Toronto Sun on Climate Files

Lorrie Goldstein of the Toronto Sun asks if maybe climate science shouldn't be just a bit more open, and citing Fred Pearce's The Climate Files as evidence. The tone of the article is interesting, with Goldstein noting that Pearce is not a "denier", but pointing out his criticisms of the climatology community's failure to check its findings.

As well as taking pot shots at climatology peer review, he also has things to say about the Climategate inquiries:

Simply having panels of sympathetic academics (or politicians) take a cursory look at the work of climate scientists and pronounce it sound — what happened following Climategate — doesn’t cut it.

Comments

[Justice4Rinka]

Hi Paul B

Sorry, had a busy day and only just got back to this.

Schneider is the most egregious example, but there are others. For example, Mike Hulme has mused about how the urgency of AGW is so great that it is OK to exaggerate the evidence to get some action going. There is even a word for it: "post normal science". The problem of course is that if you don't do the science properly in the first place, you cannot have any rational grounds for being convinced of a looming crisis.

Another on-the-record liar would be Jonathan Overpeck, who has indicated that "we have to get rid of the MWP". Because it undermines the claims of AGW, he wants it massaged out of the record.

Then there is Phil Jones, who urged all his colleagues to delete data rather than make it available to FoI inquiries. While he didn't explicitly say "I believe it's OK to lie and break the law", he did advocate to his colelagues that thye do so. Same thing.

Then we have the group that met in Tanzania a year before the 4AR and finding that Briffa's proxy data undermined itself agreed that it had to be got rid of. They didn't agree that the data undedrmined the hypothesis so the hypothesis needed to change; they decided that it was the data that needed to change. So they just, well, deleted it.

Gotta rush, but for me, there is abundant evidence here of noble cause corruption - lying because you care.

[BBD]

Er - McShane and Wyner present a critique of Mannean short-centering. So they are working with the same proxies as MBH.

But this is the point - so was everyone else. The same proxies turn up again and again in paper after paper and (surprise!) yield broadly the same results.

Unless you take time to find out about the commonalities behind the mass of mutually-supporting paleo reconstructions you won't realise just how flimsy that particular consensus actually is.

This is all detailed in Montfort's book.

[BBD]

Blast - typo - 'Montford'

[Paul B]

@BBD and others

Well, obviously this site is dedicated to precisely the critique of the HS that's been alluded to over the past few posts, so no doubt you all are far more steeped in the intricacies of the argument than me.

So let me ask another "innocent" question.

Suppose we have 100 proxies and 40 of them give reconstructions which have some kind of commonality, whereas the other 60 are completely random, with few or no common features. Aren't we then justified in using the 40 that express the common signal and ignoring the other 60?

Of course this is probably a great simplification of the real situation, but I only advance it as a possible explanation of why certain proxies get used in many reconstructions.

Sorry, I have to rush off now, so won't be able to reply till late

[BBD]

Paul B asks:

So let me ask another "innocent" question.
Suppose we have 100 proxies and 40 of them give reconstructions which have some kind of commonality, whereas the other 60 are completely random, with few or no common features. Aren't we then justified in using the 40 that express the common signal and ignoring the other 60?

But that’s not what happened. The group of mutually-supporting paleo reconstructions surrounding the Mannean Hockey Stick actually use very small numbers of proxies selected for their atypical Hockey Stick signal.

It is extremely difficult to illustrate this, but if you are prepared to take a look at the table on p45 (pdf) of the infamous ‘Wegman Report’ you will get an idea of how dominant certain proxies are in the various reconstructions:

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf

(Please note that this aspect of the report is not in question by the vigorous and bizarrely belated attempts to discredit the document as a whole).

It’s also instructive to remember what Keith Briffa actually said about the Mannean flat Hockey Stick ‘handle’:

For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of years as Mike [Michael Mann] appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) [sic] that require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future background variability of our climate.

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=136&filename=938018124.txt

Now that’s the Lead Author of the Paleoclimate chapter of TAR and AR4 explaining what he really thinks. It is impossible not to wonder why his views – particularly that ‘the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago’ - didn’t make it into the final IPCC reports.

Later in the same email Briffa goes on to say:

I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.

Another fascinating email exchange between Edward Cook of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and others (including Mann):

[Cook writing to Crowley:]
>> >> >Thomas J. Crowley
>> >> >Dept. of Oceanography
>> >> >Texas A&M University

I do think that the Medieval Warm Period was a far more significant event
>> >>than has been recognized previously, as much because the high-resolution
>> >>data to evaluate it had not been available before. That is much less
>>so the
>> >>case now. It is even showing up strongly now in long SH [note Southern Hemisphere] tree-ring series.
>> >>However, there is still the question of how strong this event was in the
>> >>tropics. I maintain that we do not have the proxies to tell us that now.
>> >>The tropical ice core data are very difficult to interpret as temperature
>> >>proxies (far worse than tree rings for sure and maybe even unrelated to
>> >>temperatures in any simple linear sense as is often assumed), so I do not
>> >>believe that they can be used alone as records to test for the
>>existence of
>> >>a Medieval Warm Period in the tropics. That being the case, there are
>> >>really no other high-resolution records from the tropics to use, and the
>> >>teleconnections between long extra-tropical proxies and the tropics are, I
>> >>believe, far too tenuous and probably unstable to use to sort out this
>> >>issue.
>> >>
So, at this stage I would argue that the Medieval Warm Period was probably
>> >>a global extra-tropical event, at the very least, with warmth that was
>> >>persistent and probably comparable to much of what we have experienced in
>> >>the 20th century. However, I would not claim (and nor would Jan) that it
>> >>exceeded the warmth of the late 20th century. We simply do not have the
>> >>precision or the proxy replication to say that yet. This being said, I do
>> >>find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global
>>event
>> >>to be grossly premature and probably wrong. Kind of like Mark Twain's
>> >>commment that accounts of his death were greatly exaggerated.

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=228&filename=.txt

There you have it: the politicisation of climate science in a nutshell.

[BBD]

Paul B

I forgot to include a link to a useful paper which reviews the state of the art of paleoclimate reconstructions. It has the groovy title of 'A noodle, hockey stick, and spaghetti plate: a perspective on high-resolution paleoclimatology'. (Frank, Esper, Zorita and Wilson 2010).

http://coast.gkss.de/staff/zorita/Frank_etal_WIRESCllmChange_2010.pdf

From the abstract:

It is perhaps advisable to use fewer, but expert-assessed proxy records to reduce errors in future reconstruction efforts.

In other words, enough cherry-picking already.

[Paul B]

@BBD

Well, I guess I've kind of implied with my own comments on the HS upthread that I broadly agree with the comments by Briffa and Cook. I've also read the Frank et al paper and I agree that we do need to be looking at the reliability and explainability of the proxy responses - in other words it isn't good enough just to have a correlation with temperature, we need to know why there is a correlation. As Frank et al say:

The diverse nature of proxy climate archives, ranging from tree-ring isotopes to documentary data to marine sediment particle sizes, means that a wide variety of physical, biological, and chemical processes and their assessment are responsible for the encoding and decoding of the climate signal. A detailed familiarity,and ideally a mechanistic understanding, of these processes and the characteristics of different archives in general and individual records, in particular, is likely advantageous if not invaluable for developing climate reconstructions.

I'm not, however, comfortable with the attributions of near-fraudulent behaviour made by some commenters here. I think a cock-up theory, involving poor data control going back decades and an over-defensive reaction to the criticism and FOI demands, is a much more likely explanation of many of the rather intemperate responses noted in the Climategate e-mails.

[WillR]

The last Time I talked to Lorrie Goldstein he was a HE! Really.
************************************************************************

Here is a link to the columnists pages of the Toronto Sun.

http://www.torontosun.com/columnists/

Lorrie has published many articles on Climate and Alternative energy. He puts some thought into his articles and is a very bright light on the Journalistic scene here in Canada.

He is pushing hard for the Ontario Government to reconsider Wind Power and Solar power for example.

Cheers. from Canada eh?

[Frosty]

"over-defensive reaction to the criticism and FOI demands"

paraphrasing....why should I give out my data if all they want to do is find fault with it?

[BBD]

Paul B

Re Climategate, it depends what we are talking about. I am personally satisfied that Mann knew that the Hockey Stick was deeply flawed, and it is obvious that Briffa, Cook and others thought so too. The arguments within the Team as visible through the emails confirm this (see above).

We must then agree to differ on the motivation for Mann’s behaviour. While I agree with you that some of the things that Climategate revealed have been over-interpreted by sceptics, by no means all of it can be waved away by apologists.

Why, I ask myself, does someone as clearly climate literate as yourself, continue to make excuses for Mann? And why the shut-eyed denial that some senior climatologists have connived in promoting a profoundly alarmist icon (the Hockey Stick) and in doing so have broken the rules of proper scientific conduct?

Why, in effect, deny or diminish the true magnitude of the role of politics or if you prefer, ‘values’ in climate science?

I would like to leave this now, as I suspect we’ve got to the natural end of the discussion. However, I contend that there is a very large elephant still in the room.

If you are as keen to understand the Hockey Stick episode in the round as you seem, please read Montford’s book. I believe libraries are still obliged to provide if you order a specific title, so you won’t need to lay down any money. As I’ve said, the book has been deliberately misrepresented by partisan bloggers and in a few (but by no means all) print reviews. It is not an attempt to ‘falsify’ AGW, simply a thorough account of what happened when McIntyre and McKitrick met the Team. And it’s a good read. I commend it to you with non-partisan sincerity.

Thank you for an interesting exchange.

Dominic