Climategate: still an astonishing lack of coverage in the MSM, the only major UK exception being the Mail which, after years of agnosticism now seems to have decided to come down firmly in the climate sceptics’ camp – here, here and in this article today by the mighty Booker. (Nigel Lawson is able to slip in a mention, too, in today’s Times).
But is that because – as some of the commenters below my post are so eager to tell me – it’s a complete non-story which deserves to get me the sack for being such a rubbish journalist (with innumerable websites dedicated to telling the world just how crap I am, apparently)?
Or does it have legs? (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
This interview with retired climatalogist Dr Tim Ball offers quite a useful perspective.
There’s no point in anyone from the AGW camp watching it: they’ve made up their minds and no quantity of contrary evidence, however devastating, is going to shake their considered position of “Nyah nyah nyah. Got my fingers in my ears. Not listening. The world IS warming and it’s man’s fault. Must tax carbon now….”
But the type of people I would dearly love to watch it are those like my friends Dan Hannan, Danny Finkelstein, Ed West and Michael Gove. This particular rogues’ gallery has long been a source of frustration and disappointment to me. They are intelligent and wise, eloquent and funny. They are on the side of wisdom and commonsense. They correctly anatomise so many of the ills of the modern world, from the perils of rampant Islamism to the evils of the EU. I like and admire them all hugely. Yet on perhaps the biggest and most important issue of our age – because it’s going to cost so much money and do so much harm to our landscape – they all have a curious blind spot.
What seems to have lulled these four – and many other clever people like them, I fear – into their dangerous complacency is the belief that given the majority of world scientific opinion is backing AGW theory, it would be irresponsible for us non-scientists to disagree.
What the Climategate scandal does is prove just how murky and unreliable this supposed scientific “consensus” really is.
Dr Ball is particularly trenchant on the phrase “peer-reviewed.” You’ll have heard it being brandished an awful lot over the last decade or so, invariably by scientists in the climate-fear-promotion lobby trying to show how all scientists who disagree with them are just ignorant cranks who need not be taken seriously. It’s a virus that has spread to non-scientists. Read George Monbiot; skim through the comments by AGW-believers below any blog on the subject of climate change. “Peer-reviewed”: it’s the magic phrase which – in their eyes – guarantees the reliability and credibility of their favoured scientists, and which completely pulls the rug from under that of the dissenters.
But what if that vaunted “peered-review” stamp of authenticity is about as valuable as a fake Rolex? It would mean, would it not, that the supposedly authoritative community of disinterested scientists who inform the IPCC’s reports are in fact to be trusted about as much as a frog would a scorpion it was ferrying on its back across a river…
This is the key point made by Dr Ball.
“It confirms suspicions that I’ve had working in my thirty years of climate science. I saw the hijacking of climate science particularly by computer modelers and then by a small group associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change….”
“What you’ve got here is confirmation of the small group of scientists who, by the way, Professor Wegman who was asked to arbitrate in the debate about the hockey stick, he identified 42 people who were publishing together and also peer-reviewing each other’s literature. So there’s a classic example of the kind of thing that bothered me. About twenty years ago, I started saying ‘Well why are they pushing the peer review?’..And now of course we realise it’s because they had control of their own process. That’s clearly exposed in these emails.”
“On a global scale it’s frightening because this group of people not only control the Hadley Centre, which controls the data on global temperature through the Hadley Climate Research Unit but they also control the IPCC and they’ve manipulated that. And of course the IPCC has become the basis in all governments for the Kyoto protocol, the Copenhagen accord and so on….”
Dr Ball describes the scandal as not just a “smoking gun” but “a battery of machine guns.” How much more evidence, I wonder, do the likes of Messrs Hannan, Gove, Finkelstein and West need, I wonder, before they feel as strongly about this issue as I do?
I agree peer review is not perfect but the advantage is that it leaves a study open to external criticism. If the paper is found to be wrong, then the reviewers will look dumb. So it is in their interest to do a good job. And when at the cutting edge of a very difficult science, there is always going to be discussion about the finer details.
What I don’t understand is how much debate there is about the basic science. What is the agreement about how much heat CO2 and other Greenhouse gases trap and if you extrapolated this up according to what is in the atmosphere now, what would the likely heat change be. Do climate skeptics and climate supporters agree there?
This is brilliant stuff. I just learned of James Delingpole after a link via DRUDGE. Man, has James got it right. Who can listen to any hysterical AGW advocate without recognizing it as nothing more than a biased political crusade? This has NOTHING to do with ‘polar bears’ and everything to do with controlling people by scaring them with skewed opinions…which aren’t the same thing as ’science.’ ‘Science’ has two speeds: ‘IS’ or ‘ISN’T.’ None of this ‘consensus’ mumbo-jumbo.
