Stanton Friedman

Kathy Marden

[disinformation ed.'s note: The following is a chapter from the new book by Stanton T. Friedman & Kathleen Marden, Science Was Wrong: Startling Truths About Cures, Theories, and Inventions, courtesy of New Page Books.]

Rarely has a subject received so much attention as has the notion of “global warming,” especially since the publication of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, the Nobel Peace Prize award received by him and the IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 2007, and the media hype. If one were to believe the propaganda, CO₂ (carbon dioxide) is public enemy number-one. Its increasing production by the world is leading to disastrous consequences, and hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent as soon as possible to reduce the warming and all the damage that will be accompanying it. Use of fossil fuels must be reduced or eliminated. Countries must sign agreements to reduce their emission of carbon dioxide no matter what it costs. Higher performance cars must be devised. Full subsidies must be given for solar and wind power. If these measures aren’t taken, then, the words of Chicken Little, “The sky is falling.”

While there is nothing simple about predicting the weather or evaluation of the myriad of statistics available about it, here are some of the assumptions on which the calls to action are based:

1. All scientists have reached a consensus that Gore and the IPCC are correct.
2. The world is rapidly heating up.
3. The major cause of the supposedly increasing temperature is mankind’s increasing production of evil CO₂. Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), which is caused by people, is to blame and Mother Nature is innocent.
4. Action must be taken immediately or we are doomed.
5. Primary threats include rising of the world’s ocean levels by as much as 20 feet as a result of the melting of various glaciers, especially on Greenland and in the Antarctic, leading to a huge loss of lives and habitats for residents of low-lying coastal areas, such as Bangladesh and Manhattan.
6. An increased number of very destructive hurricanes, cyclones, tornados—all as a result of global warming—will occur
7. Polar bears are decreasing in number because of the melting ice, and they need to swim greater distances to find food.
8. Islands, such as the Maldives Southwest of India, are slowly sinking as the ocean rises.

As it happens, in the real world, all of these assumptions are seriously being called into question by a growing number of so-called “deniers.” Though still difficult, it has become easier to publish papers that seek to replace widely held myths with facts in refereed scientific journals. A turning point may have occurred when BBC News published an article by Paul Hudson in October 2009, entitled “What Happened to Global Warming?” The BBC had previously been fully behind the “Kill CO₂” movement. Hudson noted that for the last eleven years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures and that the global climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. Note that, simply put, the temperature of the world has not risen for eleven years.

Hudson noted that according to research conducted in November 2008, by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated. He says that they warm and cool cyclically. The most important cycle, is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). This was in a positive cycle (warmer than usual) for much of the 1980s and 1990s, and global temperatures were warmer too. In the past, the cycles have lasted for about thirty years, with the period from 1945 to 1977 coinciding with one of the cool Pacific cycles. Now it is again in a cooling mode. In September 2009, Mojib Latif, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, wrote that we may indeed be in a period of cooling that could last another ten to twenty years. The current level of CO₂ is about 380ppm. Some believe that we must do all we can to bring it back to 350. We know despite the fact that it has been higher in the past, we have survived.

Everybody knows that the weather changes from day to day and season to season, and that even local forecasts a day in advance can be wrong. The notion that the “sophisticated” computer models used to predict climate change over the next twenty to fifty years for our entire planet are accurate is mind boggling. They all have fudge factors. There are a number of reasons. Weather depends on many factors, including what happens in uninhabited land areas and over the oceans, which cover about three quarters of the planet. There are external factors, such as sunspots, cosmic rays, variations in the energy output of the sun, El Nino, Ocean Decadal motions, volcanic eruptions, pollution of the atmosphere, about which we are slowly beginning to learn. It seems strange, but we sometimes forget that CO₂ is not the most abundant greenhouse gas. Water vapor has a much higher concentration. Evaporation of water vapor is also dependent on many factors, which include cloud cover, changes in the surface characteristics of water and ice, winds, and temperature. There are the chlorofluorocarbons which were used in spray cans, methane from farm animals, exhausts from jet aircraft, radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere, ozone, and so on. In addition, we haven’t had many, many years’ worth of good data as to what the actual surface temperatures have been across the planet. Satellite measurements can be very useful, but obviously haven’t been available for many decades.

There is considerable concern with the effects of local factors on the surface measuring devices, especially near cities which tend to hold in heat, and even near structures out in the country. Some devices have even been moved to different locations, though not noted in their compilations. Many devices previously located in the country have been moved to airports.

There are, of course, some indirect means of trying to get a handle on past temperatures, such as the use of tree rings. Cores are taken and the thicknesses of the tree rings each year have a close, but certainly not perfect relation to the overall temperatures that year at the location of the tree. However, not surprisingly, tree rings and tree growth are influenced by other factors besides temperature. Rainfall, shade, root nutrition are among these. One almost bizarre example of the difficulty of using dendrochronology is when a dozen trees at one location were used (even though many more had been examined). Though all were growing in the same area, the results were nowhere near identical. There was also some indication that the data was cherry picked, so that only those trees giving certain results were used. This is not surprising for propaganda and politics, but is surely not the way of science.

