Climate Research Unit

Does Climategate Undermine the Scientific Integrity of EPA’s Endangerment Finding? You Betcha.

by Marlo Lewis on March 3, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

Instead of exercising its “judgment,” as required by Sec. 202 of the Clean Air Act, to determine whether greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions endanger public health and welfare, EPA largely deferred to the judgment of an external agency not subject to U.S. data quality and freedom of information laws — the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC developed three lines of evidence for its conclusion that GHG emissions are causing dangerous global warming. The first is based on the IPCC’s understanding of the physics of the climate system. The second is the claim that recent decades are unusually warm compared to previous centuries during the current interglacial period known as the Holocene. The third line of evidence is the asserted agreement between observations and computer model simulations.

Peabody Energy’s 240-page petition for reconsideration assesses these lines of evidence in light of new information not in EPA’s possession when it drafted the endangerment finding. Much of this new information is contained in the thousands of emails and other files that produced the Climategate scandal. The files and emails provide an insider’s look at the professional (or unprofessional) behavior of leading climate scientists at the UK’s Climate Research Unit and their colleagues in the United States. This scandal has led to the resignation (allegedly temporary) of Dr. Phil Jones as director of the CRU and an official determination that the CRU violated the UK’s freedom of information act. 

Peabody concludes that the Climategate files undermine each of the IPCC’s principal lines of evidence, and confirm what many climate “skeptics” had long suspected:

The CRU information reveals that many of the principal scientists who authored key chapters of the IPCC scientific assessments were driven by a policy agenda that caused them to cross the line from neutral science to advocacy. Indeed, they went far beyond even what is acceptable as advocacy, as they actively suppressed information that was contrary to the “nice, tidy story” that they wished to present, they refused to disclose underlying data concerning the studies in which they were involved to third parties who might use the information to critique those studies, they engaged in a wide variety of improper and indeed unethical tactics to manipulate the type of scientific information that appeared both in the IPCC reports and in the peer-reviewed scientific journals upon which the IPCC largely relied, and they relied on inaccurate and unverified information from secondary source material that was included anyway to advance the authors’ advocacy agenda. Moreover, the Information Commissioner’s Office of the United Kingdom (“U.K.”), the agency that oversees and enforces the U.K.’s freedom of information laws, after investigation, recently concluded that CRU broke those laws in refusing to respond to information requests.

EPA’s only reasonable course of action, Peabody argues, is to reopen the endangerment proceeding:

EPA has effectively delegated its judgment under section 202(a) of the CAA to an international body that acted contrary to basic U.S. standards of information quality, integrity and transparency. In the interests of good science and policy, and as required by law, EPA must now reconsider its Endangerment Finding in light of the CRU revelations. The importance of low-cost, reliable energy to the economy is too high for EPA to begin regulation based on such an uncertain foundation.

Climategate — the Real War on Science?

by Marlo Lewis on November 25, 2009 · 6 comments

in Environment, Global Warming

The huge pile of emails purloined or leaked from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week does indeed “give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics,” as the Wall Street Journal stated yesterday. However, the main issue brought to light by these emails is even more serious.

In a column posted yesterday on Anthony Watts’s blog, amateur scientist Willis Eschenbach documents the many ruses and excuses CRU director Phil Jones and his allies employed over several years to deny outsiders access to the CRU gang’s temperature data and computer codes.

Skeptics have been accused of waging a “war on science“ because they frequently question the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) interpretation of the rapidly expanding field of climate change research.

 But science is not a set of dogmas certified by government-funded bodies. Rather, as Mr. Eschenbach points out, science is fundamentally an ”adversarial process” whereby competing scientists attempt to reproduce — that is, invalidate — each other’s results. This process absolutely depends on each combatant allowing the others to examine his data and methods. Tactics designed to hide data and methods are anti-science even if — nay, especially if – those resorting to such tricks are big-name scientists.   

“Science,” writes Eschenbach, “works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with data and methods they used to make the claim. Other scientists then attack the claim by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand.”

