Jasper

I am not a climate scientist. But my point here is, neither are you. In your talks, (I have sat through most of a DVD of one, and had detailed reports of your recent Totnes adventure), you spend at least the first 30 minutes trying to sell your credentials, and why the audience should take you seriously, why you are a respected scientist, but, I repeat, you are not a climate scientist.

Your qualifications, so far as I can tell, are in marine pollution, and you have acted as a consultant on environmental issues, but you have no qualifications in climatology, glaciology, or any of the many disciplines that make up the complex study of climate change.

You state that “I do not hold that climate science is a conspiracy”, and you try and paint yourself as a respectable yet misunderstood climate scientist who has the good of the environmental movement and Transition initiatives dear to your heart, yet you go about trying to achieve that scientific credibility in a very odd way. Do you write papers for respected journals, present those papers at scientific conferences, i.e. approach this in the way a credible scientist would? No.

You give talks at events like Ian Crane’s ‘Alternative View’ conferences, alongside people who argue all kinds of absurd conspiratorial nonsense, like Crane’s assertion that the 2012 Olympics will be used to stage a fake extraterrestrial invasion in order to usher in the New World Order, as well as other similarly silly stuff made popular by the likes of David Icke, who has also appeared at those events.

You appear in films about 2012, and use your platform to also talk about shamanism, consciousness shifts and other utterly non-scientific, belief-based stuff. If you don’t hold that climate change is a conspiracy, why allow the publicity for your recent talk in Totnes to rant that your talk will cover “the true agenda behind the Copenhagen Treaty, and the ? collusion of Transition Town Totnes??”. Do you actually hold that TTT is knowingly spreading what it knows to be falsehoods about climate change? If not, why would you ever allow a talk you gave to be hijacked in this way? If you are the credible scientist you would like us to believe you are, you really do yourself no favours at all by mixing your supposedly scientific work with pseudoscience and New Age beliefs.

The organisation promoting your recent talk in Totnes have run events stating that swine flu, 9/11 and peak oil, among a wide range of other things, are all conspiracies, and your climate talk was promoted in just the same way. What’s next, “The Evolution Scam”? Creationism is, after all, another example of where belief trumps science. From my encounters with some of those who organise such events, their core belief, to which your work is now, by association, linked, is that we make our own reality, and that belief and science are the same thing.

As I wrote in this piece, that assertion is really a terrifying position to be facing an uncertain future with. One of the most often heard pieces of feedback from your Totnes talk was that the onslaught of graphs you subjected the audience to would have been utterly incomprehensible to most, if not all of them, leaving them to decide whether or not to take your word for it. The mostly positive acceptance of your message at that event is proof, I would argue, of the degree of gullibility among those attending, the fact that that was the message they wanted to hear (which was presumably why they came), and the lamentably low levels of critical thinking and basic scientific understanding we leave school with these days.

As I put to you when we met briefly in Glastonbury last year, if your views on climate change are so robust, then where are the peer reviewed papers on the subject that you have had published in respectable journals (i.e. not Nexus magazine)? You had no answer for that question at all. As I said, I am not a climate scientist. When I go looking for the most informed, reliable, convincing science on climate change, should I;

a). look to a robust body of scientific evidence, built up over decades of peer reviewed science by scientists from a wide range of disciplines, or

b). listen to one guy from Glastonbury with no climate science credentials, no peer-reviewed papers, who also uses his talks to also talk about shamanism, 2012 and other New Age beliefs, and who thinks that exactly the opposite is taking place to what that body of evidence believes?

Peter, you can’t have it both ways. Do you promote science, in the form of peer-reviewed, credible science, or do you promote belief? Can you apply the same rigorous, impartial scientific thinking that you claim to have applied to the question of climate change as set out in your book to the other beliefs you promote, such as 2012? Of course not, and therein lies the reason why if I look for credible evidence about climate change, I don’t look in your direction.

As for your assertion that “the current ‘global warming’ science will not survive the UEA ‘climategate’ exposure”, time will tell. I think in a few months it will have been seen as the petty and irrelevant pre-Copenhagen dirty tricks campaign that it was.

Rob

I don’t know if anyone reads this far and so late on from your posting – but I would like to respond and communicate directly with Transition Towns – since I have a great deal of sympathy with its aims. I am what you would probably refer to as a ‘denier’ and hence not worth listening to, but I nevertheless urge TT to enter a rational dialogue and not simply respond from a ‘position’.