There should be no surprise that politics has been such an important part of the global-warming warnings. Al Gore, after all, is not a scientist, but a politician. Likewise, the IPCCC is a much politicized body. The members are supported by their home governments. The actions that are being discussed all involve politics: How much should we reduce our CO₂ production, as though passing a law would accomplish the reduction? How many hundreds of billions of dollars should be spent on ameliorating CO₂ production? How much should the developed countries give to the undeveloped ones to assist in their attack on C0₂?

Most CO₂ is produced by the burning of fossil fuels in power plants. No government will tell its people to keep their houses much colder in the winter and turn off air conditioning in the summer, that industry should reduce its output, or that cities should be darkened. Closing all coal-fired power plants would be disastrous in many places, though some extremists have demanded such an action. One gets votes, after all, by making promises that one hopes will be forgotten once it’s seen that they cannot be kept. Politics has also been very important in determining the awarding of research contracts. The worse the situation is made to seem, the more research must be done. Thus, most publications discussed in the media provide a range of values for how much the temperature or sea level will increase. The focus is always on the high and usually unrealistic end. For example, some have claimed the sea will rise twenty feet; current rates are about a millimeter a year.

Not surprisingly, one doesn’t hear much about the benefits of higher CO₂ levels, such as increased plant growth and crop yields. Controlled experiments have demonstrated that increased CO₂ levels lead to increased crop yields. Many countries, such as Russia, would prefer to have a warmer climate. There has been great politicizing in what papers get submitted for publication, because contrarians risk losing their jobs or being denied future research grants if they speak out. A polar bear expert, Mitchell Taylor, who had attended a special conference of polar bear experts every years since 1981, had his paper rejected in 2009, because it didn’t follow the party line as to how much danger the bears were in from global warming. He wasn’t even permitted to attend and was replaced by people knowing nothing about polar bears.

Politically, it isn’t accepted to talk about the fact that water vapor is the most prominent green house gas, much more so than CO₂. However, it is very much more difficult to predict accurately the effect of water vapor on planetary temperatures. Far more of the planet is covered with water and ice than with power plants. When water evaporates into the atmosphere, clouds form, and they are blown by unpredictable winds. Clouds keep some solar radiation from reaching the planet by reflecting it back out to space, thus cooling the planet. However, the clouds also absorb some of the heat emitted by the ground and help heat the atmosphere.

It is certainly clear that there have been warmer periods of time than the present, which could not have been caused by CO₂, because so little industrialization existed then. There have also been lengthy cooler periods, which also obviously had nothing to do with CO₂. The famous “hockey stick” graph shows what seems to be level temperatures for a long time and then a steady increase because of CO₂. More careful and honest work shows that the curve just happens to omit periods of higher and lower temperature that could not have been influenced by the production of CO₂ and has discretely been left out of recent IPCC publications.

The history of environmental movements certainly includes examples of bandwagon jumping to take care of a perceived problem, often with severe and unplanned consequences. One of the better examples is the banning of the pesticide DDT in 1972. This was directly the result of the hue and cry stemming from Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring. Apparently, egg shells of predatory birds, such as hawks, were thinner because of DDT. The problem is that DDT was by far the most effective, inexpensive, and safe weapon against the anopheles mosquito that spreads malaria. Because of the banning, there have been literally millions of deaths, especially amongst young children in Africa. One might wonder if this is a fair trade off.

A much more recent example involves the production of biofuel to reduce the use of imported oil. Producing corn to be converted to biofuel greatly increased the income of farmers, but, unfortunately though predictably, substantially raised the cost and reduced the supply of food for people. In addition, more detailed calculations have indicated that sometimes more production of CO₂ was produced by all the activities associated with the farming and the extraction of the biofuel than would have been produced using the equivalent amount of oil.

In addition, the pressure for non–CO₂ producing (renewable) power plants, such as solar and wind power, has been dependent on major government financing, incentives, and subsidies. Because of these it has been profitable to build large solar and wind facilities, but operating them requires much higher expenditures than using non renewable resources. It was found in California, which does have abundant sunlight, that people bought solar swimming pool heaters when substantial tax and subsidy benefits were provided. They stopped when the benefits were eliminated, causing many companies to go out of business. Much repair and servicing of the solar heating systems could not be provided.

There are other strange aspects of the anti-CO₂ war. A number of anti-nuclear groups have loudly proclaimed the need to avoid building new nuclear plants and hopefully to shut down old ones. They are also against CO₂. But the nuclear power plants produce far, far less, CO₂ than do any other major sources of power production. Some countries in Europe, such as Germany and Belgium, have recently delayed earlier mandates to close their existing nuclear power plants by ten or more years because there aren’t reasonably affordable alternatives. Somebody has to pay the bill, though not the activists.

It should not be surprising, considering the examples given in other chapters, that there have been unexpected but significant new scientific developments concerning the factors that control global warming. It was announced on October 18, 2009, that the New Phytologist Journal (184:545-551, November, 2009) had published an article, “A Relationship between Galactic Cosmic Radiation and Tree Rings” by Sigrid Dengel, Dominik Aeby, and John Grace, concerning an evaluation of tree-ring growth rates as a function of various parameters, such as temperature and precipitation. It turns out that there was no significant correlation with temperature or precipitation. However, there was a significant correlation with galactic cosmic radiation. All the trees that were used, Sitka spruce, had been planted in 1953 and cut in 2006. Felling protocols had been laid out by Forest Research; North and West directions were marked on the bark and the discs were frozen as soon as returned to the research station. The rings were counted in their frozen state; otherwise discs can shrink and crack. To quote the authors so as not to bias the reporting: “There was a consistent and statistically significant relationship between growth of the trees and the flux density of galactic cosmic radiation. Moreover there was an underlying periodicity in growth with four minima since 1961, resembling the period cycle of galactic cosmic radiation.” They postulate that what might explain this correlation could be the tendency of galactic cosmic radiation to produce cloud condensation nuclei, which in turn increases the diffuse component of solar radiation, and thus increases the photosynthesis of the forest canopy. Diffuse radiation penetrates the canopy more than direct sunlight.

They found no correlation between temperature or precipitation and growth rates. It would seem that CO₂ had nothing to do with the growth rates since it had slowly and steadily increased during the period of growth. One can safely predict that the “warmists” will attack or ignore these results. It is also likely that the “deniers,” who have been getting more and more publicity, will cite these results.

It is interesting that the apparent hoax involving the flight in Colorado of a helium filled balloon, supposedly with a 6-year-old boy on board, receive world-wide attention in October 2009. In contrast, the hoax aspects of global warming have received very little attention. Senator Orinn G. Hatch of Utah did, however, compile a large number of anti-AGW statements by scientists, most of them actually involved with the IPCC. It was reprinted by The Science and Public Policy Institute in their SPPI Reprint Series dated September 18, 2009. The title is “UN Climate Scientists Speak out on Global Warming,” selected and edited by Hatch from the Senate Minority Report. It includes comments from 101 individual scientists sorted by backgrounds as follows:

• UN IPCC Authors: 9
• UN IPCC Scientists: 7
• UN IPCC Expert Reviewers: 12
• NASA: 10
• Other Government Scientists: 6
• State Climatologists: 9
• Academies of Science: l0
• Avowed Environmentalists: 4
• Noted Scientists: 27
• Other Nobel Prize Winners: 3

Hatch, in his introduction, states that the statements prove there is not a consensus, even at the UN, on the widely touted IPCC conclusion: “Greenhouse gas forcing has likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last fifty years.” Hatch notes that the chapter of the IPCC report making that conclusion was reviewed by only 62 scientists, not the 2500 scientist reviewers of the IPCC reports.

A very detailed report, “Climate Change Reconsidered: 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC),” refutes the IPCC conclusions. A PDF file of this 880-page volume can be downloaded at http://climatechangereconsidered.org. Printed copies are also available. It probably won’t be a best seller, but it includes the names of 31,478 scientists who signed a petition circulated to thousands of scientists, with a cover note by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences. In his note, Seitz said, “The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds. The treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful. The proposed agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over four billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries.” These are strong words indeed.

Here are some comments from the petition that was signed:

“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth”.

Obviously, the number of signers far outweighs the 2500 IPCC people. None of the circulation funding came from oil or gas companies or other interested parties. Among the signers were many physicists, chemists, climatologists and other scientists. It is certain that the widely repeated notion that the science of climate change is settled, and that the unquestioned consensus of the scientific community is that CO₂ is responsible for a rapidly growing worldwide temperature and must be stopped at all costs, is clearly not true.

A very important and detailed study was published by Dr. Habibulto Abdussamatov, head of Space Research Laboratory of the Pulkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg, Russia. The observatory was built in 1839, was destroyed in World War II, and then rebuilt. For some time, it had the largest telescope in the world. He and his colleagues have done a detailed review of the data we have on sunspots and other activities on the sun. Dr. Abdussamatov’s focus was on the sun and solar radiation emission as a function of time. There is data on sunspot numbers going back to 1611. Its provocative title is “The Sun Defines the Climate”; the entire paper can be found at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id+4254. An except reads, “Experts of the United Nations in regular reports publish data said to show that the Earth is approaching a catastrophic global warming, caused by increasing emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. However, observations of the Sun show that as for the increase in temperature, carbon dioxide is ‘not guilty’ and as for what lies ahead in the upcoming decades, it is not catastrophic warming, but a global and very prolonged temperature drop.”

These are strong words backed up by a great deal of information. A key point is that it had been thought that the amount of energy emitted by the sun was constant in time. Better measurements have shown this isn’t the case and there is a periodicity in the energy output of the sun. It had been known since the middle of the 19th century that the number of sunspots on the surface of the sun varies in an 11-year cycle. An English astronomer, Walter Maunder, in 1893, discovered that from 1645 to 1715, sunspots had been essentially absent. Only 50 spots were noted in that period, whereas it would have been normal for 50,000 sunspots to have appeared in that time period. We know now that there have been such minima many times in the past. He also noted that the Maunder Minimum included the coldest dip in temperatures that had been noted for thousands of years.

In 1976, an American astrophysicist, John Eddy, noted that there was a correlation between periods of significant change in the number of sunspots in the past millennium and large changes in the climate. In 1988, a soviet geophysicist, Eugene Borisenko, showed that in each of 18 deep minima of solar activity, there have been periods of global cooling. There were periods of global warming during periods of high sunspot activity. About every 200 years, there are such minima and maxima. It is this bicentennial variation in climate that is so important, even more so than the 11-year solar sunspot level. The primary factor here is that it has been discovered that the TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) is not, as has been thought, a constant, but rather varies in time in a periodical fashion. According to Dr. Habibulto Abdussamatov, the sun is a variable star, which changes its parameters under short and long cycles. The sun is never found in a steady state of energetic and mechanical equilibrium. He points out that an entirely new instrument, a solar Limbograph, is to be installed in the Russian Section of the International Space Station in 2011. It should be able to make the most accurate measurements ever of the radius and energy output of the sun, which will allow for much more precise predictions of climate than are now possible. He also points out that the gradual growth of ice caps at the poles has already begun, not the melting that some expected.

According to an announcement on October 27, 2009, NASA is also planning on much improved observations of the sun when it launches, probably by the end of 2010, a new instrument named EVE “The Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment” on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Though the sun appears from Earth to be a consistent quite placid surface, in extreme ultraviolet frequencies, it is a seething caldron of storms and prominences and sunspots and faculae.

Two important events took place near the end of 2009. One involved the determination by careful observation by meteorologists that 90 percent of the 1100 official surface measuring thermometers in the United States did not meet official regulations as to their locations not being near sources of heat. The bias was almost always found to raise the apparent temperatures. The second problem was the hacking into the files of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University and the subsequent release of over a thousand e-mails. This has been described as an enormous scandal because they provide clear evidence of bias, deception, misrepresentation, and suppression of dissent by the CRU. Chairman Jones resigned at the beginning of December, as an outside committee will review the situation. Major media outlets, such as the New York Times, the Toronto Globe and Mail, McLeans magazine and even CBC Radio’s “As it Happens” program, who had previously gone along with the warmists, have paid attention to the new information. How much impact these revelations will have on the looming Copenhagen International Climate Conference is not known.

Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from Science Was Wrong: Startling Truths About Cures, Theories, and Inventions © 2010 Stanton T. Friedman and Kathleen Marden. Published by New Page Books a division of Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ. 800-227-3371. All rights reserved.

About The Authors

Stanton T. Friedman has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Physics from the University of Chicago. He has lectured on “Flying Saucers ARE Real!” to more than 700 college and professional audiences in 50 states, 9 provinces, and 16 other countries, and has appeared on hundreds of radio and TV programs including CBS Sunday Morning, Larry King Live, Nightline, and Unsolved Mysteries. Friedman has worked on classified, advanced technology programs for such companies as GE, GM, and Westinghouse. He has done research at 20 government document archives, authored TOP SECRET/MAJIC about Operation Majestic 12, and coauthored Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident. He was the original civilian investigator of that very important event, and also coauthored Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience with Kathleen Marden, Betty Hill’s niece.

Educator and sociologist Kathleen Marden is Betty Hill’s niece and trustee of her estate. She has all of Hill’s papers and correspondence, and has transcribed the tapes of the Hills’ hypnosis sessions with psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon. Marden has also met with the numerous scientists who investigated the case. For the past 10 years, she has served on the Board of Directors of the Mutual UFO Network, the largest International UFO organization and as director of Field Investigator Training for MUFON. Marden lives in Stratham, New Hampshire.

Credit: Bruno Comby of Environmentalists for Nuclear

His words, not mine. Here’s Gaia hypothesis theorist James Lovelock’s first in-depth interview since the “Climategate” story made world news. Leo Hickman writes in the Guardian:

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

It follows a tumultuous few months in which public opinion on efforts to tackle climate change has been undermined by events such as the climate scientists’ emails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit.

“I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change,” said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. “The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful.”

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is “modern democracy”, he added. “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

Image via Wikipedia: James Lovelock in 2005, scientist and author best known for the Gaia hypothesis. Photograph taken by Bruno Comby of Environmentalists for Nuclear.

