Quotes of the day
It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s growth rate. -Paul Krugman
Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for … what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: ‘Have they no grandchildren?"-Jeremy Grantham
Deniers are doing all conservatives a disservice
Deep Climate has uncovered some good climate reporting in the steaming pile that is the National Post. The article, written by Jonathan Kay, examines the claim that there exists a growing number of scientists who question the scientific consensus on global warming, and concludes that it is nonsense:
Have you heard about the “growing number” of eminent scientists who reject the theory that man-made greenhouse gases are increasing the earth’s temperature? It’s one of those factoids that, for years, has been casually dropped into the opening paragraphs of conservative manifestos against climate-change treaties and legislation.
Fine-sounding rhetoric — but all of it nonsense. In a new article published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, a group of scholars from Stanford University, the University of Toronto and elsewhere provide a statistical breakdown of the opinions of the world’s most prominent climate experts. Their conclusion: The group that is skeptical of the evidence of man-made global warming “comprises only 2% of the top 50 climate researchers as ranked by expertise (number of climate publications), 3% of researchers in the top 100, and 2.5% of the top 200, excluding researchers present in both groups … This result closely agrees with expert surveys, indicating that [about] 97% of self-identified actively publishing climate scientists agree with the tenets of [man-made global warming].”
Once again Michael Mann has been exonerated
The first investigation into Michael Mann’s conduct cleared him on 3 of 4 charges against him. In regards to the 4th charge the investigators didn’t find any evidence against Mann but they felt they were not adequately suited rule on the matter, so they referred judgement until the charge could be properly investigated.
And now it has been, and this what the investigators concluded:
The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor, Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University. More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.
The decision of the Investigatory Committee was unanimous.
In other words a full exoneration. These investigations into Mann’s conduct were called after the CRU email leak, and along with several investigations in the UK, show that there is no evidence to back up claims that climategate somehow undermines the science supporting global warming.
Changing the rules after the fact
One of the key criticisms of the Oxburgh inquiry was that it ignored three key papers written by people at CRU, but these papers are only being considered key because they were not investigated. Had they been looked at, other papers would have been declared key.
Climategate: the scandal that wasn’t, Part 2
Once again, we see how empty the claims regarding the CRU emails truly are:
Comments, peer-review and censorship
Remember the study (McLean et al. 2009) that claimed that the recent warming trend was due mostly to el niño? Remember how deniers claimed it it was proof that global warming was bunk? And remember how it was shown that the paper could not say anything about the trend because their methods removed any influence of such trends?
Well a comment to the paper has finally been published, which concludes:
The suggestion in their conclusions that ENSO may be a major contributor to recent trends in global temperature is not supported by their analysis or any physical theory presented in that paper, especially as the analysis method itself eliminates the influence of trends on the purported correlations.
This in it of itself is not surprising (I mentioned that a comment has been submitted in my original post on the matter). What is interesting is that the reply from original authors was not published. This fact has, predictably, stirred up calls of a climate conspiracy keeping dissent out of the peer-reviewed literature. Such claims, as usual, miss the point.
Climategate: the scandal that wasn’t
Despite denier’s hyperbolic claims that the CRU email leak was the “final nail in the coffin of global warming science”, ”the abject corruption of climate science” and “a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science” and in what should come as no surprise to anyone who has scraped beyond the surface of this saga, CRU and Phil Jones have been cleared of wrong doing (perhaps now the death threats can stop). This may however come as a surprise to those who’s only exposure to this whole affair was with reporters who were more interested in maintaining a sellable narrative, than reporting the truth.
The inquiry by the British house of commons science and technology committee has cleared Jones and CRU, saying that ‘there is no case to answer’:
The fact that denier science is rejected by the peer-reviewed literature is not evidence of bias, or conspiracy
Climategate has renewed calls that the peer-reviewed literature is either biased against global warming deniers, or is actively conspiring to prevent those with dissenting views from publishing their work. But the fact that this is happening is not evidence that such bias or conspiracy exists, as Michael Tobis writes:
Conspiracy theories
Climategate has renewed calls that the IPCC and climate science in general is all just a big fraud. This is happening despite a lack of supporting evidence. The problem is that those claiming this is all a massive conspiracy have no idea of the amount of evidence required to not only prove mainstream science wrong, but fraudulent.
Climategate: the bottom line
By Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle
From the Cartoonist Group.
The bottom line of the CRU email leak, is that in terms of the science behind global warming the emails are meaningless. In terms of the politics they are not, but only because deniers are twisting the emails, taking them out of context and claiming that they invalidate the science. This is denialism pure and simple.
The fact that deniers have jumped all over this shows, again, their disregard for the truth. They automatically assume the worst (so obviously they are not skeptics), without any evidence to back up their extreme claims. Anyone who jumped on this has revealed their true colours. They aren’t interested in finding truth… but we already knew that.
In the end this little escapade has revealed more about the deniers than about climatologists.
But if you disagree, please post specific examples of compromised science (vague claims simply won’t cut it), and then explain exactly how this changes our picture of the climate system. If you claim these emails somehow invalidate global warming, this is the absolute minimum one needs to substantiate those claims.
