Nontroversy Watch: CRU-Gate
The Washington Post’s Andrew Freedman interviewed science historian Spencer Weart about the stolen climate science emails (known at the more hysterical blogs as the “scandal of the century”); Weart has a good perspective on the nontroversy.
Andrew Freedman: What effects do you think this will have on public perceptions of climate science and climate scientists?
SW: I don’t expect this to have much impact on public perceptions of climate and climate scientists. Opinions have become so fixed that it would take serious evidence to shift a significant number of people. Since the late 1980s, just about every year and sometimes almost every month, a group of people (mostly the same ones) have exclaimed, “Now in these latest (whatever) we finally have proof that there is no need to worry about climate change!” There is a segment of the public that has believed every new claim. The rest will continue to doubt such claims in the absence of truly solid proof.
AF: What do you think this story reveals about the conduct of climate science?
SW: Back around 2000 leading climate scientists talked to each other mostly about their science—debating one another’s data and analysis and negotiating travel, collaboration and other administration—and a little bit about policy. As time passed they have had to spend more and more of their time answering criticism of the scientific results already established, criticism mostly based on ignorance, fallacious reasoning, and even deliberately deceptive claims. Still more recently they have had to spend far too much of their time defending their personal reputations against ignorant or slanderous attacks.
The theft and use of the emails does reveal something interesting about the social context. It’s a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance.
Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers. In blogs, talk radio and other new media, we are told that the warnings about future global warming issued by the national science academies, scientific societies, and governments of all the leading nations are not only mistaken, but based on a hoax, indeed a conspiracy that must involve thousands of respected researchers. Extraordinary and, frankly, weird. Climate scientists are naturally upset, exasperated, and sometimes goaded into intemperate responses… but that was already easy to see in their blogs and other writings.
RealClimate has an update to the story, with context for some of the issues that have been raised.
And Steven Andrew has a post at the Los Angeles Examiner with more information about the one email all the anti-AGW blogs are hammering to death, containing this quote about a “trick” used to correct data:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Andrew interviewed Michael Mann, the “Mike” to whom the email refers, to find out exactly what this was about:
Steven Andrew: You are the Mike referred in the quoted email correct? When was that email written?
Michael Mann: Yes, the email is from ‘99.
SA: Who wrote it?
MM: Phil Jones
SA: What does Phil Jones mean by “hide”?
MM: I think we expressed this best in the “RealClimate” article. Here’s an adapted version of the text: “As for the ‘hide the decline’, comment, I assume what Phil Jones was referring to was the well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy data diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”) 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 the reason for the “divergence”.”
SA: What was the Mike’s “trick”?
MM: All he (apparently) meant by “Mike’s Nature trick” was us, in our original ‘98 Nature article, showing the instrumental record after the proxy record ends (1980). Since both records were clearly demarcated and labeled in our article, there was really no room for misinterpretation of what we were showing. So while it’s unclear exactly what Phil Jones meant, “trick” would appear to mean “clever way to deal with the conundrum” that the proxy record ends in 1980. The easy way out of that conundrum is to just show in addition the more recent data from the instrumental record. Again, in our Nature article, this was all clearly labeled and explained, nothing secret or hidden.
SA: Is this much adieu about nothing, again?
MM: Of course. This is about the climate denial noise machine trying to drum up a manufactured controversy in advance of the most important climate summit (Copenhagen) in years.
Indeed.
Frank says: