raises some questions. Why is Friel being promoted as someone who thoroughly checked out all the facts to rebut Lomborg? Clearly, on something as obvious as the melting of the Himalayan glaciers Friel couldn't have bothered to check out the facts when he was attacking Lomborg. Had he done so he would have investigated what experts said about glaciers and quoted them. And they were rounding condemning the IPCC for getting the facts wrong. So what kind of checking did Friel do?

I suggest that all he wanted to do was show Lomborg "wrong," not because the research he had done proved this, but because he already knew Lomborg had to be wrong and went out searching for evidence to back up his conclusion. He was the proverbial judge with the death sentence already in his book merely seeking what charges to lay against the accused. To show Lomborg wrong he went no further than the IPCC. Yet, the moment the IPCCs was subjected to just a small amount of scrutiny it fell like a house of cards. Even this blogger knew this claim was false. So why didn't the meticulous, thorough, debunking Friel realize the error was wrong? Why did he include it in his book? The only answer I can give is that he didn't actually bother to subject the IPCC's claim to any scrutiny whatsoever, he took it on faith, the way fundamentalists believe the Bible. This isn't an "ooops," not by any means. It's an aaargh!

How Doomsday Types Turn Possible Good News into Bad

The last gray whale seen int eh Atlantic was in the 18th century. According to Discovery.com:

There are, in fact, no gray whales in the Atlantic—–have not been, for that matter, since the eighteenth century, when the species was possibly exterminated from the hemisphere by commercial whalers.

Today, gray whales exist in two populations, both in the Pacific: a critically endangered western Pacific population believed to number fewer than 200 individuals, and an eastern Pacific population of approximately 20,000. Members of the latter breed in the lagoons of Baja California; swim north along the coasts of Mexico, the United States and Canada to feed in the Arctic waters north of Alaska and northeastern Siberia; and then return south.

But, and this is a big but, a gray whale was spotted and photographed off the cost of Israel in the Mediterranean. So is this good news? Nope, the doomsday types say that good news is unlikely——but it always is with this crowd.



Instead of being good news that a whale was spotted back in this hemisphere, for the first time in centuries, it is proof that global warming is destroying the planet.

They argue that the whale took "advantage of ice-free conditions" and swam into the Atlantic. First, there was never ice-free conditions in the Northwest Passage, just reduced ice. Every summer the ice in the passage retreats and grows back in the winter. Watch this time lapse of the retreat and growth of the ice since 1978, which when such records were first kept. You will see that for most summers the ice retreats sufficiently to allow a whale to make this journey, if it so chooses. The Northwest Passage has been navigable to man for well over a century and certainly would be navigable to whales during that same period.

It is true that in recent years wind patterns in the Arctic have blown ice out of the region and into warmer waters where it melted, so the Passage was more easily navigated in the past. Using data collected by NASA a team of researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory found that "the rapid decline in winter perennial ices the past two years was caused by unusual winds." And the winds, they said, were due to " unusual atmospheric conditions [that] set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic." You can information on other NASA studies which "confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming." These ice changes are not due to global warming.

The Northwest Passage has been navigable multiples times over the last century as the records clearly show—in spite of the false claims in the media that this has been a recent occurrence.

You may remember that when dolphins were spotted in the Baltic we had some people crowing that this proves global warming. Spiegel claimed the appearance was the "the result of warmer temperatures due to global warming. I debunked that nonsense by showing that dolphins were spotted in the Baltic centuries ago and that numerous reputable sources list the Baltic as one area where dolphins are regularly spotted and have been for many, many years. Yet this rather usual sighting was reported by numerous media outlets as another ominous sign of global warming.

There are two possible stories with this whale. One is that a small number of whales survived and were never spotted in the past. This is dismissed as impossible. Of course the coelacanth, which is a rather large fish, was believed have gone extinct during the Cretaceous period, almost 66 million years ago. But one was found again in 1938, millions of years after it was believed to have vanished. Since then many more have been caught. And, quite by coincidence, a hiker in Sweden found an oar fish that had died, on the beach. This fish, which can grow to 39 feet long, was last seen in Sweden around 130 years ago, though two were seen on English beaches last year.

Another story is that a lone whale got lost, took advantage of one the multiple times that Northwest Passage was navigable, and is stuck. The first story is a tremendously good one, the second a sad one for this whale but relatively inconsequential to the fate of the planet. But what this isn't, is a story about global warming and impeding disaster.

But these days global warming theory seems to come down to this: everything causes global warming, global warming causes everything, everything is evil. So everything should be banned, restricted, regulated, controlled or taxed.

If only the weather were as predictable as the alarmists.

It seems that a group of US warming alarmists have been emailing one another discussing an offensive against those nasty people who question their theory. I was looking at those emails and one of them, apparently from David Schindler says:

"I'd add that Edmonton is near snowless and has been shirtsleeve weather for most of 2010 instead of the usual -40C... but of course there are no major media here, so only the locals know!"

Unlike most global warming theory, which is based on models projecting into the future what the theorists think will happen, given the assumptions they make, this claim is easily verified in the here and now. So I did.

First, I wondered if the "usual" temperature in Edmonton is -40C, as the author claimed.

