Bishop Hill The Economist on the Climategate anniversary
Nov 28, 2010 Climate: CRU Slightly late out of the blocks, The Economist takes a look at Climategate, namechecking yours truly in the process.
I'm not sure quite what to make of the article, which doesn't seem to take much of a position. The thrust of the piece seems to be that Climategate was not principally about manipulation of the numbers, and its certainly fair enough to bat back the wilder claims that have been made about what the emails mean.
But there is much to take issue with. The inquiries were flawed, we learn, and yes, that's true, in the same way that Bill Gates is "well-off". The "secondary presentations", as the article coyly refers to the IPCC reports, apparently included misrepresentations of primary research; again, yes, but where does that leave policymakers? And if sceptical views were excluded from the primary literature, what is the point in secondary assessments anyway?
I would also take issue with the idea that we learned little from Climategate, because many of the claims "had all been aired long before". This seems slightly obtuse to me. Before Climategate they were just claims. After the emails hit the airwaves they were rather more than that.
Reader Comments (10)
For me, the main feature of the Economist article is how weak it is compared to blog posts too numerous to mention. My reaction was to wonder why on earth anyone would actually buy paper copies of the Economist – or even subscribe to it. On the evidence of this and other Economist articles, it isn’t very well researched considering the amount of material available. It reads as if it was done to a deadline with limited resources and almost no interest in the subject.
Tufty - I subscribe to the Economist. The reason being I took out a three year subscription nearly three years ago. It was once a very good newspaper, possibly the best place for informed comment in the UK. Unfortunately it isn't any more, and is full of the same claptrap as all the other papers. I shan't be renewing.
I am glad the Economist seems to be edging sheepishly towards a more even handed position. Good business sense when more than half of their US market ain't fans of CAGW silliness.
Have to stand up for the paper copy - you still get good investigative articles from places all over the world that you will not see elsewhere in this agency dominated news world. And if you spill coffee on the paper copy it doesn't sizzle and spit and not work anymore.
The Economist, like many mainstream media outlets, is trying to negotiate its way back to respectability after several years of uncritical AGW alarmism.
Judging by the comments on their site, nobody's very impressed.
The Economist became the house organ of the corporate rent-seeker agenda. They have been peddling the "get in line and get your piece of the pie" line e.g. BP, the Climate Action Partnership, etc.
I had the same take as bish on the "claims aired before". It's a common enough ploy by the hockey team: 1) "these ridiculous, unfounded allegations by a few skeptics funded by evil oil companies are meaningless", 2) after the claims prove accurate -- "move along, nothing to see here, nothing new, old news that isn't relevant to anything".
Those who make the editorial decisions at The Economist, and at many similar publications, have about as much understanding of science as my wife's cat... or equivalently, as most politicians.
Knowing nothing makes the choice of accepting the 'consensus' opinion the most attractive and lowest risk option. What the editors and writers at the Economist (not to mention politicians) are incapable of appreciating is that climate science is in fact an unholy mix of science, politics, and propaganda, which passes itself off to the public as a 'normal science' rather than what it really is: a 'politically informed science' with a set of extreme left-wing and enviro-lunatic policy goals. The public pronouncements of leaders in the field about 'the science' are as much political statements as scientific ones.
Only failure to make accurate predictions of drastic warming will discredit the field in the eyes of writers and politicians. We can only hope that political resistance to draconian public actions delays those actions long enough for that failure to become obvious... even to the writers and editors at The Economist.
I subscribed to The Economist for over 10 years, then gave it away 2-3 years ago. It completely lost the plot.
I agree that going with the supposed consensus may have been the easy way out for journalists a decade ago. But they are very well aware that it is all about politics today. They know which side they root for politically and they know how their side views the climate issue. As Pielke, Jr. has revealed in a couple of posts, lots of academic climate scientists actively focus their work on the politics (i.e. in the US, Democrats are good, Republicans are evil). Everyone sees the issue in political terms. Scientific reality, like economic research, is simply another thing to be manipulated for the 'greater good' (i.e. political power for the left).
I subscribed to the Economist for many years. But I began to notice that, when they dealt with a topic that I knew something about, they often got things wrong. And that made me worry about the other stuff. So I did not renew.