Climate scientists who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet
By Fred Guterl
One of the most impressive visuals in Al Gore’s now famous slide show on global warming is a graph known as the “hockey stick.” It shows temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rising slowly for most of the last thousand years and turning steeply upward in the last half of the 20th century. As evidence of the alarming rate of global warming, it tells a simple and compelling story. That’s one reason the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included the graph in the summary of its 2001 report. But is it true?
The question occurred to Steven McIntyre when he opened his newspaper one morning in 2002 and there it was—the hockey stick. It was published with an article on the debate over whether Canada should ratify the Kyoto agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. McIntyre had little knowledge of the intricate science of climate change; he didn’t even have a Ph.D. He did have a passion for numbers, however. He also had some experience in the minerals business, where, he says, people tend to use hockey-stick graphs when they are trying to pull one over on you. “Reality usually isn’t so tidy.”
As every climate scientist must know by now, McIntyre’s skepticism of the hockey stick launched him on a midlife career change: he has become the granddaddy of the global warming “denial” movement. McIntyre asserted that the data of Michael Mann, head of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, did not support his conclusions, and that a true graph of temperatures would suggest a cyclical cause of recent warming. Following in his footsteps, a cottage industry of amateur climatologists have dug into the climate literature, tried to poke holes in the arguments, and demanded supporting data from scientists, sometimes under the auspices of Freedom of Information Act requests.
The scientists have resisted these efforts just as fiercely. For the past six years the conflict has played out in blogs, in the halls of Congress, and in deliberations of the IPCC. It came to a crescendo with the theft of private e-mails from the University of East Anglia in England in November, which raised questions about the scientific objectivity of several prominent researchers, including Phil Jones, who resigned in December as head of the Climatic Research Unit.
The battle between “alarmists” and “deniers” has taken a huge toll, not just on the reputations of Jones and the other “climategate” scientists. It has also damaged the credibility of climate science itself, and threatened more than a decade of diplomatic efforts to engineer a global reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. The effort, which has kept a forward momentum since the Kyoto meeting in 1997, came to a cold stop in Copenhagen in December. The conference was originally intended to bring the U.S. and China into a global agreement, but produced nothing of substance. Indeed, the climate project bears a striking resemblance to health-care reform in the United States—stalled by a combination of political resistance and hubris.
What went wrong? Part of the blame lies, of course, with those who obstructed the efforts of the IPCC and the individual scientists, including bloggers who tried to sandbag scientists with spurious FOIA requests, and the perpetrators (as yet unknown) of the hack at the Climatic Research Unit. Part of the blame also falls on the climate scientists themselves. Many of them—including perhaps Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC head—may have stepped too far over the line from science to advocacy, undermining their own credibility. Some scientists, as a result, are now calling for a change in tone from antagonism to reconciliation. Climate science, they say, needs to open its books and be more tolerant of scrutiny from the outside. Its institutions—notably the IPCC—need to go about their business with greater transparency. “The circle-the-wagons mentality has backfired,” says Judith Curry, head of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
The first thing to fix is the institution that has borne the brunt of the recent public-relations disaster: the IPCC itself. Recently there have been several minor revelations of sloppiness. A line in the group’s 2007 report stating that glaciers in the Himalayas will melt entirely by 2035 turns out to have come not from the peer-reviewed literature, but from a 1999 article in New Scientist, a popular magazine in the U.K. More damaging, IPCC chairman Pachauri has been acting as a consultant to financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus, an investment firm. Although he says he has donated the proceeds to the nonprofit organization he founded in Delhi to promote charitable programs in sustainability, many people have wondered whether the head of a scientific organization that calls itself “policy neutral” should be consulting with banks. Some have called for his resignation.
The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report.
John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.
A journalist working for Science had told Dr Pachauri several times late last year that glaciologists had refuted the IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Dr Pachauri refused to address the problem, saying: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” He suggested that the error would not be corrected until 2013 or 2014, when the IPCC next reported.
The IPCC issued a correction and apology on January 20, three days after the error had made global headlines. Mr Sauven said: “Mistakes will always be made but it’s how you handle those mistakes which affects the credibility of the institution. Pachauri should have put his hand up and said ‘we made a mistake’. It’s in these situations that your character and judgment is tested. Do you make the right judgment call? He clearly didn’t.”
Confidence Melting Away: Doubts Grow in Climate Change Debate
By Gerald Traufetter
The Siachen Glacier is home to the world’s highest crisis region. Here, at 6,000 meters (19,680 feet) above sea level, Indian and Pakistani soldiers face off, ensconced in heavily armed positions.
The ongoing border dispute between the two nuclear powers has already claimed the lives of 4,000 men — most of them having died of exposure to the cold.
Now the Himalayan glacier is also at the center of a scientific dispute. In its current report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the glacier, which is 71 kilometers (44 miles) long, could disappear by 2035. It also predicts that the other 45,000 glaciers in the world’s highest mountain range will be virtually gone by then, with drastic consequences for billions of people in Asia, whose life depends on water that originates in the Himalayas. The IPCC report led environmental activists to sound the alarm about a drama that could be unfolding at the “world’s third pole.”
“This prognosis is, of course, complete nonsense,” says John Shroder, a geologist and expert on glaciers at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. The results of his research tell a completely different story.
For the past three decades, the US glaciologist has been traversing the majestic mountains of the Himalayan region, particularly the Karakorum Range, with his measuring instruments. The discoveries he has made along the way are not consistent with the assessment long held by the IPCC. “While many glaciers are shrinking, others are stable and some are even growing,” says Shroder.
Untenable Claim
The gaffe over the Himalayan glaciers has triggered an outcry in the world of climatology. Some are already using the word “Glaciergate” in reference to the scandal over a scientifically untenable claim in the fourth IPCC assessment report, which the UN climate body publishes every five years. The fourth assessment report was originally published in 2007. Last week, the IPCC withdrew the erroneous claim and apologized for the error.
German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is also upset about the incident. “The error in the IPCC report is serious and should not have happened,” Röttgen told SPIEGEL. “Scientific accuracy is a vital condition to support the credibility of the political conclusions we draw as a result.” Although the minister still has confidence in the overall validity of the IPCC report, he wants to see “a thorough investigation into how the error originated and was communicated.”
But why wasn’t this clearly nonsensical claim noticed long ago by at least one of the 3,000 scientists who contributed to the IPCC report? “What’s really amazing is that such a blunder remained uncorrected for so long,” says Shroder.
CBS News Investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkissonreports official filings and our own investigation show at least 106 people from the House and Senate attended - spouses, a doctor, a protocol expert and even a photographer.
For 15 Democratic and 6 Republican Congressmen, food and rooms for two nights cost $4,406 tax dollars each. That’s $2,200 a day - more than most Americans spend on their monthly mortgage payment.
CBS News asked members of Congress and staff about whether they’re mindful that it’s public tax dollars they’re spending. Many said they had never even seen the bills or the expense reports.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., is a key climate change player. He went to Copenhagen last year. Last week, we asked him about the $2,200-a-day bill for room and food.
“I can’t believe that,” Rep. Waxman said. “I can’t believe it, but I don’t know.”
But his name is in black and white in the expense reports. The group expense report was filed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. She wouldn’t talk about it when our producer tried to ask.
Fresh doubts were cast over controversial global warming theories yesterday after a major climate change argument was discredited.
The International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit its key claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The report was based on an interview with a little-known Indian scientist who has since said his views were “speculation” and not backed up by research.
It was also revealed that the IPCC’s controversial chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, described as “the world’s top climate scientist”, is a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics and no formal climate science qualifications.
Dr Pachauri was yesterday accused of a conflict of interest after it emerged he has a network of business interests that attract millions of pounds in funding thanks to IPCC policies. One of them, The Energy Research Institute, has a London office and is set to receive up to £10million from British taxpayers over the next five years in the form of grants from the Department for International Development.
Dr Pachauri denies any conflict of interest arising from his various roles.
Yesterday, critics accused the IPCC of boosting the man-made global warming theory to protect a multi-million pound industry.
Climate scientist Peter Taylor said: “I am not surprised by this news. A vast bureaucracy and industry has been built up around this theory. There is too much money in it for the IPCC to let it wither.”
Actor Danny Glover should probably stick to reading lines other people write for him. Speaking off the cuff, he said this of the tragic earthquake in Haiti that may have killed as many as 50,000:
“The threat of what happened to Haiti is a threat that can happen anywhere in the Caribbean, to the Island nations. You know? They are all in peril because of global warming. They are all in peril because of climate change and all this, and we need to find… When we did what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response. This is what happened, you know what I’m saying? We have to act now.”
I had to add a new category to the site to accommodate this post. None of the regular categories really seemed to quite fit. In retrospect, a lot of other stories would probably fit in there too, but it took Danny Glover to Christian the new category.
Modern men have lived through 20 sudden global warmings
By Pete DuPont
Al Gore said the other week that climate change is “a principle in physics. It’s like gravity. It exists.” Sarah Palin agreed that “climate change is like gravity,” but added a better conclusion: Each is “a naturally occurring phenomenon that existed long before, and will exist long after, any governmental attempts to affect it.”
