Bishop Hill Misrepresenting hide the decline
Nov 14, 2011 Climate: CRU Climate: MWP After uncovering a consistent error in the way the BBC's Richard Black has represented sceptics allegations over the "hide the decline" incident, I thought it might be interesting to see how some other well-known environmentalist correspondents have dealt with the question.
Here's Nature's David Adam:
Most famously, he boasted that he had used a "trick" to "hide the decline" in a temperature chart. Very soon, members of the sceptic community had pounced on these messages as evidence that Jones and others had concealed flaws in their temperature data...
Wow. The same mistake as Richard Black! What about...Geoffrey Lean?
The most quoted of them – about using "a trick" to "hide the decline" – has been widely, but wrongly, spun as evidence of a cover-up of a supposed drop in global temperatures since 1998, an anomalously hot year, which sceptics often cite to support their belief that global warming has stopped
The "climategate" scandal erupted after thousands of emails were stolen from the CRU at the end of last year. One email referred to a "trick" to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, prompting claims that scientists were willing to manipulate the data to exaggerate the extent of global warming.
David Rose appears to be an exception.
Bishop Hill
I've deleted a lot of comments from this thread. The discussion forum is there for people who want to have an uncivilised discussion.
Reader Comments (84)
I find this truly bizarre; are journalists effectively saying that they are so completely sure that their readers will not understand the issue correctly that they will not bother to even attempt to put them right they will just work with their reader’s misconceptions?
To do this they are also saying that the great unwashed can only ever come to one misconception, the one the assumed by the journalist?
Is this really what is being said? If so surely it can only ever feed and further promote any misconceptions. Why would a journalist want to do that?
David Adam: You lost me there. What hack are you talking about?
"David Adam: You lost me there. What hack are you talking about?"
Nov 15, 2011 at 4:27 PM | Phillip Bratby
The servers at the University of East Anglia were hacked into and lots of private emails between individuals were stolen. These were then then quote-mined to come up with some which, when taken out of context, seemed to be incriminating.
It was followed by a series of independent inquiries, which all found that the CRU had not behaved dishonestly, that the science was broadly correct, and that there had been no manipulation of data.
It's been mentioned on this website before. I'm surprised you've missed it.
Zed: "I'm not really sure what your angle is. I can't believe you don't really know the answers to the questions you're asking, so why are you asking them?"
As they say in parts hereabouts; "Yow do mak oi larf!!"
Suffice to say, I know what your angle is. Never answer a question - except if you can turn it into another question; ignore comments that find you out; always point to obscure comments you have made on different threads; ad nauseum.
And YOU know that I am not asking questions because I need to know or confirm my knowledge - that's pedantry - of which you are a mistress - it's to see if I can understand that you know what you're talking about. But then, it's obvious you are unbalanced - in argument, I mean, with a chip on your shoulders. I ask for citations of 'sceptical outlets' and you claim three tabloid newspapers ('though being tabloid hardly disqualifies them), yet they are easily balanced by the dull roar of believers in the Guardian, the Times, the Independent, the BBC. Yet still you are bested on these blogs.
I shall not forget that you have not tried to engage on why you don't post at WUWT or the Daily Telegraph (or are you DWRICE/SACCULINA/whoever?
"The servers at the University of East Anglia were hacked into"
If you're sure about this, Zed, I think the Norfolk police would like your help.
ZBD, @ 4.35 p.m/ you do talk a lot of drivel. Do you know something the Norfolk police don't? The longer there is no result to their investigation, the more it seems likely it was a leak, not a theft, but everybody is too embarrassed to admit it. Plus, Mike Jackson has it right - the e;mails are quite damning as they stand. As for independent enquiries - I read the Oxburgh report. I think Judith Curry said - is this the executive summary? when it was the full report. My reaction was "where's the beef?" All of them were alarmingly superficial, but then it's a British tradition for enquiries to obscure the truth, rather than reveal it.
[snip- forum please]
Yes the Norfolk Police could really do with zebedee's evidence. They seem to have run out of steam. But I don't recall zebedee ever having produced any evidence.
I think she will find a good analysis of many of the released emails at http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/ She won't like it though, she prefers to ignore the evidence in favour of a few coats of establishment whitewash.
David Adam -
A small point arises in conjunction with the quotation which geoffchambers cites above: "“The decline was not in recorded global temperatures, as was sometimes said, but in temperatures inferred from a series of tree rings over the last few decades. The trick is to ignore the obviously faulty information. This statistical technique has its critics, and it raises questions about why the decline occurs and whether earlier data can be relied on...”
Describing the latter-day tree ring data as "obviously faulty information" is incorrect. It was examined quite thoroughly (as one would expect given the unexpected nature of the trends); to my knowledge there was no question that the trees were sampled and measured properly. The tree-ring data is *not* faulty. The reconstruction from said data does not correspond to measured temperatures, true: but this is not a good reason to discard the data (or the reconstruction) unless the point is to present a "nice tidy story".
A description of "obviously faulty information" is just not accurate.
As a postscript, I'd like to add that a more accurate wording would be something like: "The trick is to ignore the
obviously faultyconflicting information."I'd have to agree with David Adam that 'uninformed' opinions drive much of political and journalistic behaviour, not to mention environmentalism, but I'd say that 'global warming is a scam and scientists caught cheating' was actually pretty accurate (as long as you take 'global warming' to be the usual shorthand for CAGW).
It's certainly better than 'climate scientists didn't label a figure properly used on the cover of a little known WMO leaflet from a decade ago that used a statistical technique published in the scientific literature that has its critics' which is a masterpiece of predigested thinking and moving the pea under the thimble.
The public deserve the truth with all it's inconvenient nuances.
Ignoring data, which was obviously not "faulty", is called cherry-picking, something that is unique to dendroclimatology (Jacoby).
Can Zed and anyone else who wants to bicker with him/her please go to the discussion forum.
5 "independent" inquiries! Now which would they be?
Sorry, wrote too soon.
David
We are talking about "hide the decline". This is a different issue to FOI or any of those other issues that were "out there" prior to Climategate. Your characterisation of hide the decline as CRU "didn't label a figure properly used on the cover of a little known WMO leaflet from a decade ago that used a statistical technique published in the scientific literature that has its critics" is, if I may say so a travesty.
1. The decline was hidden, partially or wholly, in the third and fourth assessment reports.
2. Deleting data so as to hide uncertainty is not "a statistical technique".
I ask again: is it acceptable for scientists to hide uncertainties from policymakers?
[snip - forum please]
There is absolutely no excuse for David Adam to make the mistake that he made in his Nature article
("Most famously, he boasted that he had used a "trick" to "hide the decline" in a temperature chart.")
And it is remarkable that he now has the cheek to turn up here and claim (3.00pm) that he didn't make a mistake.
Adam was writing a year after the event, so had plenty of time to get the story correct. Moreover, unlike most journalists, he has a science degree so ought to be able to understand the difference between a temperature chart and a proxy chart.
Paul
I agree that he should have given a better characterisation of the criticisms of CRU. I'm struggling with his reasoning: that what CRU actually did - hiding the uncertainties from policymakers - was no big deal.
Would the newspapers really not have reported the Climategate story if Sarah Palin hadn't have sounded off about global cooling? It's a bit of an indictment of the MSM if so.
David Adams could also have read an analysis of "hide the decline" in Climategate emails 0938018124 and 0942777075 as long ago as January 20th 2010. See http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/climategate_analysis.pdf
I guess David Adams has a point in one sense. The story had wheels due to the incorrect spin on 'hide the decline', hence the journalistic reports should focus on the incorrect version. After all, I guess we're all fairly relaxed about, or at least resigned to, reporting of politics (among other topics) in newspapers being as much about perceptions as reality. I'm not sure Nature should embrace that kind of journalism, though. And the various enquiries seemed to have followed that line, in part at least, and that is the really shocking thing. None seem to have frankly addressed the strongest arguments whereby 'hiding the decline' is, well, deceitful.
I'd say that there was not one specific item in the leaked emails that caused general concern about the science at EAU. Before the leak I think many people saw scientists as the guys in white coats looking at the fact, just the facts. What the emails showed was more akin to footballers with barging, shirt pulling and diving as common tactics. I think that caused a significant reaction.
And thanks Bish for moving the 'noise' elsewhere, a very welcome intervention.
David Adam
I note that in Feb 2010, more than a decade from the “hide the decline” incident that you felt that the “divergence problem” could be explained away by:-
1. “these questions have been openly addressed by scientists for years.”
2. “The issue appears in text books”
3. “and even has its own, rather more pedestrian, name”
There was no explanation of the “divergence problem” in 1999, still none in 2010 and now at the end of 2011 we still have no answers.
Do you still think that your three points above justify the use of “Mike’s Nature Trick”?
David Adams clearly was on a roll when he quickly scanned all the right wing outlets from the month after the Climatgate. Just the thing to use - hindsight focus on one month in order to recast the whole of the last two years into a narrative that justifies his only having to deal with the easiest depiction of "hide the decline". Ah! professional science writing ;)
One minor quibble though, in his haste I think he missed the fact that the Heartland link he quotes actually is quite a long article which contains a totally accurate description of HTD:
And more...
