Slashdot Mirror
Climategate's Final Days
The Bad Astronomer writes "Climategate may be on its way out. An investigatory committee at Pennsylvania State University has formally cleared climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann of any scientific misconduct. Mann was central in the so-called Climategate scandal, where illegally leaked emails were purported to indicate examples of scientists trying to cover up any lack of global warming in their data. This finding by the committee (PDF) is another in a series of independent investigations that have all concluded that no misconduct has occurred."
Climategate's Final Days
Bullshit. If you think this means it's over, you're not familiar with the debate.
Immediately following Climategate Nature released an editorial saying no controversy found in the e-mails. That didn't seem to matter at all.
The more respected global warming papers have been published and accepted in peer reviewed journals. Point out any global warming denialist papers that have done the same. I think the most you'll find are papers that suggest global change could result in positive things in some areas. I don't know of any saying that climate change is not happening.
Your fundamental problem in arguing with a person who denies global warming is that they use erroneous logic. They find one uncertainty or minor flaw in a study and suddenly volumes of studies -- even those unrelated -- can be thrown out and dismissed. If it isn't in Mann's research, if it isn't in the East Anglian e-mails, it's somewhere else. You just have to face that logic and move on past them. Oh, and for future articles, Bad Astronomer, using cute otter lolcats to fire back at your opponents isn't exactly the hallmark of a logically sound debate. It's little more than an ad hominem attack.
If you think this is the 'final days' of this mess, you are sadly mistaken. Not until first world countries find it hard to get by will the majority of them step up and realize it. The election of Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli shows you got a whole state who would like to sweep this inconvenience under the rug and want you to stop trying to hinder their economy with your "research and science."
My work here is dung.
One can never satisfy a conspiracy theorist.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I seem to recall that
1.there were emails clearly indicating that they were politically involved, ie they'd exagerate to scare people. Hardly a scientific attitude
2.there was some pretty perverted data analysis to get to "expected results"
There's no denying there are climate changes going around. But
1.calling it man-made is complete speculation at the current point(yes it is, there's correlation at best, no proof of causality)
2.calling it warming is kind of fucked up since it's warming in some places, and cooling in others
3.no proof either that anything we do can change anything about it.
Oh and there is a non negligible part of the climate scientific community that *disagrees* with how things are being presented.
How about they study pollution and find a way to stop the billions of tonnes of garbage that still get dumped into our landfills and seas every year? Won't pollution and deforestation will kill and harm us a whole lot more than a few simple degree changes in our atmosphere?
I'm sorry, but isn't getting sick with dieases like cancer from a contaminated environment deserving more funding for research than climate research? Why are they getting all that attention and research dollars? Are we being played into fools to keep on looking up at the sky at the weather instead of the ground we're standing on and the quality of air we breath?
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
As far as the lay public is concerned, the damage has already been done. They were already convinced that these were a bunch of self-serving interests promoting their cause, and the leaked emails affirmed it for them.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
You article author says this about himself:
"Since Day 1 of this I have been calling it a non-event, a manufactured controversy by global warming denialists trying to make enough noise to drown out any real talk on this topic. "
Hardly an unbiased observer. I, for one, really hope that there isn't anything to 'ClimateGate' but if you've read anything about it at all, you know that the problem wasn't the emails, but in the leaked data sets and source code. The emails show typical petty human behaviour. The data and source code suggest the possibility of cherry picking of data, and mathematical modeling to reach a predetermined conclusion. That is what worries me, but I admit I don't have the expertise to make a determination on my own.
Sunshine and openness is only way to ever end this debate over global warming. All research, results, and data sets should be publicly available. Is that really too much to ask?
Necron69
News at 11.
Hardly an independent panel. And really, they did say he was incorrect to not have real statisticians working on the results - which invalidates much of the published work.