Read More in the Guardian

It’s a safe bet that the millions of Americans who have recently changed their minds about global warming — deciding it isn’t happening, or isn’t due to human activities such as burning coal and oil, or isn’t a serious threat — didn’t just spend an intense few days poring over climate-change studies and decide, holy cow, the discretization of continuous equations in general circulation models is completely wrong!

Instead, the backlash (an 18-point rise since 2006 in the percentage who say the risk of climate change is exaggerated, Gallup found this month) has been stoked by scientists’ abysmal communication skills, plus some peculiarly American attitudes, both brought into play now by how critics have spun the “Climategate” e-mails to make it seem as if scientists have pulled a fast one.

Scientists are lousy communicators. They appeal to people’s heads, not their hearts or guts, argues Randy Olson, who left a professorship in marine biology to make science films. “Scientists think of themselves as guardians of truth,” he says. “Once they have spewed it out, they feel the burden is on the audience to understand it” and agree.

[Read more at Newsweek]

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics.

In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of “being treated like political pawns” and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times.

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.

Some scientists question the tactic and say they should focus instead on perfecting their science, but the researchers who are organizing the effort say the political battle is eroding confidence in their work.

“This was an outpouring of angry frustration on the part of normally very staid scientists who said, ‘God, can’t we have a civil dialogue here and discuss the truth without spinning everything,’” said Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford professor and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment who was part of the e-mail discussion but wants the scientists to take a slightly different approach.

The scientists have been under siege since late last year when e-mails leaked from a British climate research institute seemed to show top researchers talking about skewing data to push predetermined outcomes. Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authoritative body on the matter, has suffered defections of members after it had to retract claims that Himalayan glaciers will melt over the next 25 years.

Last month, President Obama announced that he would create a U.S. agency to arbitrate research on climate change.

Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican and a chief skeptic of global-warming claims, is considering asking the Justice Department to investigate whether climate scientists who receive taxpayer-funded grants falsified data. He lists 17 people he said have been key players in the controversy.

That news has enraged scientists…

[continues at the Washington Times]

I am trying something new, a blogospheric experiment, if you will.  I have been a fairly active participant in the blogosphere since 2006, and recently posted two essays on climategate, one at climateaudit.org and the other at climateprogress.org. Both essays were subsequently picked up by other blogs, and the diversity of opinions expressed at the different blogs was quite interesting.  Hence I am distributing this essay to a number of different blogs simultaneously with the hope of demonstrating the collective power of the blogosphere to generate ideas and debate them.  I look forward to a stimulating discussion on this important topic.

Losing the Public’s Trust

Climategate has now become broadened in scope to extend beyond the CRU emails to include glaciergate and a host of other issues associated with the IPCC. In responding to climategate, the climate research establishment has appealed to its own authority and failed to understand that climategate is primarily a crisis of trust. Finally, we have an editorial published in Science on February 10 from Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Science, that begins to articulate the trust issue: “This view reflects the fragile nature of trust between science and society, demonstrating that the perceived misbehavior of even a few scientists can diminish the credibility of science as a whole. What needs to be done? Two aspects need urgent attention: the general practice of science and the personal behaviors of scientists.” While I applaud loudly Dr. Cicerone’s statement, I wish it had been made earlier and had not been isolated from the public by publishing the statement behind paywall at Science. Unfortunately, the void of substantive statements from our institutions has been filled in ways that have made the situation much worse.

Credibility is a combination of expertise and trust.  While scientists persist in thinking that they should be trusted because of their expertise, climategate has made it clear that expertise itself is not a sufficient basis for public trust.  The fallout from climategate is much broader than the allegations of misconduct by scientists at two universities.   Of greatest importance is the reduced credibility of the IPCC assessment reports, which are providing the scientific basis for international policies on climate change.  Recent disclosures about the IPCC have brought up a host of concerns about the IPCC that had been festering in the background: involvement of IPCC scientists in explicit climate policy advocacy; tribalism that excluded skeptics; hubris of scientists with regards to a noble (Nobel) cause; alarmism; and inadequate attention to the statistics of uncertainty and the complexity of alternative
interpretations.

The scientists involved in the CRU emails and the IPCC have beendefended as scientists with the best of intentions trying to do their work in a very difficult environment.  They blame the alleged hacking incident on the “climate denial machine.” They are described as fighting a valiant war to keep misinformation from the public that is being pushed by skeptics with links to the oil industry. They are focused on moving the science forward, rather than the janitorial work of record keeping, data archival, etc. They have had to adopt unconventional strategies to fight off what they thought was malicious interference. They defend their science based upon their years of experience and their expertise.

