Bishop Hill Whodunnit?
Feb 17, 2012 Climate: fakegate Climate: other Megan McArdle at the Atlantic has done an excellent analysis of the Heartland documents and comes to the conclusion that the strategy document was indeed a fake.
Overall, like the fake documents and quotes of earlier posts, [the strategy document] just feels too convenient. It's a super-handy roadmap to all the most incendiary portions of the other documents, and it contains absolutely nothing that does not serve that purpose--no formulaic self-puffery, no mentions of problems that you would think a legitimate memo would have covered, like the precipitous cuts in their global warming programs that they were forced to undertake when their anonymous donor delivered less cash than expected in 2011. It reads like it was written for climate activists. And I don't get the feeling that the folks at Heartland are much interested in helping out their friends at ClimateProgress and Grist.
There's also some very interesting speculation about the identify of the culprit going on in the comments at Lucia's at the moment. Steven Mosher has noted the west-coast time stamp in the strategy document metadata and also some of the stylistic quirks of the author - poor punctuation, excessive use of parenthesis, and also the use of the strange term "anti-climate". Comparisons are being made with the literary style and twitterings of none other than Peter Gleick, the very green head of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California.
Reader Comments (63)
This is side-splitting.. Ignore the pathetic irony of Heartlands plea for the material to be taken down from the web after their hand in Climate gate disinformation,and their cry that they did not have the opportunity to verify the material's authenticity,then spread some witless amateur speculation on the identity of an author of the supposedly faked element.
Do, please, demonstrate which part of "Climategate" was "disinformation". I am not aware that any e-mail, from either Climategate I, or Climategate II, has yet been shown to have been forged.
So, I repeat: please identify the element of "disinformation' in either of the Climategates.
In your own time...
I did not claim that The Climate emails contained forgeries,Owen. Please don't be deliberately obtuse. The way the emails have been exploited,by Heartland and others, has been a demonstration of classic disinformational strategy. That's somewhat an open secret,don't you think? Heartland has been happy to exploit the deliberately selected and decontextualised email packages to exaggerate the significance and distort the actual meaning of certain exchanges,and to provide commentary based on climategate emails that deliberately misrepresents mainstream scientific view. They rely on the fact that most people are actually seriously unfamiliar with all the matters that so exercise their passion. That is how disinformation succeeds.
For instance,we see Heartlands James Taylor manufacture rhetorical claims such as that Climategate2 emails show that "these [climate] scientists view global warming as a political "cause" rather than a matter for balanced scientific inquiry". That is dishonest and disinformation,as nowhere in the emails do climate scientists express such a view,explicitly or implicitly.And Taylor does not explain how belief in a political cause prohibits the exercise of 'balanced scientific inquiry';after all,his organisation claims its own scientific inquiry to be balanced,right under the declaration of its own political charter. Heartland happily churns out this junk communication,and more than happily links to other sites that show far less restraint in personally attacking scientists...all in the spirit of 'balanced inquiry',I guess.
You have to worry when such groups are either too brazen,stupid or dishonest to understand hypocrisy.
Nick - I understand there are people like you concerned about other people freely expressing their opinions, opinions that sound reasonable to them and unreasonable/dishonest/disinforming to you. I'm fine with it, exactly because I don't think the way you do.
I only hope "my" side wins so we all will keep being free to talk about whatever topic, rather than having to follow strictly-enforced Truths.
Heartland's 'information' doesn't 'sound' disinforming,Maurizio...it just doesn't stand up to simple though often time-consuming analysis. This is not opinion,it's observation. Compare the Heartland funded NIPCC take on what the IPCC says with an actual reading of the IPCC report itself. So it 'reads' like the selective,elaborate misdirection that it intends,and that Heartland planned.
It's sad to see there is a problem on agreeing on examples of hypocrisy. Mutually agreed standards only improve communication by creating essential trust. Those who attack climate science by holding scientists to behavioral standards that they themselves do not keep are transparently disqualifying themselves from sober rational exchange,and they are restricting their own freedom to talk about whatever topic meaningfully.
Ah Nick,
the old "it's all out of context, they didn't do nuffin, honest gov" argument. If it's context you want, I suggest you put the following into google and see what pops out:
climategate_timeline_banner.pdf
This was done a couple of years ago. Even before the second instalment, putting the climategate emails into their fuller context most definitely doesn't make the climate "scientists" involved appear any better. Quite the contrary.
Gee,Jim,that's precisely the decontextualisation -plus unsolicited editorialising- that I reject. And in colour and boxes.Very pretty.
Starting off with the notorious stitch-up of John Haughton's celebrated 'disasters' comment is not the way to convince. Or trying to claim Ed Cook said in 2003 that "we know for certain we know nothing about temperatures before 1900",when the actual email comment is that 'we know f**k all about the >100 years variation' based solely on the studies incorporated in his proposed paper.