Something Adam didn't seem quite able to muster himself in the right-on, high impact, non-right wing Nature a whole year later ;)
He still doesn't get it. If you talk about a subject and want respect from all sides, you have to talk about the subjects actual substance in reality. If you only operate with your best guess about what your badly informed readership thinks the enemies and "deniers" think on the subject, then you are not actually controlling the narrative. You don't want to risk that! There will always people out there always ready to hear new things on a subject ;)
The big picture is that "the decline" invalidates the field of paleodendroclimatology. If tree rings do not correlate with temperature in the present, they cannot be used to reconstruct temperature in the past... cue "hide the decline".
Your Grace, as one of those who had comments [snipped] I accept that it's your blog, your rules. And I shall always respect that.
Please though, allow me to take a little exception to your update that characterised those snipped comments as being 'uncivilised'. More especially as I was, in my simple way, merely trying to synthesise the argument to a one word solution: 'proxy'. As in: 'The hide the decline was all about hiding the decline in the temperature...proxy'.
A classic, and brilliantly executed straw man argument. You have to admire its simplicity and almost total effectiveness, surely? Be dispassionate: It is true class!
For those that want to downplay the importance of the hockey stick, here's a reminder:
"In the global warming debate, one of the most potent tools of Kyoto Treaty advocates was the “hockey stick diagram,” which became famous a few years ago when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used it to argue that the “1990s were the warmest decade in the millennium and 1998 the warmest year.” These sound bites were used in speeches advocating Kyoto during the 2002 ratification debate; the Government of Canada promoted the hockey stick on its web site, sent it to schools across the country and quoted its conclusion in pamphlets mailed out to all Canadians." - Steve McIntyre
Prior to having this propaganda delivered to his house by and from his federal government, McIntyre had had no intetrest in "global warming." Had he just discarded his junk mail (as most people would have!) history would likely have been very different.
Snotrocket
I take your point - I still need to stop the threads turning into the regular foodfights. Commenters who want to engage with ZDB will probably have to go to the forum, since Zed appears unwilling to be polite.
I'm obliged, Your Grace. No more food fights. :)
Here is David Adam fist foray into the climate debate with this Guardian article.
Climate change hits butterfly habitats - David Adam, June 2003.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/jun/07/science.research
Mr Adam offers this titbit, "Records show Britain has warmed by 1C to 1.5C over the past 25 years."
Of course Mr Adam must have got those figures from official records. Well on checking Met Office records from 1978 to 2003 you find that the mean temperature change, a warming, for the UK during that period was ~ 0.8C.
If your are dealing with lower and upper limits, say min and max temps, then this becomes 0.7C to 0.9C.
Now 0.7C to 0.9C is not 1C to 1.5C.
So where do these much higher temps come from?
Was Mr Adam given wrong figures? Did he fail to understand them? Did he misrepresent the known data?
My post has been deleted! Notoriety at last!
Mac
The article you link to is a classic example of the drivel that scientists of every discipline used to churn out (less so in recent years fortunately) as they tried apparently to get aboard the climate change bandwagon.
There is little, if any, evidence to suggest that butterflies are so susceptible to a couple of degrees of temperature change that global warming in the UK was ever likely to threaten them. Habitat loss has been the main cause of decline of most small species over the last half-century and though it might be true that this has prevented them from extending their range northwards (by no means universally) there is no evidence of a contraction of their southern limit.
If you don't believe that, look at a map of butterfly, insect, and bird distribution across western Europe.
I don't want to seem to have it in for Adam (I've had my say) but journalists are supposed to try and get the facts right. PR firms will try to get this sort of guff printed; it makes their clients look as if they're doing something useful and it keeps them in a job. It is not a reporter's job to take the latest press release, regurgitate it and as a result mislead his readers.
And if as a private individual you want to see species decline as proof of global warming then as a journalist you should be twice as hard and twice as sceptical. Anything else is reporter as advocate. In the long run it makes you and your paper untrustworthy because sooner or later your sins will find you out (as they have been doing to the catatrophists for the last few years) and nobody will then believe a word you say.
There is no place for "post-normal journalism", aka "the end justifies the means".
Mike Jackson.
At the start of his Guardian tenure David Adam misrepresented temperature data, and his article was unquestioning of the science. At the end of his time at the Guardian he was misrepresenting the arguements of sceptics. During that intervening period David Adam wrote over a thousand published articles for the Guardian. If an audit was done of his work how many of those articles not only misrepresented climate science but also misrepresented the debate over climate change?