Scientists are claiming that the scientific content of the IPCC reports is not compromised by climategate.  The jury is still out on the specific fallout from climategate in terms of the historical and paleo temperature records.   There are larger concerns (raised by glaciergate, etc.) particularly with regards to the IPCC Assessment Report on Impacts (Working Group II):  has a combination of groupthink, political advocacy and a noble cause syndrome stifled scientific debate, slowed down scientific progress and corrupted the assessment process?  If institutions are doing their jobs, then misconduct by a few individual scientists should be quickly identified, and the impacts of the misconduct should be confined and quickly rectified.  Institutions need to look in the mirror and ask the question as to how they enabled this situation and what opportunities they missed to forestall such substantial loss of public trust in climate research and the major assessment reports.

In their misguided war against the skeptics, the CRU emails reveal that core research values became compromised.   Much has been said about the role of the highly politicized environment in providing an extremely difficult environment in which to conduct science that produces a lot of stress for the scientists.  There is no question that this environment is not conducive to science and scientists need more support from their institutions in dealing with it.  However, there is nothing in this crazy environment that is worth sacrificing your personal or professional integrity.  And when your science receives this kind of attention, it means that the science is really important to the public.  Therefore scientists need to do everything possible to make sure that they effectively communicate uncertainty, risk, probability and complexity, and provide a context that includes alternative and competing scientific viewpoints. This is an important responsibility that individual scientists and particularly the institutions need to take very seriously.

Both individual scientists and the institutions need to look in the mirror and really understand how this happened.  Climategate isn’t going to go away until these issues are resolved.   Science is ultimately a self-correcting process, but with a major international treaty and far-reaching domestic legislation on the table, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

The Changing Nature of Skepticism about Global Warming

Over the last few months, I have been trying to understand how this insane environment for climate research developed.  In my informal investigations, I have been listening to the perspectives of a broad range of people that have been labeled as “skeptics” or even “deniers”.  I have come to understand that global warming skepticism is very different now than it was five years ago.  Here is my take on how global warming skepticism has evolved over the past several decades.

In the 1980’s, James Hansen and Steven Schneider led the charge in informing the public of the risks of potential anthropogenic climate change.  Sir John Houghton and Bert Bolin played similar roles in Europe.  This charge was embraced by the environmental advocacy groups, and global warming alarmism was born.  During this period I would say that many if not most researchers, including myself, were skeptical that global warming was detectable in the temperature record and that it would have dire consequences.  The traditional foes of the environmental movement worked to counter the alarmism of the environmental movement, but this was mostly a war between advocacy groups and not an issue that had taken hold in the mainstream media and the public consciousness.  In the first few years of the 21st century, the stakes became higher and we saw the birth of what some have called a “monolithic climate denial machine”.

Skeptical research published by academics provided fodder for the think tanks and advocacy groups, which were fed by money provided by the oil industry. This was all amplified by talk radio and cable news.

In 2006 and 2007, things changed as a result of Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” plus the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, and global warming became a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut.  The reason that the IPCC 4th Assessment Report was so influential is that people trusted the process the IPCC described:  participation of a thousand scientists from 100 different countries, who worked for several years to produce 3000 pages with thousands of peer reviewed scientific references, with extensive peer review.  Further, the process was undertaken with the participation of policy makers under the watchful eyes of advocacy groups with a broad range of conflicting interests.   As a result of the IPCC influence, scientific skepticism by academic researchers became vastly diminished and it became easier to embellish the IPCC findings rather than to buck the juggernaut.  Big oil funding for contrary views mostly dried up and the mainstream media supported the IPCC consensus. But there was a new movement in the blogosphere, which I refer to as the “climate auditors”, started by Steve McIntyre.  The climate change establishment failed to understand this changing dynamic, and continued to blame skepticism on the denial machine funded by big oil.

Climate Auditors and the Blogosphere

Steve McIntyre started the blog climateaudit.org so that he could defend himself against claims being made at the blog realclimate.org with regards to his critique of the “hockey stick” since he was unable to post his comments there.  Climateaudit has focused on auditing topics related to the paleoclimate reconstructions over the past millennia (in particular the so called “hockey stick”) and also the software being used by climate researchers to fix data problems due to poor quality surface weather stations in the historical climate data record. McIntyre’s “auditing” became very popular not only with the skeptics, but also with the progressive “open source” community, and there are now a number of such blogs.  The blog with the largest public audience is wattsupwiththat.com, led by weatherman Anthony Watts, with over 2 million unique visitors each month.

So who are the climate auditors?  They are technically educated people, mostly outside of academia.  Several individuals have developed substantial expertise in aspects of climate science, although they mainly audit rather than produce original scientific research. They tend to be watchdogs rather than deniers; many of them classify themselves as lukewarmers”. They are independent of oil industry influence.  They have found a collective voice in the blogosphere and their posts are often picked up by the mainstream media. They are demanding greater accountability and transparency of climate research and assessment reports.

So what motivated their FOIA requests of the CRU at the University of East Anglia?  Last weekend, I was part of a discussion on this issue at the Blackboard. Among the participants in this discussion was Steven Mosher, who broke the climategate story and has already written a book on it here.