According to the BBC the average minimum temperature in Edmonton, for January, is -20 and the average high is -9. For February it is -17 and -6 respectively. The record low is -50, so it appears that -40C is not usual at all, but would be highly unusual. I went to the Canadian Weather Office for more official data. They say the daily average in January, in Edmonton, is -11.7, not -40 as Schindler claimed in his email. For February, the weather office says the average is -8.4. They say the January "extreme minimum" was -44.4, set in 1943 and for February the extreme minimum was -46.1, set in 1939.

The record lows for Edmonton are barely colder than what Schindler claimed is the "usual" weather in Edmonton. The official data shows the "usual" weather is nowhere near -40C, either an a daily average, or as the daily low. Temperatures of -40 are not "usual."

What about Edmonton having "shirtsleeve" weather this year? Since Schindler said this was "for most of 2010" and since he wrote the email on February 27th, it is fair to look at average temperatures for January and February in Edmonton. Obviously there is no objective definition of "shirtsleeve weather," so that is more ambiguous than the now-debunked claim that the usual temperature is -40C. But I sincerely doubt anyone reading this would actually define the weather in Edmonton, this year, as shirtsleeve weather. I would dare Prof. Schindler to spend much time outside, in his shirtsleeves, during even the warmest of the days this year in Edmonton. At best there were a few hours that might qualify as "shirtsleeze" weather. A few hours over 58 days is not "most of 2010."

For the last third of January the temperature never got higher than -5.1C (yes that is negative) and the minimum temperature went down t0 -21.5C.

Here is the maximum temperature, per day, for February: 1st, -6.4C; 2nd, -7.4C; 3rd, -4.7C; 4th, -6.6C; 5th, -8.9C; 6th, -6.7C; 7th, -5.9C; 8th, -5.6C; 9th, -2.4C; 1oth, 1.7C; 11th, -1.7C; 12th, -8.6C; 13th, -14.6C; 14th, -6.1C; 15th, 4.8C; 16th, 1C; 17th, 2.3C; 18th, 2; 19th,-2.4C; 20th, -6.3C; 21st, 0.4C; 22nd -5.1C; 23rd, -5.1C; 24th, 4.2C; 25th, 5.5C; 26th, 7.3C; 27th, 0.6. I end with the day of Schindler's email since he was referring to the weather to that date.

Considering that when Schindler made his claim, there had been only 58 days in 2010, it certainly was easy to check how accurate he was. He said that "most of 2010," as of that day, had been shirtsleeve weather. The official data shows the average day to be below freezing. Only a few days crept above freezing and just a handful had highs in the 40s (F). Even defining "shirtsleeve weather" very broadly it is impossible to say that "most of 2010" was "shirtsleeve weather." Mr. Schindler grossly exaggerated the warming.

I have also looked at his other claim, that the "usual" temperature in Edmonton is -40C. I don't know if "usual" is supposed to be the mean temperature or the usual low temperature. Normally I would take his comment as referring to the usual mean temperature. Unfortunately for him, neither would substantiate his claim. The most favorable interpretation would be to say he meant the mean low temperature for those months. But that is still far off the mark since the mean couldn't be that close to the record low. For the record, the mean temperature for Janaury, 2010 in Edmonton was -12; for February it was -8. In addition to exaggerating Edmonton's "warm" weather, Schindler grossly exaggerated it's "usual" cold weather as well. This seems par for the course with the alarmists, hence the designation "alarmist."

Perhaps Mr. Schindler thought he could get away with it because, as he said, "there are no major media here." Unfortunately for him, there is weather data available. Of course, that is before they "adjust" the data with unknown formulas in their climate models. No doubt when they finish that process Edmonton will have had the "warmest" winter in recent memory.

But, doesn't Mr. Schindler's claim—even if it were true—confuse weather with climate? After all, we constantly hear that record colds don't disprove warming theory since the one is weather, and the theory is about climate. Of course, when we have extraordinarily warm days the warming alarmists bleat about it constantly. So apparently the "weather isn't climate" slogan only applies to weather that contradicts their theory, not weather that is alleged to confirm it. As far as I know, all weather, of whatever kind, for however long, is considered proof of warming. I've yet to find out what the alarmists say would falsify their theory.

I also note, with some amusement, that one of the prominent names among the emailers about countering the evil skeptics was Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich is certainly an alarmist, if ever there was one. His history of unsubstantiated looming disasters are well known. And, again par for the course, his solutions were always massive government control of individuals. His first alarmist work was The Population Bomb, which said: "By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people." He predicted a massive famine in America with populations plunging to around 2.6 million by 1999. (Yep, still waiting for that one as well.) He predicted the oceans wouldbe destroyed by 1979 and said: "If I were a gambler, I would tekae even money that Engliand will not exist in the year 2000." If anyone deserves the lable "alarmist" it is Ehrlich. I know of no prominent left-wing environmentalist who has been as hysterical, on as broad range of topics as Ehrlich. I should also note that I can't think of anyone in the field of public academia who has been so consistently wrong either.

Given Ehrlich's history of paranoid alarmism I'm not suprised he is now in a warming alarmist. Given his track record, when it comes to being right, I find his presence in the warming camp actually rather assuring.

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.

Debating the facts, who has the most to lose?

Joe Romm is one of the leading climate alarmists around and operates the ClimateProgress blog, which is associated with the left-wing Center for American Progress. Romm is one of the people the warming groupies turn to in order to learn their "talking points" in dealing with those big, bad, nasty skeptics.

