Bradley on the Hockey Stick

I'm currently reading Raymond Bradley's new book Global Warming and Political Intimidation, which is very interesting. The sense I get from the book is of a minor civil servant trying to justify some almighty great shambles over which he has presided, which in a way is what the Hockey Stick story is about.

It's a very political work, with Bradley apparently seeing pretty much everything through a political lens: in several places in the book we are presented with stories of valiant Democrats defending honest scientists from wicked Republicans. We have, in essence, a minor civil servant who thinks he's living in a fairy tale and trying to justify himself to the world.

Because of this political focus, there is remarkably little discussion of the science and although there is a chapter on the Hockey Stick, there is no mention of bristlecones or principal components analysis. (And before you ask, no, he doesn't mention the Hockey Stick Illusion either). However, he does make an attempt to defend the science of the Hockey Stick, and my attention is going to be focused there. There's quite a lot to say on this subject, however, so I'm going to break the analysis down into separate posts.

Comments

[KnR]

The subtitle is amazing 'How politician cracked down on the scientists as the Earth Heated up ' setting aside the alarmist claim you have to ask given the way AGW proponents have had the political filed virtual to themselves , what evidenced is there for any 'crack down ' .
True politicians may not have bended down to the climate scientists as deeply as they like and true because they want to get and stay elected they not meet the aspirations of scientists/advocates for what are in fact political not science based goals, but that is not a 'crack down' in any sense.

Seem like usual story told by AGW proponents that only the bad ,mad or the evil can not support AGW and the only reason the public is not fully on-board is becasue of some evil external influences.

[LJH]

As a collector of examples of cognitive bias, denial, group think, transference and self- justification, I think I love it already.

[Mac]

In America they have Democrat science and Republican science - both are wrong.

We must remember that Bradley was also sent the infamous Phil Jones email, "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

[Mac]

Here is the one review from the Amazon site.

By palaeoscientist - review is from: Global Warming and Political Intimidation: How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up (Paperback)

This is an excellent and revealing account of current knowledge about climate change and the attempts by oil-backed politicians to deny the overwhelming scientific evidence and to discredit the scientists by a sordid campaign of personal attacks. If you want to understand why the USA lags behind the rest of the world in tackling human-induced climate change then read this NOW!

I wonder who palaeoscientist is? Bob Ward did a bit of palaeo science once, though uncompleted.

[David Holland]

Readers might also look at what Malcolm Hughes had to say in 2007 at:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/inconversation/stories/2007/1882479.htm#

[Buffy Minton]

Mac,

you can tell if it was Bob "Flying Fingers" Ward - was the "review" published within a minute or two of the book becoming available?

[Latimer Alder]

The review is seemingly the one and only ever produced by 'paleoscientist' on any book. Strange indeed.

And unlike most Amazon reviews (which do try to review the book), this one reads more like advertising blurb than an attempt to provide useful info about the contents.

[James P]

I don't know why Amazon don't limit reviews to people who bought the book (or item) from them, or at least provide an indication if the reviewer has done so. It would usefully hamper the opinionated non-readers and improve the quality of the reviews to a similar degree.

[Martin Brumby]

"and the attempts by oil-backed politicians to deny the overwhelming scientific evidence and to discredit the scientists by a sordid campaign of personal attacks...."

Hmmm. Which politicians would those be? Certainly not here in the UK?

Can anyone think of a single UK politician who has "discredited scientists" by "personal attacks"? Possible canditates include the DUP's Sammy Wilson, Tory MEP Roger Helmer, the BNP's MEPs Griffin & Brons and UKIP's little MEP team including Farage & Helmer. Peter Lilley has made a few sarky comments in Westminster. I think that's about it.

"Sordid campaign of personal attacks"? Drat! I must have missed them! Weren't they reported - even in the blogosphere?

And oil-backed? Only politicians I can think of that were 'oil-backed' include Mrs. Thatcher and several of her cabinet. Couldn't be them - they started the cAGW scam!

So I think our lightning reviewer has got his facts ar** about face.

Yup. Sounds like Bob "attach chihuahua" Ward.

[Latimer Alder]

@Your Grace

Please provide a review at Amazon when you have finished reading Bradley's book.

[Nicholas Hallam]

I like the comment at Amazon on palaeoscientist's rave review:

"The 'review' above seems to be an extract from the publisher's (or even the author's own) blurb, rather than a serious attempt. I am none the wiser except that the Good Guys in this interpretation are the scientists and the Bad Guys are the 'oil-backed politicians'

Unless a more even-handed and nuanced review appears, I think it is unlikely that I will shell out over 15 quid for 150 odd pages."

[Stirling English]

Glad you liked it... :-) I was quite pleased with it myself.....

[Candide]

Other fantasy-worlds:

* Mr Murdoch controls ALL the media; the BBC is relatively tiny

* You can raise taxes on income and dividends without incurring tax incidence;

* You can run a national debt without paying more for borrowing; money just magically appears!

* We're being oppressed by all-powerful copyright industries; that's why we never have to pay for anything we download online

* The Guardian has a viable business plan

[Orson]

Reading the online excerpt of Bradley at Amazon in the US, I notice three things. The first two are biographical, the third concerns Michael Crichton’s congressional testimony, and goes to the heart of “The Hockey Stick Illusion.”

First, Bradley makes much of being a card-carrying climatologist. The “I’m just a scientist (average-joe),” a self-serving, smarmy plaint.

Next, on page 33, Bradley mentions that Mann went to high school with his own son. He mentions that Mann went to UC-Berkeley to study physics and math, before doing the MS in physics and PhD in geophysics at Yale. Now, Yale simply doesn’t do climatology. How did Mann get to be a big career-building paleoclimatologist? Through maths.

This makes all that we know to come all the more disingenuous. Even Mann’s father was a math prof at U-Mass, Amherst, where Bradley also teaches - and where Mann himself was posted for a time.

In short, we see early in Mann’s life the lesson of networking to advance his career, and the use of number manipulation when people couldn’t be charmed. Then they could be bullied.

Bradley says, “Mike Mann is a cleaver guy. His knowledge of statistical methods and the climate system are exceptional.” (33) Then why hide your data and methods if they are sound?

By contrast consider the criticism from Harvard Med School educated Michael Crichton, a film director in the 1970s, and a science-fiction writer of the techno-thriller since the 1960s.

. In the chapter on “ The Congressional Hearings, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Chrichton appears with Bradley before AGW-skeptic Senator Imhofe to testify. “What possesses a doctor (an M.D., that is), to feel qualified to sound off on climate science, that I don’t know.” (18)

Presumably, Chrichton counts at “bad” as does Imhofe. But the amazon excerpt cuts out too soon (19 & 20) for me to be sure. But the real reason Crichton appears is to talk about sound science methods - something Bradley neglects to mention, in what I can read.

Since Crichton is now dead, let me excerpt some of his testimony in his own defense. To start with, his then new novel “The State of Fear” dealt with the politicization of science. And he was “a post-doctoral fellow at the Salk Institute, where I worked on media and science policy with [famous late scientist] Jacob Bronowski.”

In essence, science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid—and will be universally accepted—only if it can be reproduced by others, and thereby independently verified....The scientific method is utterly apolitical.
...Thus, when adhered to, the scientific method can transcend politics. Unfortunately, the converse may also be true: when politics takes precedent over content, it is often because the primacy of independent verification has been abandoned.

[He then introduces an example of the highly stringent research protocols followed in drug research, in order the prevent bias and conflicts of interest by regulators. Millions and billions of dollars are at stake.]

For a person with a medical background, accustomed to this degree of rigor in research, the protocols of climate science appear considerably more relaxed. A striking feature of climate science is that it’s permissible for raw data to be "touched," or modified, by many hands. Gaps in temperature and proxy records are filled in. Suspect values are deleted because a scientist deems them erroneous. A researcher may elect to use parts of existing records, ignoring other parts. Sometimes these adjustments are necessary, sometimes they are questionable. Sometimes the adjustments are documented, sometimes not. But the fact that the data has been modified in so many ways inevitably raises the question of whether the results of a given study are wholly or partially caused by the modifications themselves.

In saying this, I am not casting aspersions on the motives or fair-mindedness of climate scientists. Rather, what is at issue is whether the methodology of climate science is sufficiently rigorous to yield a reliable result. At the very least, we should want the reassurance of independent verification by another lab, in which they make their own decisions about how to handle data, and yet arrive at a similar conclusion.

Because any study where a single team plans the research, carries it out, supervises the analysis, and writes their own final report, carries a very high risk of undetected bias. That risk, for example, would automatically preclude the validity of the results of a similarly structured study that tested the efficacy of a drug. Nobody would believe it.

By the same token, it would be unacceptable if the subseqent verification of such a study were conducted by investigators with whom the researcher had a professional relationship—people with whom, for example, he had published papers in the past. That's peer review by pals, and it’s unavoidably biased. Yet these issues are central to the now-familiar story of the "Hockeystick graph" and the debate surrounding it.

SOURCE

Crichton then takes up the familiar MBH Hockey Stick graph, then concludes: "Some have asked why the UN accepted Mann’s report so uncritically. It is unsettling to learn Mann himself was in charge of the section of the report that included his work. This episode of climate science is far from the standards of independent verification."

Crichton then draws three conclusions: first, six years passed before the unscientific mask on it was exposed - far too long to serve policy makers needs; second, the exposers, McIntyre and McItrick, were outsiders. (This logically led to the congressionally authorized Wegman Report and his conclusion that independent peer review was really a tight coterie that lacked independence or skill-specific expetise.) They were blocked at every turn. And finally, “Third, this kind of stonewalling is not unique or uncommon.” In fact, it was ongoing!

Clearly, Crichton was a stand in for M&M to Bradley. Chrichton closes with a brief for the necessity of data archiving in science - the long-standing cri de coeur of McIntyre and science lovers everywhere aghast at the Hockey Stick scandal.

So, my question to Bradley readers ‘in the know’ is this: how does he treat Crichton’s specific complaints and recommended reforms?

[hunter]

Typical warmist bs.
A civil servant whose career has been made fat by selling climate fear whines about how it is all falling apart.
The idea that wraskly wrepublicans somehow caused the trainwreck AGW is experiencing is a hoot.
I hope all of the true believers buy into that. The confused looks so many AGW believers will have as this debacle finishes unwinding will be priceless.