They are concerned about inadvertent introduction of bias into the CRU temperature data by having the same people who create the dataset use the dataset in research and in verifying climate models; this concern applies to both NASA GISS and the connection between CRU and the Hadley Centre. This concern is exacerbated by the choice of James Hansen at NASA GISS to become a policy advocate, and his forecasts of forthcoming “warmest years.”  Medical research has long been concerned with the introduction of such bias, which is why they conduct double blind studies when testing the efficacy of a medical treatment. Any such bias could be checked by independent analyses of the data; however, people outside the inner circle were unable to obtain access to the information required to link the raw data to the final analyzed product.  Further, creation of the surface data sets was treated like a research project, with no emphasis on data quality analysis, and there was no independent oversight.  Given the importance of these data sets both to scientific research and public policy, they feel that greater public accountability is required.

So why do the mainstream climate researchers have such a problem with the climate auditors? The scientists involved in the CRU emails seem to regard Steve McIntyre as their arch-nemesis (Roger Pielke Jr’s term). Steve McIntyre’s early critiques of the hockey stick were dismissed and he was characterized as a shill for the oil industry.   Academic/blogospheric guerilla warfare ensued, as the academic researchers tried to prevent access of the climate auditors to publishing in scientific journals and presenting their work at professional conferences, and tried to deny them access to published research data and computer programs. The bloggers countered with highly critical posts in the blogosphere and FOIA requests.  And climategate was the result.

So how did this group of bloggers succeed in bringing the climate establishment to its knees (whether or not the climate establishment realizes yet that this has happened)?  Again, trust plays a big role; it was pretty easy to follow the money trail associated with the “denial machine”.  On the other hand, the climate auditors have no apparent political agenda, are doing this work for free, and have been playing a watchdog role, which has engendered the trust of a large segment of the population.

Towards Rebuilding Trust

Rebuilding trust with the public on the subject of climate research starts with Ralph Cicerone’s statement “Two aspects need urgent attention: the general practice of science and the personal behaviors of scientists.”   Much has been written about the need for greater transparency, reforms to peer review, etc. and I am hopeful that the relevant institutions will respond appropriately.  Investigations of misconduct are being conducted at the University of East Anglia and at Penn State.  Here I would like to bring up some broader issues that will require substantial reflection by the institutions and also by individual scientists.

Climate research and its institutions have not yet adapted to its high policy relevance.  How scientists can most effectively and appropriately engage with the policy process is a topic that has not been adequately discussed (e.g. the “honest broker” challenge discussed by Roger Pielke Jr), and climate researchers are poorly informed in this regard.  The result has been reflexive support for the UNFCCC policy agenda (e.g. carbon cap and trade) by many climate researchers that are involved in the public debate (particularly those involved in the IPCC), which they believe follows logically from the findings of the (allegedly policy neutral) IPCC. The often misinformed policy advocacy by this group of climate scientists has played a role in the political polarization of this issue.. The interface between science and policy is a muddy issue, but it is very important that scientists have guidance in navigating the potential pitfalls.  Improving this situation could help defuse the hostile environment that scientists involved in the public debate have to deal with, and would also help restore the public trust of climate scientists.

The failure of the public and policy makers to understand the truth as presented by the IPCC is often blamed on difficulties of communicating such a complex topic to a relatively uneducated public that is referred to as “unscientific America” by Chris Mooney.  Efforts are made to “dumb down” the message and to frame the message to respond to issues that are salient to the audience.   People have heard the alarm, but they remain unconvinced because of a perceived political agenda and lack of trust of the message and the messengers. At the same time, there is a large group of educated and evidence driven people (e.g. the libertarians, people that read the technical skeptic blogs, not to mention policymakers) who want to understand the risk and uncertainties associated with climate change, without being told what kinds of policies they should be supporting. More effective communication strategies can be devised by recognizing that there are two groups with different levels of base knowledge about the topic.  But building trust through public communication on this topic requires that uncertainty be acknowledged.  My own experience in making public presentations about climate change has found that discussing the uncertainties increases the public trust in what scientists are trying to convey and doesn’t detract from the receptivity to understanding climate change risks (they distrust alarmism). Trust can also be rebuilt by  discussing broad choices rather than focusing on specific policies.

And finally, the blogosphere can be a very powerful tool for increasing the credibility of climate research.  “Dueling blogs”  (e.g. climateprogress.org versus wattsupwiththat.com and realclimate.org versus climateaudit.org) can actually enhance public trust in the science as they see both sides of the arguments being discussed.  Debating science with skeptics should be the spice of academic life, but many climate researchers lost this somehow by mistakenly thinking that skeptical arguments would diminish the public trust in the message coming from the climate research establishment.   Such debate is alive and well in the blogosphere, but few mainstream climate researchers participate in the blogospheric debate.  The climate researchers at realclimate.org were the pioneers in this, and other academic climate researchers hosting blogs include Roy Spencer, Roger Pielke Sr and Jr, Richard Rood, and Andrew Dessler. The blogs that are most effective are those that allow comments from both sides of the debate (many blogs are heavily moderated).  While the blogosphere has a “wild west” aspect to it, I have certainly learned a lot by participating in the blogospheric debate including how to sharpen my thinking and improve the rhetoric of my arguments. Additional scientific voices entering the public debate particularly in the blogosphere would help in the broader communication efforts and in rebuilding trust. And we need to acknowledge the emerging auditing and open source movements in the in the internet-enabled world, and put them to productive use.  The openness and democratization of knowledge enabled by the internet can be a tremendous tool for building public understanding of climate science and also trust in climate research.