Romm has been particularly unpleasant to Roger Pielke, Jr., perhaps because Pielke is also on the left side of the political spectrum but is most decidedly not a warming alarmist. Like most skeptics he does not deny warming (the deniers label is just one of the many inaccuracies that the alarmists like to push). But he also thinks the problems are grossly overstated and questions some of the science used to justify various political agendas.

Romm has used the usual tactic of sneer and smear that the alarmists seem to love. As much as they talk about science they really won't debate the science, instead they question the morality of their opponents, or their intelligence. That is not debate, that is the argument from intimidation that Rand exposed long ago.

Pielke offered to debate Romm and people put up a lot of money, to go to the charity of the choice of the debate victor. Romm immediately came up with multiple excuses as to why such a debate will never happen—mainly more of the same sneer and smear tactics again.

The matter started when Andy Revkin, a faithful alarmist who writes for The New York Times, said that Pielke should be part of the IPCC review of documents. In his typical hyperbolic fashion Romm called that suggestion "the most illogical climate post on Earth." It's not a bad suggestion, or a wrong suggestion. Nor is it just illogical. It is the most illogical post on Earth, which I guess means the most illogical post ever posted to the best of our knowledge. Wow! No sir, Romm isn't prone to exaggeration.

Romm then went on to attack Pielke in the same hyperbolic fashion saying that Pielke "is the single most disputed and debunked person in the entire realm of people who publish regularly on disasters and climate change." Wow! Now you know what to expect when he talks about the single warmest winter if the history of the planet and other such rot. Sneer, smear and gross exaggeration—that is the arsenal of the the warming alarmist in a nutshell.

Pielke offered to debate Romm and gave Romm virtually total control of the debate. Romm could veto any moderator for the debate. He could veto any resolution to be debated. He can pick the time and place of the debate. Foreign Policy magazine agreed to host the debate. And a donor would put up $20,000 to the charity of Romm's choice. None of that was good enough. Romm says that you can't trust audience votes at a debate because "antiscience ideologues" (the term he uses for scientists who disagree with his hysterical exaggerations) go to debates intending to lie.

I was wondering how they would explain three major debates I knew about—one in New York, one in London and one in Montreal—where the shift in audience perception was decidedly in favor of the skeptics. Apparently the reason the sneer, smear and exaggerate alarmists believe the audience is lying, even though many of the audience members are regular attendees at the series of debates.

Pielke says he is "offering Joe a chance to come out from behind his blog, where he bullies and systematically misrepresents my views. He has a chance to air his arguments about me in public and where I can respond to them directly. He will have a chance to explain why my views are so very wrong. At the same time, regardless of the outcome of the debate itself, we can do some good for people who need help, thanks to a generous donor."

Romm, of course, says that he won't debate because he doesn't want to give Pielke any publicity. That claim is disproved by the 75 posts he has written on his own site going after Pielke, including a recent 4,000 word extended attack. Pielke says: "Should Joe Romm turn down this offer, he will reveal his true colors to all -- a bully who hides behind his blog and who would rather call people names than engage in a serious policy debate on a topic of critical importance to our generation. There is no reason for Joe to turn this offer down, other than knowing that his arguments cannot stand up to scrutiny were he to emerge from behind his blog."

Mr Pielke doesn't understand that the entire purpose of the argument from intimidation is precisely to bully people into adopting a viewpoint. It is meant to bully. I think Rand's formulation of the argument was one of her more insightful contributions. She defined it:

There is a certain type of argument which, in fact, is not an argument, but a means of forestalling debate and extorting an opponent’s agreement with one’s undiscussed notions. It is a method of bypassing logic by means of psychological pressure . . . [It] consists of threatening to impeach an opponent’s character by means of his argument, thus impeaching the argument without debate. Example: “Only the immoral can fail to see that Candidate X’s argument is false.” . . . The falsehood of his argument is asserted arbitrarily and offered as proof of his immorality. In today’s epistemological jungle, that second method is used more frequently than any other type of irrational argument. It should be classified as a logical fallacy and may be designated as “The Argument from Intimidation.” The essential characteristic of the Argument from Intimidation is its appeal to moral self-doubt and its reliance on the fear, guilt or ignorance of the victim. It is used in the form of an ultimatum demanding that the victim renounce a given idea without discussion, under threat of being considered morally unworthy. The pattern is always: “Only those who are evil (dishonest, heartless, insensitive, ignorant, etc.) can hold such an idea.”

Personally, when I see this argument used I conclude the user has an an empty intellectual quiver. They resort to the sneer and smear tactic because ultimately it's all they have. One reason, but only a small one, that I have to wonder if the skeptics aren't right, is because their opponents, the alarmists, act precisely the way individuals without good evidence act when debating opponents. They don't face the arguments head on, they instead use tactics to try and silence their opposition.

We saw precisely that in the emails from Climategate. Of course the alarmists immediately started screaming: "There's nothing to see here folks, move along." But the more people actually looked at the emails the more they concluded that there was most definitely something there worth discussing. Of course, Romm's talking points on the matter was to dismiss them and resort to sneer and smear. Consider this memorandum submitted to the British Parliament by the Institute for Physics. These are not scientific lightweights, nor are they known to be skeptics. In their submission to Parliament they said:

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself - most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change.