You can say he was cleared, but that's only of purposeful intent to mislead - what the report is basically dancing around is that he misled through poor application of scientific principals. And isn't that what really matters here, that the scientific method is carefully applied instead of fitting data to a pre-concieved conclusion?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The story in The Sunday Times of London that kicked all this off has been fully retracted with several uses of the phrase "We apologise." The German newspaper that reported that the IPCC erred in its assessment of climate impact in Africa also retracted that story.
Speaking as a journalist, the most damning phrase I see in The Times' retraction is this one (boldfaced emphasis mine):
So what really happened there? It sounds suspiciously like somebody high up at The Times or News Corporation didn't like the point of view presented and changed it to fit his or her own worldview, facts be damned.
Prevent Windows piracy. Use Linux instead.
The earth has been both hotter and cooler than it is now.
That is correct... but irrelevant to the question.
Anthropogenic global warming is not instead of natural variations-- it is in addition to natural variations. Natural variations don't suddenly vanish now that we add carbon dioxide to the air.
...I'm all for taking better care of the planet, but the global warming nuts haven't really provided much evidence and they're the ones making the allegations.
The way I see things, if you make a bunch of claims, the burden of proof is ON YOU... not the people you're speaking to.
By "global warming nuts," you apparently mean "the scientists who actually study the problem."
By "the burden of proof is on you" you apparently mean "...to prove the correctness of scientific results to people who aren't willing to take any effort to look at the actual science, but will believe any criticism with no skepticism whatsoever."
There is a lot of science... this is not made up. (And it dates to way before Al Gore, who's not a scientist.) Have you actually read, for a start, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Working Group I Report on Physical Science Basis of Climate Science? What? No? Because you already read in a blog somewhere that it's a hoax, so you don't need to read it?
So, uh, if you won't actually read the evidence, how can any possible amount of evidence convince you?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
People on the right (not necessarily applying that label to you, mind) seem really hung up on the question of whether human action is causing global warming (those that are able to get past arguing over whether it's even happening, that is).
I'm not as interested in that question, frankly. The way I look at it is this: every single homo sapien that lives or has ever lived has been on this one planet. As far as we've been able to tell, homo sapiens is the only "intelligent" life that's ever evolved anywhere, certainly in local space. I'm of the mind that that's fairly important and worth preserving. And this planet is the only one we know of that can support homo sapien life on some of it's surface some of the time, and even then we're on a climactic knife-edge. A little bit of change in any direction and we have reasonable concerns that the whole semi-stable equilibrium we're in will skew off wildly. It looks like that's what happened on Mars, and there's no reason to assume it can't happen here.
Taking all that in mind, until we have a way to live and thrive off-planet, we absolutely have to do what we can to keep this planet healthy, where healthy is defined as "able to support a large human population". If Earth winds up looking like Mars, knowing the planet is just going through a normal geological cycle that we didn't cause is not much comfort. Not that there will be any complex life anywhere in the Sol system to mourn us.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
That's because that's not what the debate is about. The Earth's climate is ALWAYS changing, as everyone well knows. Examining ice cores, fossils, geologic record, etc, prove that the Earth's climate is never steady and has always been changing. In fact, it has been both much warmer and much colder than today at various times in history.
The people you bash as "deniers" are actually not denying climate change, but are instead debating the following points that you seem to be ignoring. They argue that:
So you are right that the debate isn't over, but not for the reasons you describe. The debate will continue because people like you don't understand what the debate is about (you seem to think it's about whether or not climate change is happening), and because people like you are making a crisis out of nothing. If man-made global warming is happening, is that a crisis? It may be, if it can be proven that human activity is truly the primary cause. But is climate change in and of itself a crisis? Given that it always changes back and forth, I would say definitely not. Should we shut down our economies and destroy our industry just because the climate is changing, just like it always has? Definitely not! It's just something life has to adapt to. But as long as people like you continue to stick their heads in the sand and scream that change that always happens is "a crisis", and as long as you refuse to see what the debate is actually about, then people like me will keep fighting to educate you.
Main Point: We don't argue that climate change isn't happening, and if that's what you think the debate is about then you are completely wrong.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I never understood why it's so hard to find other people who don't subscribe to one extreme or the other when it comes to climate change.