No one really believes that the “science is settled” or that “the debate is over.”  Scientists and others that say this seem to want to advance a particular agenda.  There is nothing more detrimental to public trust than such statements.

And finally, I hope that this blogospheric experiment will demonstrate how the diversity of the different blogs can be used collectively to generate ideas and debate them, towards bringing some sanity to this whole situation surrounding the politicization of climate science and rebuilding trust with the public.

Republished with permission from Professor Curry’s site.

Establishment figures intone about the substantial “body of science” supporting the notion of man-caused global warming. But based on recent events, they need to check the body’s pulse. The body is dead, and rapidly wasting away before our very eyes.

Over the past 3 months, a circus of scandals has played around the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its periodic Assessment Reports on global warming. The latest report issued in 2007 proclaimed a consensus regarding a 90% probability that mankind’s activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, were causing global warming that would lead to catastrophic results if drastic steps were not taken to reverse it.

The lasting scientific upshot of that circus of scandals is that the historical global surface temperature record on which the contention of global warming has been based has been thoroughly discredited as manipulated and mangled beyond recovery.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Three official global surface temperature data sets exist. These include British data (Hadley-CRU) maintained by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office (Met Office). Another is maintained by the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. The third is maintained by NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA-GISS).

Last October, Hadley-CRU admitted in response to Freedom of Information requests that they had actually thrown away the raw temperature data from which they constructed their historical surface temperature record…

[continues in the American Spectator]

The scientist at the centre of the “climategate” email scandal has revealed that he was so traumatised by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide.

Professor Phil Jones said in an exclusive interview with the Sunday Times that he had thought about killing himself “several times”. He acknowledged similarities to Dr David Kelly, the scientist who committed suicide after being exposed as the source for a BBC report that alleged the government had “sexed up” evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

In emails that were hacked into and seized upon by global-warming sceptics before the Copenhagen climate summit in December, Jones appeared to call upon his colleagues to destroy scientific data rather than release it to people intent on discrediting their work monitoring climate change.

Jones, 57, said he was unprepared for the scandal: “I am just a scientist. I have no training in PR or dealing with crises.”

Read More: Times

Something Is Melting in Denmark: Dan Esty believes President Obama will bring a change in spirit to the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Gordon Rayner writes in the Telegraph:

The drab, drum-shaped home of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit is an anonymous little outpost, blending seamlessly with its chunky concrete neighbours on a windswept campus just outside Norwich. To the uninitiated, it has the look of a Seventies bus station waiting for the council to pull it down.

Unlikely as it may seem, however, this little corner of East Anglia is now ground zero in a controversy which just might influence the entire future of our planet.

A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal emails written by scientists working at the CRU were obtained by a hacker and posted on the internet, some of which appeared to show that researchers had deliberately faked evidence of global warming by manipulating statistics.

At first, the fallout was restricted to a row between climate change experts, played out in scientific journals and specialist internet blogs, but in the past few days, as the ripples have spread around the globe, “Climategate” has become a white hot political issue which has been seized upon by global warming sceptics and now threatens to overshadow next month’s crucial climate change conference in Copenhagen.

In the US, where the CRU emails have been cited as proof of “the greatest act of scientific fraud in history”, there are very real fears that hardline Republicans — together with powerful Right-wing media organisations — will use the scandal to scupper President Obama’s proposed legislation to cap carbon emissions.

Read More in the Telegraph

A coordinated campaign to hide scientific information about climate change appears unprecedented. Could it wind up costing us trillions?

Science depends on good quality of data. It also relies on replication and sharing data. But the last couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations. Computer hackers have obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. These e-mails, which have now been confirmed as real, involved many researchers across the globe with ideologically similar advocates around the world. They were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims. The academics here also worked closely with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit, and Professor Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University, who has been an important scientist in the climate debate, have come under particular scrutiny. Among his e-mails, Professor Jones talks to Professor Mann about the “trick of adding in the real temps to each series … to hide the decline [in temperature].” Professor Mann admitted that this was the exchange that he had and explained to the New York Times that “scientists often used the word ‘trick’ to refer to a good way to solve a problem, ‘and not something secret.’” While the New York Times apparently buys this explanation, it is hard to see the explanation for “to hide the decline.”

More on Fox News