They also say that the emails "eveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements." They write that the emails show an intolerance that "impedes the process of scientific 'self correction', which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process..." And they indicate the "possibility of networks of like-minded researchers excluding newcomers."

The Institute says that the entire climate change network needs investigation, not just the one center in England. They write "there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field."

What went out with the Climate Research Unit, and Romm's actions, both seem manifestations of the same sort of attitude. Even though they act like people who know they are wrong, I suspect they are true believers who think they are absolutely, 100% correct—they are the fundamentalists of science, with an infallible, inerrant scripture (the IPCC report)—at least they like to think way. And like fundamentalists, they get downright nasty when someone questions the infallibility of their beliefs. The intolerance of fundamentalists exists because of their own insecurity. Deep down they fear they might be wrong. The more they fear that their arguments are false the more intolerant they become.

The high price of fear-based politics.

Francisco Lotero and Miriam Coletti were true believers in the various doomsday scenarios that some attach to the "threat" of global warming. The couple wrote their fears out in a letter, actually in a suicide pact. The couple shot themselves to death. Unfortanately these two fear-driving individuals were also parents. Their two-year-old son, Francisco, died after being shot in the back. Their daughter was shot as well, but the bullet missed any vital organs. Neighbors investigated the situation three days after the shooting and discovered the girl, still alive. She is in hospital and expected to recover. Police say the couple left a note explain their fear of global warming.

" Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis." Al Gore.

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.

The final humiliation from Climategate

When the Climategate material was made public the warming crowd circled the wagons, insisted they meant nothing, and claimed they were the victims of climate skeptics acting as criminals who "hacked" into their sites. As the material made the rounds of the media, reports defending the warming advocates were replaced with more skeptical reports. Media outlets now saw a pattern of abuse. While the media was still on-board about warming panic the top warming scientists had lost their luster in the ideas of the press. The result has been more skepticism about the entire process and how material is being reported, as this blog has reported on recently.

When the material first materialized the scientists, whose actions were exposed, screamed criminal conspiracy. They were sure they were the victims of some sophisticated hacking effort. Recently the David King, a political appointee and a scientist, claimed that some foreign intelligence agency must have been behind the exposure. The hints were that it was the Russians.


But the U.K.'s left-0f-center Guardian newspaper, says that police investigations aren't turning up evidence of a hack job at all: "So far, the police investigation has got nowhere. It is not even clear whether the crime of computer data interception has actually occurred." The Guardian says that the University of East Anglia "has confirmed that all of this material was simply sitting in an archive on single backup CRU server, available to be copied."

The article notes that previously a warming skeptic had posted some data from the Climate Research Unit, which had been denied to him by the CRU. It was assumed that he, or someone helping him, had hacked the data. It later turned out that the data was on-line but that the CRU had deleted the links but leaving the data up for anyone to browse through if they stumbled upon it. In other wrods, there was no hacking, just the CRU was as careful with storing data as they appear to be with analyzing it.

One of the nasty skeptics stumbled across something similar. In an attempt to go to the CRU's site he came to the directory of all material on the site istead. This was due to an error at the CRU. This horrible skeptic then called the CRU and informed them that their own site was basically leaking information that they were hiding from the public. The Guardian says that after that warning the "CRU failed to batten down the hatches."

The Guardian quotes one skeptic on how such things happen. He said that files get put "in an ftp directory which was on the same central processing unit as the external webserve, or even worse, was on a shared driver somewhere to which the webserver had permissions to access. In other words, if you knew where to look, it was publicly available."

If true that is the final humiliation for the warmers from Climategate. As the warming loyalists at the Guardian put it, if this proves to be the case, as it is increasingly starting to look like, then "UEA may end up looking foolish. For there will be no one to arrest." This is precisely the reason this blog refused to call the release "hacking" as the mainstream media rushed to do. I stated that all we knew was that the data was out there. We had no proof it was hacked. It could have been intentionally leaked as well. We just didn't know. But since the media was quite anxious to make the warmers look good, and skeptics look villianous, they rushed to an unwarranted jugment—and not for the first time either. As a final precaution, we STILL DON'T KNOW.

The climate blunders continue

The Times of London reports another major screw up by the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change. And they report that a former chair of the IPCC, Robert Watson, "has warned the United Nations' climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility."

The IPCC claimed that global warming was likely to reduce crop yields in north Africa in half by 2020. The IPCC loves apocalyptic claims like this. This was so popular that IPCC chair, Rajendra Pachauri (who has no credentials in climate science at all), and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, have publicly quoted this section of the IPCC report. In addition the IPCC thought the claim was so important that they included it in the IPCC's Synthesis Report, "the IPCC's most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers." Among the lead authors of this report os Pachauri himself.

Pachauri wrote: "By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%. Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised.” Pachauri has made this claim publicly in highly reported meetings. The problm is that there is NO verified, scientific evidence for the claim. Watson says that the report shows "no data supporting" the claim.

According to the Times this claim lists as its source a policy paper written by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The Institute is an environmentalist think tank, not a scientific body and the paper never underwent peer-review. The IPCC had repeatedly claimed that its apocalyptic vision of global warming is based on the science, and the science alone. Yet we have seen a growing body of evidence that the IPCC report is hobbled together using advocacy literature from left-wing, non-scientific sources.