Because people are inherently unsatisfied with the answer "we don't know, and cannot know".
And at the higher levels, because trillions of dollars are at stake going either direction. It pushes the rhetoric and arguments to one side or the other - by necessity, since the tendency is for each side to engage in greater and greater bombast until those of us in the middle have a hard time being heard as neutral without being cast to one side or the other, because all people know is either extreme.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Have you actually read, for a start, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Working Group I Report on Physical Science Basis of Climate Science?
Yes. Have YOU looked into the problems with said report? Because science doesn't stop with one report . Science means other people get to question your results, your assumptions, and your methods.
Science means other people get to ask exactly how you arrived at a conclusion and you tell them so they can reproduce your results or raise issues with your methods. Yet what the emails revealed, was that even in the face of FOI requests the "scientists" would not release data or methods - and after looking at the actual computer modeling code also leaked, you can understand why. Because the "scientists" over time, became less interested in the actual science than in proving a conclusion they had reached, at any cost.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here's a starting point for you.
More damagingly, he added in an email to Mann with the subject line "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL": "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!
This has, rightly, become one of the most famous of the emails. And for once, it means what it seems to mean"
Or, you could just try using google.
Funny how we have to keep re-posting links to the actual emails when all you have to do is claim it's all a lie and a fantasy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Right. The journal "Nature" doesn't understand statistics. And neither do all of the scientific review boards looking into this.
As for "code", do you even know what the "code" you were looking at was from and where it is used, if at all?
We're all familiar with the tragedy of being you.
Having seen both of the papers in question, I can tell you that they wouldn't pass muster as undergraduate term papers at Podunk U.
The fact that those papers somehow made it into reputable journals is the real scandal.
Just for the record, $500 K over 5 years is pretty small change for research, overall. That won't even hire a post-doc once you take out the overhead.
In which case, all you have to show is that (a) one of those papers was a serious scientific article, and (b) it wasn't in fact published. IIRC, both of those papers were published, although I don't remember where. I have no idea whether they were serious scientific papers or prejudiced hack jobs.
If an authority in a field says that a certain paper is nonsense, it's wise to consider the possibility that it actually is.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Wait, who have you ever heard say that humans are the only thing affecting climate?
Anyone who has ever said that expensive changes in industry will result in significant change in global warming. So, basically any policy maker, and pretty much every single person at those AGW global summits.
Really? Please cite one that has actually said that. They may say that humans are making a very significant impact on the climate, but they don't say that we're the only thing affecting it.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Have you read the IPCC working group reports? They cover that chain of proofs pretty well.
If you have and you still don't think that global climate change has been proven, what level of evidence would it take to prove it to you? After all, you use the quotation that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; what level of evidence would you consider to be extraordinary for the theory of global climate change?
Honestly though, I'm not certain I'll get a reasonable answer from you. The two links you provided are pretty tangential to your point. Don't like the US surface station data? Well, the European and Japanese surface station data shows the same trends. Don't like any surface station data? Well, the satellite data shows the same trends. Hell, even the decrease in average bird sizes over the last 46 years is indicative of an upward trend in average temperature. Even data from studies that are entirely unrelated to climate science show indications of increasing average temperatures! How is that not extraordinary?
We put out a lot more CO2 than the earth itself does,
Actually, it's not even close.
We put about 5% of the carbon into the atmosphere, but that 5% is enough to tip the balance and cause CO2 levels to rise, because the biosphere cannot absorb it.
I don't deny the Earth has shown some slight warming, warming which brings us nowhere near the levels that Earth has successfully endured in the past. I have concerns with CO2 being named as the scapegoat. I take issue with models being called science. Models are part of the hypothesis. Every other field of science requires a testable, and repeatable experiments. It's what makes science great, because it can weed out free energy nuts that power their cars with cold fusion and water. Evolution, for a long time, really was a hypothesis that fit the facts. It needed DNA to tie it all together and really put the last nail in the Creationist coffin. It appears that climate science is exempt from this requirement (a test of what the model concludes) before calling conclusions facts. The problem with the Warmers is that when a question is asked, the debate that follows is usually just a bunch of name calling. Two things separate science from religion. Science assumes a lack of knowledge or that the knowledge we currently have is incorrect. Religion assumes it is right. Science wants to be challenged by anyone, where religion demands it be challenged by no one. When you deny anyone's right to ask "why?", then you are spewing dogma.