Including Wegman is understandable,because at the time the author of the timeline did not know what a crock of plagiarism it was,including its facetious social network 'analysis'.
Fixation over the ambiguities of some elements of palaeoclimate study gives a deliberately false impression of the significance of that element of climate science...and you'd better not try to pass off that comment as my suggesting it has no significance. I see no lack of caveat and qualifying statements in the papers I read. Maybe that's the problem--of course it's the problem--: people simply will not read the original papers. Science is a public exercise;publish,comment,reply,re-work.It takes time. The climategate collations obsession with a few authors in one field is a genuine attempt to injure reputations rather than rebut their work in an orthodox way.
I see the crap about UEA CRU destroying the original data lives on...when we all know that the original data is with the agencies that gathered it. UEA CRU disclosed on their data availability pages that they had destroyed their copies of some of it [and destroyed it years ago] at least a year before journalist Leake spun up a false story that they had only just 'admitted' to the act around the time of Climategate1. Leake took a sentence from their website, put quote marks around it,and attributed it to anonymous 'UEA CRU scientists' before time-shifting it forward to a more provocative date. Few people noticed...
It really does not surprise me that scientists producing summaries simplify things,or that they lobby to exclude stuff they conclude is rubbish,or that they do not wish to waste time with what they think are vexatious inquiries. The bleating about access to basic temperature data has so far produced no redefining studies,no matter the data is available.Crying loud about a few papers that have weak work does not bring the thousands of other papers down,unless you are satisfied with rhetoric. Bring on the rest of the emails.
@Nick
Sure, Nick, sure .... when I want exemplars of rational, thorough, dispassionate, fair-minded, thoughtful, well-balanced, admirable scientists contributing to sound public debate and policy guidance I will always look to the sterling performances of Jim Hanson, Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Gavin Schmidt, Kevin Trenberth, Peter Gleick, et al...... [thanks for the hearty uncontrolled laughter here].
Nick,
Tell me how Mashey's rubbish on Wegman's "plagiarism", in the standard intro waffle to his report, in any way affected the key content, like:
- Confirmation that Mann's statistical methods were basically automated data mining for hockey sticks
- Confirmation that if you take out a handful of bogus proxies, the hockey stick bends, and the MWP reappears.
- Confirmation that the only validation statistics to show significant skill were not generally accepted among statisticians, while those statistics with a long pedigree, such as good old R2, showed near randomness.
- Showed that the Hockey team and associates, though totally dependant on statistics, had virtually no links with the serious statistical community.
As for the "Fixation over the ambiguities of some elements of palaeoclimate study gives a deliberately false impression of the significance of that element of climate science....", this is the bit that shows you truly don't get it at all. I'll try and make it simple for you.
1) The palaeoclimate studies have been shown to be utterly unreliable, and in some cases difficult to interpret as anything other than deliberate fabrications.
2) Many alarmist scientists continue to defend both the validity of the reconstructions, AND the conduct of the hockey team and others in both creating them, and suppressing criticism of them.
From 1 & 2 above we arrive at:
3) Even if the palaeoclimate reconstructions were unimportant (a ridiculous idea, but lets keep it simple and focussed to see if I can lead you through it), the fact that they have been utterly discredited, and yet are still vigorously defended by the climate establishment makes them absolutely central. Not for what they show / don't show about climate, but because of what they reveal about the lack of competence and/or integrity of key players in the whole CAGW scam.
Since I'm not here to defend heartland or anybody else's opinion, rather their right to express it, if anybody asks for a common ground all I can say is that am against people who express one opinion in public and another in private.
That pretty much disqualifies many of the CG protagonists so it'll be a non-starter with Nick, who's still determined to tell others what to think unfortunately.
Jim,I did not say palaeoclimate studies were unimportant,and I tried to make it simple for you by warning you not to misinterpret what I actually said on that point...but you could not resist the temptation,eh? Cling hard to your 'Team',its transgressions and its supposed centrality to climate science if you wish,but it seems to me that the centrality is to a deliberately narrowed narrative. It's a long way from the thinness of Yamal data and the novelty of Manns early approach-just a few papers of so many in the last twenty years- to "the whole CAGW scam" but you got there in no time at all. You might consider that palaeoclimatologists vigorously defend their work not because it is the last or best word on the data but because of the nature of the attacks on them from those who wish to take the argument onto the street.
Maurizio,I'm telling you what I think,Jim's telling me what he thinks and Heartland are doing what their once anonymous donors think. Do you think Joe Bast was a smoker,BTW?
Nick - do you have a problem with the Grantham Institute(s)?
None whatsoever,Maurizio. Their mission,status and funding are transparent.