As you know, I have written a book – ‘Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory’. It was published in June 2009. It took three years to research and write and it relies entirely for its arguments on peer-reviewed science literature. I am a life-long ‘green’ – an ecological scientist and active in policy formulation. I pioneered ‘critical scientific review’ of policy issues in the 1970s – and have brought about several significant changes in policy connected to nuclear safety, waste disposal, toxic emissions, energy strategies and biodiversity conservation. I have no links to the oil industry. I do not hold that climate science is a conspiracy. I work on climate issues because I am concerned that simplistic computer simulations do not allow for natural cycles that could bring much colder periods and soon – and for which we are not prepared (and have done so consistently since 1996 when I reviewed climate science for the Countryside Commission).

My opinion – based upon 35 years experience, is that the current ‘global warming’ science will not survive the UEA ‘climategate’ exposure.

Contrary to your own view in this posting – their data is crucial to the science – all of the other work – the tens of thousands of papers are not relevant – the issue is not whether the globe has warmed, but whether what we have seen between 1950-2009 (the global warming period for which computer simulations of the natural world diverge from observed temperatures unless carbon emissions are added), is primarily driven by carbon emissions or by natural cycles.

What the UEA material reveals is that a) there are only two teams working on the homogenised global index (average temperature – calculated by computer codes from all the station data) and that they collude to get the same results; b) that where the data did not exist to support their expectation, they made it up; c) they bent data to fir the expectation, d) they sought to remove a ‘blip’ they could not explain – i.e. change the data (that ‘blip’ is evidence for a cyclic effect focussed in the Arctic on a 70yr periodicity and is strong evidence that the current warm period is a repeat); e) they ignored correspondents who found divergences with their graphs compared to station averages – for example, Fennoscandinavia; f) they sought to subvert the peer-review process and the FOI requests from bona fide academics in order to avoid ‘criticism’ – one of the fundamental safeguards of good science; g) they have not kept appropriate records or quality checks of the ‘homogenisation’ process (so nobody can check it).

These are all extremely serious failures of scientific protocol. Under normal circumstances, UEA might be able to bluster, but it is likely the investigation will be fair, and that powerful political forces will use the results. A cover-up is not likely.

I am not entirely sure how far the US team have colluded – and whether any of the data can be trusted. I intend to find out in February when I will visit their laboratory.

I have been advising TT and my former allies in Greenpeace to find an exit strategy on climate change. That is because I think the ‘ship’ will go down. There is a danger it will take the environmental movement with it. Of course, the ‘greens’ will still be there – but they will be politically neutered by a resurgent right-wing business as usual wave with the spin that ‘we have all been scammed’.

It was not a ‘scam’ but it sure was ‘something’ – and green philosophers may one day take a hard look at what went wrong (I make a stab at it in my book and it will be hard reading for many).

I have been called all manner of names by TT people – who won’t attend my talks or read the book – ‘mad’, ‘bonkers’, ‘troll-feeder’ – except my home town, where TT members know me. How likely is it that the person who drafted the Kyoto Protocol and who endorsed my book, would have done so having read something that did not make sense?

It is time to stop name-calling and hiding behind convenient smokescreens of ‘they are all deniers’ and look at your own denial of the science – there is no consensus within the IPCC – that’s what I show in my book – they could not agree on the causes of what they saw. But that is not the spin.

Let go of the spin, if you dare, and start to look critically at the science – not align with academies and institutions and pundits who have no decent historical record of leading on any aspect of environmental protection. Otherwise, you gift ground to the ‘deniers’ that the world is in any kind of environmental danger.

Someone else motivated that funding restrictions are influencing whether there is consensus about AGW or not.
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2009/12/incentives-and-conspiracies.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CoyoteBlog+%28Coyote+Blog%29&utm_content=Bloglines

One of the points made on CoyoteBlog is a comment made on WattsUpWithThat.com,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/07/americans-belief-of-global-warming-sinking-below-50-for-the-first-time-in-2-years/#comment-252604
- That at least one source of research funding is limited to efforts to confirm AGW, and explore catastrophic consequences; those questioning global warming, or that an anthropogenic component is significant, need not apply. This kind of function has to skew the balance of pro- and anti- AGW reports.