This means, says Eschenbach, that researchers who hide their data and computer codes to prevent others from replicating/invalidating their results “attack . . . the heart of science.” Such behavior is unethical and, as Eschenbach notes, likely illegal as well.

If you read only one commentary on Climategate, read this one. It is an eye-opener.

Real Climate Spin

by Marlo Lewis on November 24, 2009 · 2 comments

in Features, Global Warming, Zeitgeist

Real Climate.Org is chief defender of ”consensus” climatology on the Internet. One of its enduring missions has been to defend the dubious, indeed discredited “Hockey Stick” reconstruction of Northern hemisphere temperature history. The Hockey Stick was the basis for the IPCC’s claim in its 2001 report that the 1990s were the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the past millennium.

That Real Climate (RC) should feel special solicitude for the Hockey Stick is no accident, comrade. Two of the five principals at RC — Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley — were among the three researchers (Mann, Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes) who authored the Hockey Stick.

All of the RC principals (Gavin Schmidt, Caspar Ammann, Rasmus Benestad, Mann, and Bradley) are frequent senders and recipients of the thousands of emails and other documents, now posted on many Web sites, that were hacked or leaked last week from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The Wall Street Journal today published a selection of the leaked emails and an editorial concluding that the emails ”give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics.”

Even eco-radical George Monbiot says he is “dismayed and deeply shaken” by the emails, because, “There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.”

So far, the only email on which RC has seen fit to comment is one from CRU director Phil Jones dated Nov. 16, 1999, 13:31. It’s gotten a lot of buzz on the Internet, because it appears to advocate the use of a “trick” to “hide” a “decline” in global temperatures.

In a post titled “The CRU Hack” (November 20), RC writes:

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

So a “trick” is just scientific shorthand for a “good way to deal with a problem,” not something “secret.” But RC ducks the real issue. Is the ”trick” Phil Jones learned from Hockey Stick author Michael Mann a form of trickery? Does it create a false impression, as an illusionist does on stage, right out in the open, in front of an audience?

The trick, according to RC, is to splice onto the end of a temperature reconstruction, built on proxy data going back several centuries, the data from instrumental records starting in 1960 and 1981.

Now this is quite a trick, because it involves comparing apples (proxy data) to oranges (instrumental data) and pretending that the composite forms a continuous record.

As the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change observed years ago, researchers attempting to construct long-term (centuries to millennia) temperature records should ”finish the dance” with the (proxy) data they started with.

Grafting instrumental data onto proxy data to produce a seemingly continuous record is trickery, because instrumental data, unlike proxy data, are massively influenced by land-use changes and site-specific quality control issues.

Urban heat islands and irrigated agriculture can inject false warming biases into instrumental data that are absent from proxy data taken from remote forests or sediment cores at the bottom of lakes, for example. Improper placement of temperature sensing equipment near local heat sources (e.g. air conditioning vents, asphalt parking lots, waste water treatment plants) also generates significant false warming signals, as retired meteorologist Anthony Watts documents in gory detail.

So RC’s “nothing to see here” argument based on the alleged insider meaning of “trick” raises rather than allays suspicion that CRU is attempting to fit data to a predetermined conclusion.

Note also that RC says nothing about Phil Jones’s advice to backdate correspondence (Sept. 12, 2007, 11:30 a.m.), to delete emails related to the 2007 IPCC report (May 29, 2008, 11:04), and to evade FOIA requests, if necessary by deleting files (Feb. 2, 2005, 9:41 a.m.). RC also says nothing about Mann’s call to delegitimize the Journal of Climate for publishing papers critical of his work (March 11, 2003, 8:14).

The Wall Street Journal editorial’s concluding comment is spot on:  ”In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.”

LibertyWeek 70: Climate-Gate Bursts Forth

by Richard Morrison on November 23, 2009

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Richard Morrison and Jeremy Lott welcome special guests Greg Conko and Iain Murray to the program for Episode 70 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the big Senate showdown on healthcare legislation and a shocking expose of climate science skullduggery. We then move on a double dose of Midwestern scandal and the curious cult-like organizing practices of major labor unions.