Climategate: An unscientific response to unscientific arguments…
Climategate is a term coined by my brilliantly louche former colleague at the Daily Telegraph, James Delingpole. Everyone, it seems, is talking about it. Guido thinks he has a local link at Queens, when he points to a mathematician who has been trying to get tree ring data from Queens but claims he has been consistently blocked in his FOI requests, of which more below the fold. On the general thrust of the argument I picked this link up from Veronica’s thread on IrishElection yesterday which seems to me to be a useful point of reference in the current storm:
…there’s no smoking gun, nor are there powder burns or any other evidence that a gun ever existed. What we see is that scientists can be jerks, can be parochial, can respond badly to criticism, can circle their wagons against outsiders (especially cranks and dilettantes desperate to prove that the entire enterprise of climate science should be tossed out the window).
I’ve worked with scientists in the past and found them to be as ill tempered, passionate and bloody-mindedly intolerant as the average Joe. More so perhaps since they can get pretty dogmatic about their own work. But two things strike me as worthy of note.
One, there is a legitimate set of tax based arguments that the money that the political elites currently want to spend combating anthropogenic climate change could be better spent on other things (like expansion of markets and general economic growth)… Yet that lobby lacks the courage of its own convictions and chooses instead to try to undermine the scientific consensus that man’s rapid development is having an indelible effect on the climate of the planet. Thus, try as hard as you might, it is almost impossible to find much in the way of peer reviewed scientific content in the anti Climate Change output.
Two, the scientific and political elites who have bought into ‘the consensus’ have failed to recognise the need to engage robustly with their critics. And as a result they now have a few scientists going feral and trying to cook or tweak data in the most transparently unscientific way in order to meet the claims of their unscientific critics.
It will be interesting to see what the Tree ring data tells us. And to understand more clearly why Queens is withholding the data (I’m awaiting a response just now…). In this information driven world, data cannot be withheld indefinately. In the vacuum that ensues people will rush in to construe all manner of conspiracy theories to suit their own (unscientific) purposes…
As luck would have it, Slugger hears that there is a Science Cafe in the basement of Queens Students Union this evening on this very subject…
“Peer reviewed” is nowhere near being anything like a synonym for “factually true”.
Also the appropriate spending of money is not a scientific question, but a political one, in which rationality and ethical values are supposed to converge. Science is not supposed to have anything to do with ethics (see JamesWatsonGate for a taboo busting example of confusion on that) other than it be ethically carried out, i.e. don’t torture animals needlessly or test bioweapons on thieving chavs.
A report on “we shouldn’t spend what the UN wants us to on climate change because it would be better spent elsewhere” is not science but rather a political opinion, and therefore it should not be “peer reviewed”. We do not peer review the Liberal Democrat’s manifesto.
Oh how naive. Scientists have had their careers ended for telling the truth. Not usually by sacking (but it has happened) by but withdrawing funding. Climate change is now a political issue.
Where science and politics step on each other’s turf (e.g. Cannabis is or isn’t safer than alcohol) all kinds of shenanigans occur.
Predicting the weather twenty years hence is about as scientifically solid as astrology (or economics). If a gaggle of politicians are looking for their new “wealthy are exploiters” ideology just as their last one (another Christianist schism) has gone down the toilet of history, we should well look at motives and funding.
Anthropogenic global warming has no more been proved than has Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”. Ideologues retreating to a new sheep’s entrails but with even more numbers and equations this time than Das Kapital (though that book had plenty of both).
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/Monckton-Caught Green-Handed Climategate Scandal.pdf
Sorry cant do hyperlinks but lots of peer reviewed links on this pdf from Mr Monckton Super.
Anyone interested in tree ring data can get it from http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/treering.html
Click on the ArcIMS icon, zoom in and download. I did this years ago using the Shane’s Castle dataset. I also plotted graphs for other datasets from the same site. I found no warming from any of the datasets I used.
It seems the only tipping point we’re approaching in terms of AGW is that of public opinion. Soon it’ll be fashionable to be a sceptic.
Daniel Hannan has an an interesting and surprisingly balanced piece about climate change in the Telegraph. In spite of the title, he doesn’t seem like much of a sceptic to me.
He concludes: I take the train to Brussels and Strasbourg, and don’t fly if I can avoid it. I drive only when absolutely necessary: no more than a dozen times a year.
Mrs H is meticulous about reusing and recycling and sourcing our food locally and all the rest. Our children were brought up with washable nappies.
I’m as keen as the next fellow on clean air and water, on whales and rainforests, and I have always thought it a pity that free market solutions are not more widely applied to environmental problems. The natural world is too important to be left to the Left.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg&feature=sub
Good little video about the e-mails, enjoy.
I prefer this one (from CBC – Canada’s national broadcaster).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIEQqLokL8
Jud you have condemned the scientist and the e-mails BEFORE a independent review has taken place. What ever happened to innocent until guilty lol?
Your video is by a journalist, boy HE KNOWS what he is talking about.
I despair of the media’s take on the climate change whether it be pro or anti. The Media has an unbelieable knack for getting science completely and utterly wrong.
Eg. The media keeps on using the term “the missing link” for stories about evolution, even though that term has been outdated in science for over a century.
Likewise if the weather so much as farts, the media are quick to point to climate change as the problem same goes for ant-climate change journalists. DO NOT TRUST THE MEDIA FOR SCIENCE.
At least the video I posted is a scientist.
And he shows that the term “trick” is used in many fields of science and in many papers and DOES NOT mean fiddling with results.
Good day, next conspiracy theory please?
Garza – Relax.
Let me ask you two questions.
Should the raw data that has been used to produce the temperature profiles from the CRU be published?
Should the methods the CRU used on the raw data to produce the numbers in the profiles be published?
Jud: Should the raw data that has been used to produce the temperature profiles from the CRU be published?
Apparently the raw data has been destroyed.
Very convenient, eh?