That connection is the C12:C14 fingerprint by which I mean the ratio of carbon-12 (C12) to carbon-14 (C14). When carbon rich sources are buried long enough to convert to coal or oil the relative amount of C12 increases as C14 ‘breaks down.’ The C12:C14 ratio is increasing and is a strong indicator that the primary source of increasing carbon dioxide is anthropogenic (human caused from the burning of fossil fuels).

But this only matters if a significant portion of the warming is human-preventable, and at a social cost which is less than the cost of adaptation.

East Anglia CRU’s findings were intended to show that the warming is human-caused (which isn’t the same thing as human-preventable, but it gets you part-way there) and very costly (which isn’t the same thing as more costly than adaptation, but it gets you part way there).

But the Climate-gate e-mails, and even more the software code and incomplete/unusable data, demonstrates that East Anglia CRU’s findings are useless garbage.

Where does that leave us?

Well, it doesn’t allow us to write off AGW as “all a big hoax.” East Anglia CRU is only one (albeit the most prominent) of several groups asserting the human causation and catastrophic cost of warming.

If the science being done by the other groups is up-to-snuff, then the assertions of human causation and catastrophic cost still remain credible.

And we are told that the papers by these other groups are all “peer reviewed.” That means they’re reliable, right? It tells us they’re up-to-snuff, right?

Unfortunately, no.

The failure of peer review to detect the utter worthlessness of the output from East Anglia CRU — the failure to examine the procedures producing it and to reject it out-of-hand as being without merit because of shoddy methodology — indicates how very unreliable the label “peer reviewed” has been, as a gauge of good climate science.

We certainly hope that science it is not being done so thoroughly ineptly by all the other groups. But we have no reason for confidence that it isn’t: The other groups don’t have scientists of particularly greater caliber, or access to particularly different data.

True, the East Anglia team was not the only one in their game…but it was one of the leading lights. Are the software development processes better in the other groups? Are their data archiving procedures better? Are they less prone to expectation bias? Do they exercise any better judgment about avoiding questionable fudge-factors? Do they show any greater openness about how they produced their results?

We don’t know, or at least I don’t. All we know is that they managed to get their results past the same kind of “peer review” as East Anglia.

That does not inspire confidence.

There is now an investigation of the shenanigans at East Anglia: The missing data, the unusable data, the buggy modeling software, the inability to reproduce the original results, the ducking FOI, the attempt to influence the organs of peer review to stifle dissent.

Good. That needs investigating.

But we also need an audit of the methods and procedures at the other groups.

This is needed in order to restore confidence.

Until then, climate studies labeled “peer-reviewed” will have barely a hair’s more scientific authority than studies labeled “casually sniffed by a blind horse.”

If the other groups have been doing their jobs in a procedurally bulletproof way, which can survive intense public scrutiny, why then, wonderful! The issues of human-causation and catastrophic cost can be put to bed, and we can move on to showing whether that which is human-caused is also human-preventable, and at what cost.

Shoring up confidence is the first step, though.

(And if, after examination, we instead find that the other groups have been half-assing and fudging their way through their research the same way East Anglia was, then we’ll know that the current scientific consensus means very little: That it is a sociological, not a scientific, phenomenon.)

I doubt is most Europeans are even remotely aware of that connection and it is even less likely that people from other countries which were less involved in WW2 know about it. People of my mother’s generation who had first hand knowledge are now in their eighties and much has passed under the bridge since then.

Someone will have wored outwhen there was a break in the international meeting schedule and when the conference and hotel space was available; no more than that.

I’m sorry. I was thinking of historical precedents, like the Roman Catholic Church jailing “Sun Centric” solar system advocates. I figured that people trying to solve a perceived problem, like climate change, are more apt to fund research into answers. People content that there are no immanent climate threats, I imagine, are less ambitious about funding what would be general research.

I know that some very good science gets done without significant funding. But most science is done under a funding grant or other support. That doesn’t invalidate findings; I never thought so. Well, actually I kind of think of Al “I invented the internet, so believe what I say” Gore as being a dim cousin to Orlov’s poster child from the double-wide. You know. My next door neighbor.

Thanks, by the way, for addressing the content of my message, and not making things personal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg&feature=player_embedded

Need I say any more?

Cheers – John

You and the other human spam-bots (see Orlov http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/)of course are not at all biased nor have you any vested interests.

For the rest of us who are mere flawed human mortals time would be better spent listening to the experts:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/12/04/press-call-michael-mann-gavin-schmidt-and-michael-oppenheimer-climategat/