In recent days the IPCC was asked by the ministers of the Dutch government to correct other errors from the report regarding the Netherlands. According to the IPCC report Holland is threatened by global warming because more than half the country is below sea level. While the Dutch are known for reclaiming land from the sea, they haven't been that industrious. The IPCC's report doubled the number.

Apparently an IPCC chart on energy production was also incorrect. In this case they reported on the potential of wave energy. The IPCC claimed the source was a company called Wavegen, note that the source is company, not peer-reviewed literature. But what the IPCC showed in their chart differs significantly from the chart that Wavegen published and Wavegen says they haven't changed the chart they published. But Wavegen also says they aren't the source for the chart as they merely reprinted it. Apparently the IPCC didn't verify the numbers, cited a secondary source for them, and wasn't interested into whether the claims were based on peer-reviewed information or not.

The Telegraph reports numerous other uses of non-peer reviewed literature in order to bolster the IPCC's political agenda including "ten dissertations" by students seeking their degrees. One such "unpublished dissertation was used to support the claim that sea-level rise could impact on living in the Nile delta and other African coastal areas, although the main focus of the thesis, by a student at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, appears to have been the impact of computer software on environmental development."

As for the false claims about the Himalayan glaciers the Yale Climate Media Forum has released a fairly in-depth article outlining precisely how the IPCC screwed up. This report appears to have pieced together all the evidence into a coherent whole. The YCMF says that the controversy was created by the IPCC alone and has "prompted intense, and warranted criticism of the IPCC review process." They do note that the "likely" source for the IPCC's "copied and pasted" claim was "an Indian environmental magazine." Think about that. The IPCC "copied and pasted" information from a magazine, no peer-review included, and reported the claims under the mantle of "peer-reviewed science."

And while Pachauri had been droning on about "one" mistake the reality is the paragraph on glaciers along contained three major errors. The YCMF lists them:

1. The first sentence predicts disappearance (a 100 percent loss) by 2035. The next sentence predicts an 80 percent loss. Nonetheless, the first prediction is made using more confident language. 2. The second sentence begins with “Its,” ungrammatical if it is referring to “glaciers” and unclear otherwise. It’s as if the two sentences were simply copied and pasted from different sources. 3. The approximate area of the Himalayan glaciers is 33,000 km2, so the 500,000 km2 starting figure in the second sentence is off by a factor of 15, and the decreased area predicted in 2035 - 100,000 km2 - is three times greater than the current Himalayan glacier area.

YCMF notes that one reviewer, David Saltz, caught and reported the first two errors but that the IPCC went ahead and published the paragraph unchanged. The third error couldn't have come from the World Wildlife Fund report that was cited originally because those numbers aren't found there. Instead they come from a paper by V.M Kotlyakov, as this blog reported two months ago. Kotlyakov wrote about all "extrapolar glaciers" not just the Himalayan glaciers and, as we reported, he listed the year 2350, not 2035. But when an environmental publication reported on these reports it made errors. And it appears the IPCC merely copied the claims as this publication reported them, errors and all. In other words, the IPCC didn't even bother to look at the science, they merely copied text from environmental publications and reported information as factual, without checking sources, or verifying data.

Climate Science Watch reported on how the IPCC "relied on an err0r-riddle online article when it it discussed the likely state of Himilayan glaiciers in 2035. It did so dispite questions raised by some reviewers." YCMF also shows that the IPCC had a chart on glacial melting which was "directly copied" from the environmental magazine in question. What is a dead give away is that the IPCC copied the chart which had its own internal errors—that is the data in the chart had a mathematical error.

The environmental magazine claimed that Pindari Glacier retreated 2,840 meters between 1845 and 1966. The magazine then said this meant the glacier was retreating by 135 meters per year! Do the math yourself, you will see that it is wrong. Had Pindari retreated 135 meters per year, from 1845 to 1966 (121 years) then it would have retreated 16,359 meters, not 2,840. The magazine had divided by 21 years not 121 years and thus got the wrong result. The IPCC, that paragon of science and peer-review, merely copied its material from this advocacy publication and that meant copying the bad math as well. So, in haste to report disaster, two major numerical errors were made. Someone transposed the year 2350 to 2035 and someone divided 2,840 by 21, instead of 121. And no one bothered to check original sources or verify the math.

Consider the main theory I hold regarding the IPCC and their reports. I do not contend that they intentionally distort or lie about information. I contend that they act precisely as we would expect someone to act who is absolutely convinced they have the right suspect apprehended. I see this similar to how police and prosecutors act when they arrest someone and are absolutely convinced of that person's guilt. If they find contradictory evidence they tend to ignore it. Anything that seems to point a finger at the suspect is emphasized. If they don't ignore exculpatory evidence they will go to great lengths to debunk it but make little effort to verify evidence that points a guilty finger.

Periodically they come across evidence that seems to prove the innocence of the suspect, but they are able to dismiss it, even if they can't debunk it. They convince themselves that "all the other evidence" proves their case. So this one piece that seems to contradict their claims can't be right. They may not know why it is wrong but they know it must be wrong. So they sweep it under the rug, not because they are trying to convict an "innocent" man, but because they are convinced they are convicting a "guilty" man. It is highly unethical either way, but these people are normally not attempting to incarcerate the innocent but tend to honestly believe they are seeking justice.

