On the Radio4 Today programme this morning, Simon Cox reported that Dr Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, says that they will be investigating the CRU emails . See first item at 07:09, here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8394000/8394501.stm
The BBC website carries the same story but with a rather different slant here:
“We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,” he said.
“We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.”
For the first time, Climategate made the headlines on the BBC’s morning news coverage. Their flagship Today programme, the one that politicians and policy makers can’t afford to miss, ran no less than three items on the story.
In a post here, I suggested that Climategate, like Watergate, is a story that will grow and grow. With the involvement of the IPCC this seems bound to happen.
Up until now, the action and news coverage has centred on the University of East Anglia’s campus. After all it was Phil Jones’s mailbox at CRU that got raided. But from the very beginning it was clear that the scandal had international dimensions. As I have said before, the address headers on those emails reads like a list of the great and the good in climate research from around the world, and that means that they are the movers and shakers of the IPCC process too.
In particular Michael Mann, Keith Briffa, and Kevin Trenberth – to say nothing of Phil Jones himself – have played a major role in the last two IPCC Assessment Reports. All have said apparently compromising things in the leaked correspondence.
- There is little doubt now that confidence in Mann’s hockey stick, the iconic graph that Sir John Houghton used so successful as a brand image for the IPPC in its Third Assessment Report, was only maintained by collusion with colleagues to suppress criticism.
- Briffa admits, referring to his IPCC duties, that the needs of the IPCC and science are not always the same.
- Trenberth questions scientific understanding of the radiation budget, perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the greenhouse hypothesis, and admits that the present cooling cannot be explained. Yet he is a factotum of the organisation that has done more than any other to implant the idea in the minds of politicians, policy makers that the general public that the science is settled and a consensus exists.
- Jones talks openly of keeping inconvenient scientific research out of the Fourth Assessment Report.
The intervention of the IPCC chairman is a turning point in the development of the CRU affair for two reasons. If the IPCC need to investigate, then it is no longer possible for anyone to pretend that the problem only concerns a few people and a limited amount of research at CRU. Climategate will have gone global. Secondly, any intimation that the IPCC are going to investigate is likely to bring forth a chorus of demands that it is not the place of the IPCC to investigate this matter, but it is the IPCC that should be investigated.
As I have said before, the people whose behaviour has been brought to light by this scandal are not bit players in the world of climate science; they are senior functionaries at the heart of the IPCC process.
In a report on this morning’s Today programme (here at 08:56), Roger Harrabin had this to say:
Climate change has become the sort of great organising theme, a great grand narrative of our age. And what you’re seeing in Copenhagen now is the sort of businesses who previously rejected ideas that we had to cut emissions now buying into climate change science, and from that position making policies of their own for a transformational economy; a low carbon economy. So you had for instance five hundred businesses last night at Downing Street presenting a petition to Gordon Brown saying give us a strong deal. And I saw Richard Lambert there, Director Genera of the CBI, and said look! what about these stolen emails? Does this put you off? And this is what he said;
Business people aren’t scientists and they’re not climatologists, but they are paid to understand risk. And they see a risk in climate change and they also see an opportunity. The question is, is it going to be an orderly transition to a low carbon economy or a disorderly transition. And are investment plans going to be [served ?] by the way that [transition] creates business opportunities in the future. That’s is why business has an real interest, in a successful outcome to the Copenhagen discussions.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8394000/8394501.stm
Why Harrabin should choose to interpret this very cautious response to a question about Climategate as a refutation of the impact of the CRU debacle is not a subject for this post, but the real burden of what Lambert said certainly is.
Industry has billions invested in what they have been told are the new opportunities that the perceived risk of AGW are supposed to create. Businessmen are, as Lambert rightly says, paid to understand risk. But they are also paid to assess the information on which decisions on risk are based. In the case of global warming the main purveyor of this information is the IPCC, aided and abetted by government and the quangos it has created.
Businessmen, or the best of them at least, are also paid to know when the information they are relying on can no longer be trusted. In the case of the IPCC, trust is a very important word. As Lambert makes clear, businessmen are not climate scientists and the number of people who can make a critical appraisal of what the IPCC has been telling us are relatively few. The decisions on risk are based almost entirely on what the IPCC has been telling us all for the last decade.
If the new markets that the businessmen are relying on to help ride out the recession begin to collapse because the IPCC process is flawed, then the IPCC can expect no mercy form the business leaders who have become its cheerleaders.
Thanks for running this blog, Tony. You’re like one of those Germans breaking down the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.
Thanks.
Jack:
That’s a complement that I certainly don’t deserve, but I’ll treasure it anyway. Having spent some time wandering around behind the Iron Curtain I was one of those people who wept when I saw those first pictures of people dancing on The Wall twenty years ago. It just didn’t seem possible. The repression and misery that it symbolised had seemed so ingrained and immutable.
All of which is OT.
And did you see Newsnight on Friday?
Link here to the youtube version via Watts Up..:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/05/scientists-behaving-badly-part-2/
Luke Warmer:
Yes I did see Watson on Newsnight.
What impressed my most was that Watson’s parting remark exhibited the same mindset as Jones et al when discussing sceptics in the emails; contempt for anyone who does not share their views, and frustration when they are asked inconvenient questions that pinpoint the weakness of their own position. This is not a frame of mind the is likely to yield good, or even competent and honest, scientific research.
Yes, business people understand risks, and if they have committed themselves and their funds to the IPCC pretence they deserve a scalding. But what they also understand is power, and the malleability of Joe/Jane citizen. And if they see JandJ jumping according to the IPCC they alter their risk perception accordingly. The blogosphere is the single brake on this whole enviro/politico takeover…
Here is a perceptive look at the Copenhagen circus by Dominic Lawson. Not at all what you would expect to find in the pages of the Independent. Perhaps they have realised that whatever happens to carbon emissions over he next few decades, their readership will dwindle to zero unless they accept that there is widespread scepticism in the UK.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-roll-up-roll-up-for-the-great-copenhagen-emissionsfest-1836067.html
TonyN & Luke: I too saw the Watson/Morano item on Newsnight. But, unlike most commentators, I had some sympathy with Watson’s parting remark: I found Morano’s manner irritating – insofar as I could tell from the limited share of the discussion allowed to him by the BBC. Surely they could have found a more sympathetic and persuasive person to put up against Watson? What for me was most interesting, however, was Watson’s observation about the “hide the decline” email. He said it was taken out of context and was simply about a use of tree ring data (to reconstruct temperatures over the past 1,000 years) that “goes wrong” in the later years of the 20th century. As I said in my post 8527 on the NS continuation thread, that context is arguably worse than the context many have understood.
I explained as follows:
That was the decline CRU wished to hide – that was the “trick”.
Robin,
Your statement “Therefore … tree ring data is clearly an unreliable guide to temperature and cannot eliminate the inconvenient MWP after all.” requires some discussion.
The first thing to say is that all scientific data varies on a scale between “unreliable” (0) and “totally reliable” (100). Most of it would fall in the mid range. Tree ring data is no exception and the validity is well discussed in http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/progress-in-millennial-reconstructions/
Its interesting that Macintyre has now agreed, at least according to this graph, that the MWP was not as warm as it is currently.
Either Mann’s curve or McIntyre’s could turn out be closer to the truth. But it doesn’t matter in the end: It is the way the atmosphere is now responding to the build up of GHG’s which is the important question to be answered.
Peter:
In the Newsnight item, Professor Watson said that the tree ring data “goes wrong’ at the end of the 20th century. Those are his words, not mine. In his Times article today he says, “The tree-ring measure declines, but the actual temperatures after 1960 go up”. If it went wrong after 1960, how can we know it didn’t go wrong during the MWP? Of course, we cannot. Therefore, it’s an unreliable indicator of temperatures then. “Totally unreliable” if you prefer it.
The ultra warmist Channel 4 News had a special tonight about Tamiflu. It reported that independent researchers, investigating claims by Roche and the government that the drug could reduce the hospitalising of patients with swine flu by up to 60 per cent, had questioned a key paper upon which the claim was based. Channel 4 focused in particular on the obstacles put in the way of the researchers when they attempted to access the original data underpinning the claim. The reporter made it especially clear that the ability of independent scientists to test original data was fundamental to good science. In this case, he said, the failure was especially deplorable because of the huge sums of public money involved.
Er … spot the hypocrisy.
Robin,
So if you had your way you’d abolish the science of dendrochronology?
Yes, there are problems, as with anything else, with tree ring data but of course this is not the only proxy used in the reconstruction of paleoclimates.These would include density and isotopes, ice cores, corals, and lake sediments.
It isn’t too difficult to suggest possible reasons why tree ring data may be unreliable in recent years. Pollution possibly? Another explanation could be the rings used in older specimens would have been selected from their mid-life high growth phase and it is not possible to know this from a selection of currently living trees.
If you were genuinely interested in science you would be addressing these questions yourself. Your only interest seems to be in minimising any knowledge that these kind of studies can bring.
Peter:
My point is simple. The Professor acknowledges that tree ring data “goes wrong” at the end of the 20th century. Therefore, it’s unreliable. Therefore, it is unwise to rely on it when reconstructing past temperatures. That might not be so if we could show that a specific factor that could not possibly have applied in the past applies now. But we cannot. Therefore, it is unwise to rely on it when reconstructing past temperatures.
Robin, re that querulous Queenslander and his #11:
[1] The MBH 99 + IPCC 2001 Hockey-stick/Manna graphs which “deleted the MWP” and set the IPCC stage in 2001 for persuading policy-makers that current warming is unprecedented, relies mostly on tree-rings. (see also my 8547 on the NS-Lynas continuation thread for more detail)
[2] Yes indeed; for instance stalagmites/tites in a South African cave inferring 6C warming from isotopes during the MWP, and the Sargasso Sea sediments etc, and Max‘s 8534 and whatnot.
[3] Many hypothesise may be raised to suggest a cause for the divergence problem*, but the fact is that even Gavin, the normal mouthpiece of Mike the manna-man has but a few weeks ago admitted that the divergence problem is still NOT understood and requires further exploration, after some 12 (twelve) years of open debate. That is from a website that the said Queensland quirk has previously expressed his great admiration for. Will that do on [3]? I could add some more if necessary!
[4] Ah yes, but the dendro’s are fully aware that growth rates vary with the age of a particular sample, and also, importantly, between individuals in a particular stand, and an inherent part of their calibration techniques should be to compensate for the age of each individual sample, and somehow to merge the group data. This includes that young trees grow relatively rapidly and then progressively slow-down with age, and are calibrated accordingly. To get a fuller picture on this, it is better to go outside the PSU/UEA culture and visit the semi-independent Swiss dendro-group, headed by Jan Esper, if you have time. (and before him some Russians and also various forestry researchers)
Will that do on [4]? I could add some more perplexing/baffling questions if necessary!
Robin,
You obviously have vested interest in chucking out all tree ring data as it doesn’t give you an answer which you are comfortable with. However you could try to take a more intelligent view. No-one is suggesting that dendrochronology, or dendroclimatology, is easy and straightforward.
Firstly, the divergence problem just goes to show there is no scientific conspiracy or hoax on AGW. If there were, the results would simply be adjusted to get rid of it.
Part of the reason could be in the rapid change which is observed in late 2oth century warming. As I understand it, its essentially trees close to the tree line which are chosen to be the most temperature sensitive. Trees at lower altitudes may be more influenced in their growth rates by rainfall.
There is quite a bit of evidence, much of it anecdotal (see the link at the end) that the tree line is moving quite rapidly. Consequently any particular tree which may have been on the line 30 years ago would now be some way back and consequently face much increased competition for available moisture and nutrients.
Maybe Max might be able to tell us if this sort of thing is happening in Switzerland too.
http://kenai.fws.gov/overview/notebook/2004/july/30jul2004.htm
Peter M and Robin
Quite aside from the “divergence” problem with the tree-ring proxies, they are really quite irrelevant.
There have been so many other studies from all over the world confirming a global MWP with temperatures slightly higher than today, that these few sloppy tree-ring studies really don’t mean very much (see 8534 on the other thread for over 20 studies).
The study by Craig Loehle, for example, specifically excluded tree-ring proxies, due to the poor correlation.
My advice: toss all those “spaghetti copy hockeysticks” into the same garbage can as the original Mann et al. hockeystick and rely on all the other studies out there.
When you do, you will see that the MWP was global, with temperatures slightly higher than today (as every schoolchild learned before Mann et al. attempted to rewrite history).
Max
Max
Peter M and Robin
I do not have any specific references to changes in tree growth in Switzerland resulting either from higher CO2 levels or slightly increased temperature.
There have been studies, which show that forests are actually growing faster as a result of the slightly enhanced atmospheric CO2 concentrations. These are from the Pacific Northwest and I have seen one from Europe.
For those worried about CO2 buildup, this is actually good news as it shows how nature compensates.
Of course, the greatest benefit from the higher CO2 concentrations is from enhanced crop growth, as several studies have shown.
Max
PeterM
I am sure that you are aware that the “corrected” Mann curve (by McIntyre?), which you posted (#8), starts around the end of the MWP, and does not cover the period of temperatures that were higher then those of today (10th to 13th centuries).
Just so you don’t draw any false conclusions.
Max
No, Peter, it’s not me who has a problem with tree ring data. It’s Andrew Wilson. And he is Royal Society Research Professor at the University of East Anglia – he’s the person doing the chucking out.
My view has always been – as you well know – that there is indeed “no scientific conspiracy or hoax on AGW” (although the CRU emails are challenging my certainty about this). My view is, much more simply, that claims about the validity of the dangerous AGW hypothesis are based on poor science.
Peter M
You asked (14) about tree-line changes in the Swiss Alps.
Apparently there are some studies underway, but, so far, these have not determined the cause: global warming, increased atmospheric CO2 or simply land abandonment as high alpine meadows are no longer being used for cattle grazing (or a combination of these factors).
Experiments at high elevations with enhanced CO2 levels have also been made; these show that many tree species respond with more robust and faster growth rates (similar results to other studies I have seen from the Pacific Northwest (USA/Canada).
Since receding alpine glaciers expose remains of old trees from the MWP and earlier Roman Optimum, it is obvious that the tree line has been higher than today during warmer periods of the past. So it is probably also true that the tree line was lower than today during the colder periods of the LIA.
Max
Robin,
I do keep coming back to the same question:If, as you say, you don’t understand much Physics how is it that you can say: “My view is, much more simply, that claims about the validity of the dangerous AGW hypothesis are based on poor science?”
I don’t particularly understand much in the way of musical theory but I do like to listen to quite a range of music which would include both Rock and Classical. However I’m afraid certain composers, like Shostakovich, don’t do much for me at all. However I’d have to be pretty stupid to say he was a “poor” musician. Like you and Max, on the question of “poor science” I am just not qualified to say.
You are both, of course, qualified to say that you don’t like the science, or its implications, and that takes us back to a more political motivation.
Peter M
You wrote (of Robin and me):
You are dead wrong on that conclusion, Peter.
The objection (in my case) is to the poor science supporting the AGW premise, rather than a “political motivation”. The reasons for this have also been explained to you ad nauseam.
Most importantly is the lack of empirical data based on physical observations to support the premise. The data just are not there, Peter; the premise is based on climate model simulations alone. Despite having been asked repeatedly to do so (by both Robin and myself), you have been unable to point to the empirical data to support the AGW premise.
From this I could conclude that your acceptance of the premise is based more on a “political motivation”, rather than on a scientific one.
This has all been pointed out to you many times, but you apparently have difficulty accepting it, probably because you do not like it.
You see, one does not have to be a climate scientist to conclude that the AGW premise is faulty anymore than one has to be a biologist to conclude that the theory of evolution according to Darwin makes sense. Just a check of the empirical data supporting the theory (and here there is quite a bit) plus a bit of common sense and scientific curiosity will do.
Your comparison of this with music is a poor example. Music is an art, not a science. There is nothing absolutely correct or incorrect about music. It is all about emotion and feeling.
Just get it through your head that those who disagree with your viewpoint on the validity of the science supporting the AGW premise are not doing so due to “political motivation”, but because they see that the science is weak.
Max
Peter:
Poor science? Two examples: (1) (as Max reminds you) lack of empirical evidence supporting the dangerous AGW hypothesis and (2) refusal by climate scientists to make their data available to independent researchers.
Politics – despite your fervent wish – has nothing to do with my drawing these to your attention.
Max and Robin,
Of course its just one tired contrarian argument that its all about computer models. What about the global temperature records, the melting Arctic ice, receding glaciers, rising tree lines and melting tundras?
You’ve previously asked for conclusive “empirical evidence” but failed to suggest just what it might be that you are looking for, or what practical experiments scientists could be doing to provide it. You really are suggesting, because we haven’t several spare Earths to test to destruction, that the AGW question is outside science, which you don’t know much about, itself.
I accept that your primary motivation isn’t religious, but its stretching credulity, after so many disparaging comments from nearly all the sceptics on this blog about Labor and Democratic politicians whom they dislike, to claim that it’s not political.
Massive storm buries central US in snow
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091209/ts_alt_afp/usweatherstorm_20091209221347
Peter M
Where are you living peter, and are you taking too much of that medication. Of course its all about the manipulation of the temperature record, the poor science and the publics lack of confidence.
I’m sorry, say that one again!!!!! come on peter, if you were genuinely interested in how the ice waxes and wains you wouldn’t make such silly comments. And of course you know that floating ice has no effect on sea level don’t you?
Peter you are cherry picking again. One receding glacier can no more be a barometer for all glaciers any more than the temperature record for one location that is rising means everywhere is increasing. You have seen the figures, try absorbing their meaning rather than regurgitating nonsensical AGW propaganda.