As is clear from the emails, “Peer Review” has degenerated to recognize only those who support anthropogenic global warming. Any paper that offers legitimate research that tends to debunk GW is roundly rejected. “Climate reasearch” is no longer about true, objective science . . . and has devolved to nothing more than a political agenda, and the reaching for power.
My question is Manbearpig (aka the laquered hair-plugged sanctimonious penguin, aka Al Gore) going to have to give back his Nobel Prize© and his Academy Award (aka Oscar©), since the very basis of why he was given them was a piffle-frosted pack of outright lies?
Petition now up at No 10, to have CRU suspended…
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/UEACRU/
James,
In your original blog article on this topic you cited the “Mike’s nature trick” e-mail as proof of collusion & fraud amongst scientists. We now know that the “trick” had nothing to do with any sort of cover up, but was rather a statistical trick used to reconcile data sets. Will you be issuing a public apology to the scientists you slandered and the readers you misled?
Lots & lots of love,
Jonnie Marbles
To Jonnie: I’m not a scientist and I don’t play one on TV, so your analysis of what was meant by ‘trick’ may or may not be conclusive. You may be assured, but I’m not. In any event, let’s say the use of the phrase ‘nature trick’ was totally benign. What of all the other damning contents in these e-mails? It just paints this collection of academic elitists as, well, just that: elitists who seem to have a political ’round’ hole conclusion and they want to hammer their ’square peg’ data into that hole. How juvenile to start with a biased, politically-motivated conclusion and then make up your own science to support it. Yes, I’m even MORE impressed by these ’scientific journals’ today than I was a few weeks ago (roll eyes). Talk about the collapse of an industry.
“AJ McConville says:
November 24, 2009 at 12:55 pm
I agree peer review is not perfect but the advantage is that it leaves a study open to external criticism. If the paper is found to be wrong, then the reviewers will look dumb. So it is in their interest to do a good job.”
True. Peer review is important in judging the worthiness of the research and conclusions. However, it can only help if the raw data and methods are provided for all to see and are openly discussed. The crew involved in this farce refused to do those simple acts (provide their data and methods for examination). This is a violation of the scientific method and by itself should have all scientists up in arms.
James I have tried a couple of times to register at your Telegraph blog to participate in the discussion, but get no confirmatory email back. Maybe they are overloaded?
When I was taught science in the 60’s there were meteorologists and there were climatologists. Now we have “climate scientists”. Isn’t “Climate Science” just a field invented by and for AGW believers who either choose not to call themselves meteor-/climatologists, because that’s not where the grant money is, or who in addition may not do so because they are in fact neither? If so it should neither surprise nor impress us if they “overwhelmingly” endorse AGW.
But enough spleen-venting - where does it go from here? The MSM are sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “ner, ner, ner, I can’t hear you.” Mr Plod probably doesn’t want to touch it with a bargepole. But as I’m sure you’re aware there’s a growing body of informal legal opinion forming in the blogosphere to the effect that the revealed behaviour is tortious.
Could it be – joy of joys – that the scientists whose reputations and careers have been sabotaged by these latter-day druids will club together and sue them? I know there’s a lot of talk about prosecuting them, but I suspect that a civil suit might be the surer way to get these guys into a court of law.
As someone who has nearly lost friends (mainly schoolteachers) by insisting that climate change is unproven and effectively a con by a clique of scientists eager to improve their careers, sit on international committees and be fawned over by politicians, Climategate has given me a glow of self-righteousness. We shouldn’t be surprised by this sort of shenanigans, it were ever so.
In the nineties, for example, it was virtually impossible to get anything published that contradicted the “comet killed off the dinosaurs” theory as this was seen as contradicting the “nuclear winter” concept which meant that you must be a supporter of nuclear weapons. Peer reviewers simply conspired to exclude contrary arguments. Now that we have e-mails to read we can more clearly see into the “climate change” corrupt can of worms in a way that wasn’t possible then.
I doubt if anything will come of these revelations. A whole generation has been indoctrinated by the Greens through Geography lessons in school, politicians have nailed their colours to the “climate change” mast and the Royal Institute is part of the problem rather than being part of the solution. A whitewash is a near certainty.
We need an Official Inquiry, under a judge not a scientist, to investigate if the so called evidence, on which multi-trillion costs will be based, is reliable or just so much malignant computer drivel. I can’t see the Government appointing one.
I think the picture of the ice on the picture in this link below says it all.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18238-why-theres-no-sign-of-a-climate-conspiracy-in-hacked-emails.html
But even say the skeptics are right - wouldn’t it be nice if we were all a bit more considerate with our use of the finite resources we have at our disposal?
We’re agreed they are finite at least - yes?