CO2 is rising, no doubt about that. My issue is that it only makes up about .04% of the atmosphere. Venus and Mars both have vastly higher amounts of CO2 compared to us (~95%). One planet is scorching hot, and the other is very cold (with some tolerably warm spots for our future explorers). Venus is fairly convincingly attributed to the Greenhouse Effect. Mars has an atmospheric CO2 content that by volume and mass is greater than Earths. Why is Mars not hot? Why does the greenhouse effect not slip out of control there? The odds of IR radiation striking a CO2 molecule on the way up on Earth is extremely small. If this weren't true, IR pictures of fields and cities would be blurred by the scattering caused by CO2. Increasing CO2 from .04% to .05% still keeps those odds extremely small. If it is absorbed, the CO2 with kick out a another IR photon, the whole idea of the Greenhouse Effect. To anything in the atmosphere, most directions lead to space. For me to accept a model, it must apply to Mars and Venus equally, without modifying constants. Yes that means the must account for all the variations, from deflection from our magnetic field of higher energy particles to atmospheric density to distance from the Sun. Without these factors, people are taking variables and assuming constants out of them. If you take a model for Earth and plug in all the same factors for Mars or any other planet into it, but are stuck with "we don't have that variable in this model" then your model is incomplete and inaccurate. That model should work anywhere, like all other physics does. If you want to convince me you've pegged the source of a less than %1 difference in temperature, then you better account for all these variables much wider than %1 difference.
The Sun is the primary sources of heat on Earth, far outpacing every other source. Are there any direct recordings (not by tree ring proxy) of variations in luminosity over the same period of time? We are kept warm by it at 150 million kilometers away. Think of the vast amount of energy that has to be releasing to do that. Even slight variations would affect us. The Earth is a very good black body, like the other planets. By the math for black body radiation, the Earth is emitting around 10% more heat that it gets from the Sun, due to geothermal heat.
I am seriously concerned that real ecological issues like pollution and conservation of resources have been hijacked by the invisible, marketable demon of CO2.
Anyone who has ever said that expensive changes in industry will result in significant change in global warming.
Really? So by saying that changing human industry will affect global warming, that implies that only human industry affects global warming?
Hey, my solution that includes HCL and H2SO4 is too acidic! I claim that if I decrease the amount of HCL, it will be less acidic. Ergo I am implying that H2SO4 does not affect the pH of the solution.
Wow. Pojut complained about people at the two extremes, but what about people who think only the two extremes exist?
The enemies of Democracy are
These start with the claim that the Earth is warming and end with the claim that therefore catastrophe will result. (Well, and more frequently these then pass on from that to claims that if we undertake to destroy the economy in a particular way, the catastrophe will be prevented or attenuated.)
I like how you accuse one group of alarmism, and then go on immediately to blithely dismiss all manner of regulation as attempts "to destroy the economy". In other words, you start with the claim that some people are trying to regulate, "and end with the claim that therefore catastrophe will result." I'd say impending wholesale destruction of an economy is an extraordinary claim, and like you say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So where's your evidence that environmentalists are trying to destroy the economy? Where's your evidence that environmental regulations will even come close to destroying the economy if passed?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
That is to say, you can't bring up monetary incentives as proof of accuracy without noting that there's a lot of money going both ways - which is true in the meta-sense of the global warming debate. There are literally trillions of dollars, not to mention the very notion of who controls industry, at stake in this discussion.
You have a very novel definition of "a lot" then. There are trillions of dollars on one side (the carbon industry), and low tens of millions on the other.
No one gets rich doing science.