The scientific process is supposed to reduce the likelihood of this same sort of distortion. But the legal process has safeguards as well, to prevent this from happening, yet it happens all the time. The reason for that is that the process relies upon the investigators voluntarily following the rules. But often investigators see the rules as an obstacle to achieving the "right" goal. So they will selectively ignore, or bend the rules. This is why evidence, which proves a man's innocence, is often hidden from defense lawyers, even though the rules say that shouldn't happen.

We understand the courtroom is supposed to help prevent this by having open debate, with the defense and prosecutors appearing before a supposedly neutral judge and jury. The adversarial system supposedly helps justice come to the forefront. And it usually does, provided everyone plays by the rules. But with the IPCC there is no adversarial system. There are only prosecutors writing the final reports and the judges involved already know the guilty of the suspect before the evidence is heard.

There is an adversarial system in that papers may be published in any one of many journals. But the Climategate emails shows how the clique of warming scientists try to distort that process to guarantee only one side is heard. Even the papers that get published are easily ignored by the IPCC as the prosecutors then seek out papers (and apparently a large amount of non-scientific claims as well) that bolster their own theory. After selecting which evidence is submitted and which is ignored it is passed up a bureaucratic ladder where each new judge or prosecutor has the guilty verdict in their pocket and is just writing up the judgment, not checking the facts and making sure the rules have been followed.

This tendency to have the guilty verdict already written out is the reason that the errors that have been exposed all lean in one direction. All the major errors have predicted dire consequences if the IPCC's political agenda is ignored. So far none of the errors have underestimated catastrophe, only exaggerated it. That is because prosecutors err in their assumptions of guilt, not innocence. And the IPCC is a "scientific" body the same way the district attorney's office is a judicial one. They may be part of the process but they are advocacy bodies meant to achieve a specific goal. The district attorney is out to secure convictions, leaving the verdict up to the court. But the IPCC is acting both as prosecutor and court, and that makes it even more suspect.

Warming advocates feel the heat.

The beware-of-warming crowd is starting to feel the heat. And it isn’t because of a warming planet either. It almost seems as if everything that could go wrong for them, is going wrong.

Now, I would never be one to claim that weather anomaly is proof that anthropogenic warming is wrong. I know that particular weather disproves climate change. We all know that such things can only prove that warming exists. In the realm of warming activism weather is a one way street. So Katrina was proof of warming. That 1998 was a particularly warm year was proof of warming. That California experiences droughts is all part of warming. Ditto for droughts in the UK, or floods, either will do. But still those nasty cold winters that seem worse than usual are never proof of anything but they do cause the public to wonder.

And this winter has been another very nasty one. Consider the poor people on Hiddensee, an island just off the German mainland. This resort island is completely ice bound. The German military has been flying in to rescue tourists on the island. Resident of the island rely on trade with the mainland for their food supplies and so shelves were getting bare. The military also flew in food. According to Spiegel the sea between Hiddensee and the island of Rügen “is now an ice sheet around 30 centimeters (12 inches) thick. An icebreaker failed to make it through to Hiddensee on Monday forcing the authorities to use helicopters to supply the island and pick up trapped vacationers.” Spiegel says that the ice “is not expected to melt until the end of February” which seems to imply that regular helicopter food deliveries will be required. Some tourists, trapped on the island when ferry service as shut down due to the ice, didn't heed the advice of authorities and walked across the Baltic Sea in order to get home.

Like the awful cold that gripped North American and the UK, this weather front is bringing record snows as well. Roofs have collapsed due to the weight of snow and “hundreds of drivers were forced to spend the night in their cars and truces on the A45 and A5 highways due to heavy snowfall.”

Floridians might also be wondering where the warming went. The L.A. Times reports “January’s bitter cold may have wiped out many of the shallow-water corals in the Florida Keys.” The paper reports that “given the depth and duration of the frigid weather” some damage was expected. But Meaghan Johnson of Nature Conservancy reported widespread, severe damage. “Star and brain corals, large species that can take hundreds of years to grow, were as white and lifeless as bones, frozen to death, she said. Dead sea turtles, eels and parrotfish also littered the bottom.”

The paper says that Florida Fish and Wildlife reported “that a record number of endangered manatees had succumbed to the cold this year—77, according to a preliminary review. The previous record, 56, was set last year.”

Meanwhile the scientists who have led the campaign to convince the world of the dangers of warming are under scrutiny as never before. Major media sources, for the first time in memory, are starting to investigate the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change and the tiny band of warming advocates who make up the elite in that field. The New Zealand Herald, the largest newspaper in the country, recently editorialized about the need for “facts, not anecdotes” from the IPCC.

The editors at the Herald, previously staunch warmers themselves, noted that they way to discredit a report is to find one mistake. But when it comes to the IPCC: “more than one mistake had been found” and the errors (if unintentional) “are hardly peripheral.” The editors listed claims regarding the Himalayan glaciers as one example and said that the IPCC was “notified of this [error] in 2006 and yet the claim appeared in the 2007 report.” They also lament the IPCC using “a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine” as evidence for “disappearing ice in the Andes, the European Alps and Africa.”

The Herald editors then refer to the IPCC claims about “extreme weather” which “turns out to have been based on a paper that had not been peer-reviewed or published at the time.” The paper even “included a caveat that the evidence was insufficient” but the IPCC deleted all such caveats from their report. The Herald, while not yet ready to abandon the comforting fear of warming, says:

The IPCC's reputation is not helped now by the argument of authority its supporters have employed for so long. Criticism was dismissed as conceit in the face of a "scientific consensus" that by implication could not be wrong.

The editors note that “the consensus has been wrong, or at least careless on several points” and that the IPCC “urgently needs new leadership and a return to strict scientific rigour if it hopes to be taken seriously again.”


Even one the staunchest media allies of the warmers, the left-wing Guardian newspaper in the UK, has started investigating claims of the warmers and finds them wanting. They report the scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the home of climategate “’hid’ data flaws.” The report says:

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei- Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up."

The Guardian, of course, is not willing to question warming orthodoxy itself, but they do say their investigation does “call into question the probity of some climate change science.” To be precise it doesn’t call climate change science into question, but climate change theory.

In particular the Guardian investigate the date used to show warming in China and says there were “apparent attempts to cover up problems with data from Chinese weather stations…” The Guardian explains the problem:

The history of where the weather stations were sited was crucial to Jones and Wang's 1990 study, as it concluded the rising temperatures recorded in China were the result of global climate changes rather the warming effects of expanding cities.

The IPCC's 2007 report used the study to justify the claim that "any urban-related trend" in global temperatures was small. Jones was one of two "coordinating lead authors" for the relevant chapter.

The leaked emails from the CRU reveal that the former director of the unit, Tom Wigley, harboured grave doubts about the cover-up of the shortcomings in Jones and Wang's work. Wigley was in charge of CRU when the original paper was published. "Were you taking W-CW [Wang] on trust?" he asked Jones. He continued: "Why, why, why did you and W-CW not simply say this right at the start?"

Already London’s Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph have been exposing IPCC errors and distortions fairly regularly. But it isn’t a small feat to have shaken the confidence the editors at the New Zealand Herald had previously shown for the IPCC. And it is a huge step when the very left Guardian starts exposing some of the antics of leading warming advocates.

It’s bad enough that nature is not cooperating with warming theory. But, if more main steam media outlets starting turning a critical eye on the IPCC and its core group of scientist/activists, the whole political agenda at work here could unravel.

Photo: Trapped tourists from Hiddensee ignore official warnings and walk across frozen sections of the Baltic Sea in order to get home.

Prof. Mike Hulme on the politics of climate claims.

Prof. Mike Hulme is one of the most well-known of the warming doomsayers. He teaches at the University of East Anglia, in the UK. He is also surprisingly candid. (He is NOT the person in the photo to the far left, although he is on the Left.) Recently Hulme participated in a debate on the warming issue. The topic was along the lines: Do science and economics support government action on climate change?

Hulme opened the debate, and the first thing he did was dismiss the debate topic itself. I took very precise notes of his words. Since I watched this on video, I stopped the presentation every couple of seconds so I could write down, word-for-word, precisely what he said. Hulme said: "Yes, I believe in government action on climate change, not action that is driven and determined by either science or economics, but action that is decided on of political ideology, risk evaluation, ethical judgments, public deliberation and a democratic sensibility."

Hulme said that we should be clear that "neither science nor economics should determine government action. ...I make this claim about neither science nor economics driving government action because I believe it should be determined by politics. Politics which is, if you like, the conduct of social relations involving authority and power in order to make decisions. Politics is what we have. And that is where government action and policy should be formulated."

Hulme was also quite happy to say what political ideology he uses. He said that the debate needs to start out with a discussion of the role of government. As he put it: "Is our preference for a small and minimalist state? Or is it for a large and interventionist state?" He said: "My own personal instincts, and my own political beliefs are for a more interventionist state, than for a minimalist one. So, for example, I believe in a state that would play a significant role with regards to wealth redistribution both within and between societies."

An interesting confession I think. He wants a state that redistributes wealth "within and between societies." Now, unless Hulme means something unusual by "societies" he is speaking about international wealth redistribution. Ask yourself what kind of state is necessary to redistribute wealth between different nations. Is he speaking about global governance where the UN or some similar body has the ability to confiscate wealth in productive nations and redistribute it to unproductive nations? He's wasn't entirely clear on that but I note that numerous warming groups have pushed for international control of markets to "stop the warming crisis."

This raises some interesting questions. Are the claims about warming the prime issues for these activists or are they secondary issues? Are the prime issues those of global governance, economic central planning and wealth redistribution instead? Hulme didn't seem to be saying that his politics is the result of his science, but that instead, his science is heavily influenced, perhaps solely influenced, by his politics. Is this debate primarily politics disguised as science? That certainly has been my view since the Green Left discovered warming claims to push a very precise political agenda.

I previously argued that much of the Green agenda was created after the collapse of socialism around the world. Old socialist arguments no longer had any credibility and thus the centralized state with economic planning needed a new veneer to cover up the cracks and worn parts. It is my belief that the many of the most ideological types on the extreme Left flung themselves into the environmental movement precisely because they it as a vehicle to relabel their ideology and give it the cloak of science once again.

In a column that Hulme wrote he said: "Too often, when we think we are arguing over scientific evidence for climate change, we are in fact disagreeing about our different political preferences, ethical principles and values systems." Hulme says that the field of science has become a debate platform, not about science, but about politics and that we "fail to engage in honest and robust argument about our competing political visions and ethical values." He says science is too uncertain and incomplete and that is "especially the case with the science of climate, a complex system of enormous scale." Hulme says he thought climategate was good since it might push the real debate into the spotlight and the real debate is "about political beliefs and ethical values."

Some years ago I wrote a political column that was published weekly. Typically they paired the column with one written by a woman I knew. She was a hard-core socialist and, a recent search online about her, reveals that she is still a socialist. She is an activist with the Democratic Socialists of America and says her goal, as well as the DSA's goal, is "to establish socialism as a political force in the U.S. and around the world by training mobilizing socialist activists...." After the collapse of socialism she became director of the Global Warming Project for the non-scientific Union of Concerned Scientists (membership does not require scientific credentials at all, just cash).

That Hulme is openly saying that the global warming debate is not a scientific one, but a political one, is refreshing. Such honesty is rare with his compatriots in the warming trenches, even if their private emails showed them acting precisely like political lobbyists and not like scientists. But I suspect Hulme won't attract much of a following from his fellow warmologists. The reason is simple. They realize that if they presented their campaign in openly stark political terms, they would lose the debate. The public is not quite willing to march toward massive state interventionism is the name of of politics. And since the public isn't willing to march in that direction they need to be stampeded instead. And the way to do that is to try to scare the hell out of them using scientific theories.

While Hulme is honest, his fellow warmologists are tactically smarter. They know that when it comes to politics, honesty is not the best policy. So they will continue to pretend, in public at least, that they are dispassionate scientists without a political agenda who are merely urging policies that are necessary due to the massive crisis that they say we are facing. And, if some silly blogger, writer, reporter, whoever, points to the political agenda they will act offended and howl in derision. Politically that is actually their best option.

More IPCC improprieties says BBC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change purports to be a scientific body, or at least wants people to see them that way. In reality they are a very political body which uses science to justify specific political agendas. And, in my opinion, the political agenda comes before the science.

We have already reported on the IPCC's use of material from a political lobby, reporting it as if it were peer-reviewed science. That was the World Wildlife Fund's report that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. (Actually the trail is more convoluted than that, so read the original post on the matter here and here.) As a BBC column noted: "This turned out to have no basis in scientific fact, even though everything the IPCC produces is meant to be rigorously peer-reviewed, but simply an error recycled by the WWF, which the IPCC swallowed whole."

That same column now describes "another howler" from the IPCC.

Then at the weekend another howler was exposed. The IPCC 2007 report claimed that global warming was leading to an increase in extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Like its claims about the glaciers, this was also based on an unpublished report which had not been subject to scientific scrutiny -- indeed several experts warned the IPCC not to rely on it.

One has to wonder precisely how much material the IPCC uses which openly violates their own claim that they only use peer-reviewed material for their reports. Instead, it appears they use any report that bolsters their political agenda, whether peer reviewed or not.

This blog has previously reported that leading experts on hurricanes have specifically repudiated the IPCC claims in the past. But now it appears that the author of the material, quoted by the IPCC to bolster their extreme scenario, himself repudiates the IPCC's use of his material. The BBC column says: "The author, whod didn't actually finish his work until a year after the IPCC had used his reasearch has now repudiated what he sees as its [the IPCC's] misuse of his work."

So the IPCC took a partially done study, that had not gone through peer-review and used it to try to whip up fear about more severe hurricanes. The author of the report, when he finished it, concluded: "There is insufficient evidence to claim a statistical link between global warming and catastrophe loss." Ooops, the IPCC jumped the gun. Of course, according to their own PR and protocol they shouldn't have even used the report in the first place.

The BBC piece notes that the British government spent millions on account of the unsubstantiated, and now repudiated, claim by the IPCC.

Yet it was because of this -- now unproved -- link that the British government signed up to a $100 billion transfer from rich to poor countries to help them cope with a supposed increase in floods and hurricanes. It was also central to many of the calculations in Britain's Stern Report, which might now need to be substantially revised. Now after Climate-gate, Glacier-gate and Hurricane-gate -- how many "gates" can one report contain? -- comes Amazon-gate. The IPCC claimed that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests were risk from global warming and would likely be replaced by "tropical savannas" if temperatures continued to rise.

The column says the claim about the Amazon is "backed up by a scientific-looking reference but on closer investigation turns out to be yet another non-peer reviewed piece of work from the WWF." It notes that the authors of the piece, cited by the IPCC as scientific proof, are not scientists at all. One is "an Australian policy analyst" and the other "a freelance journalist" for the left-of-center Guardian and a "green activist." The author of the BBC column, Andrew Neil, writes:

Every time I have questioned our politicians about global warming they have fallen back on the mantra that "2,500 scientists can't be wrong", referring to the vast numbers supposedly behind the IPCC consensus. But it is now clear that the majority of those involved in the IPCC process are not scientists at all but politicians, bureaucrats, NGOs and green activists. They may -- or may not -- still be right or wrong but what has become clear in the past couple of months is that, contrary to what many leaders have claimed, the science as promulgated by the IPCC is very far from "settled" and that there are important questions still to ask. The mainstream media has been slow to do this. The bloggers, too easily dismissed in the past, have set the pace with some real scoops -- and some of the mainstream media is now rushing to catch up.

All I can say is: "Amen." Whether or not you think man-made global warming is melting the glaciers, I can say that they credibility of the IPCC is melting away even faster.