Over time climates do change. As author Howard Bloom wrote in The Wall Street Journal last month, in the past two million years there have been 60 ice ages, and in the 120,000 years since the development of modern man, “we’ve lived through 20 sudden global warmings,” and of course this was before–long before–”smokestacks and tail pipes.”
In our earth’s history there has been both global warming and global cooling. In Roman times, from 200 B.C. to A.D. 600, it was warm; from 600 to 900 came the cold Dark Ages; more warming from 900 to 1300; and another ice age from 1300 to 1850. Within the past century, the earth has warmed by 0.6 degree Celsius, but within this period we can see marked shifts: cooling (1900-10), warming (1910-40), cooling again (1940 to nearly 1980), and since then a little warming. The Hadley Climatic Research Unit global temperature record shows that from 1980 to 2009, the world warmed by 0.16 degree Celsius per decade.
As for the impact of reducing global warming, Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, outlined in The Wall Street Journal that Oxfam concluded that if wealthy nations diverted $50 billion to climate change that “at least 4.5 million children would die and 8.6 million fewer people could have access to HIV/AIDS treatment.” And if we spent it on reducing carbon emissions? It would “reduce temperatures by all of one-thousandth of one degree Fahrenheit over the next hundred years.”
COPENHAGEN, Denmark-I’m not sure whether it was the chicken-suited followers of Supreme Master Ching Hai wandering about or the experience of freezing slowly for seven hours as I waited to get into the Bella Center, but something happened in the last 10 days to convince me, once and for all, that the United Nations climate negotiations will never quite work. As the dust settles on this year’s talks and observers try to understand exactly what happened here, one thing is for certain: The U.N. process can no longer be the central focus of global efforts to confront climate change.
President Barack Obama in Copenhagen The structural problem with these talks has long been clear: It’s hard to find anything that 193 countries agree on, and it’s downright impossible to negotiate when all those parties must have their say. But activists, diplomats, and many analysts have long insisted on the participation of every last U.N. member nation. Climate change is a global problem, they argued, and hence one that requires a global solution. Indeed, the logo for the Copenhagen conference shows circle of 192 crisscrossing lines. (It was designed before Somalia joined the U.N. process on Dec. 10.) This pattern is meant to symbolize how interconnected we are. Instead, it looks like a ball of tangled string.
GCS Editor’s note: This article reveals the true motivation behind the push for a “Copenhagen Protocol.”
By Keith Johnson
The failure of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen to produce a strong, binding agreement to cut carbon-dioxide emissions sowed gloom in European carbon markets Monday, with prices for carbon-emissions permits falling more than 8%.
There were also political echoes to the Copenhagen summit’s acrimonious conclusion. Some senior officials, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and British climate-change secretary Ed Miliband, criticized the current U.N. framework for addressing climate change, which requires consensus among more than 190 countries.
“Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down those talks,” Mr. Brown said Monday. “Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries.”
The slumping price for carbon reflected disappointment among traders and businesses that the nonbinding Copenhagen Accord didn’t stipulate how much big countries such as the U.S. or China have to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. The deal also left unresolved most of the big issues of how to curb emissions linked to climate change. On Tuesday, China’s Xinhua news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu, taking issue with British complaints about the summit and China’s role.
Ms. Jiang said China urged developed countries to “fulfill their obligations to developing countries in an earnest way, and stay away from activities that hinder the international community’s cooperation in coping with climate change.”
Because the U.S., China and other major economies didn’t agree to binding emissions cuts, European countries didn’t increase their own pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. European officials, who had considered curbing emissions by 30% from 1990 levels, instead maintained their target of a 20% reduction from 1990 levels by 2020.
That helped push prices for carbon permits to €12.41 ($17.73) per metric ton Monday, down from €13.58 Friday. Carbon-permit prices have fallen 14% since the beginning of the Copenhagen conference, a reflection of how expectations steadily fell as countries bickered over how much they would cut emissions and who would pay for it.
The European Union’s emissions-trading plan caps the amount of greenhouse gases that power companies and the like can emit. They can purchase carbon permits on the market in order to comply with emissions limits.
Investors in low-carbon or no-carbon energy technology, such as solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear power, say the prices for carbon permits must be much higher than current levels — in some cases, as much as €60 a ton — to make their systems cost-competitive with coal, oil or natural gas.
By Lord Christopher Monckton — The mountains shall labor, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”.
The White House spinmeisters spun, and their official press release proclaimed, with more than usual fatuity, that President Obama had “salvaged” a deal at Copenhagen in bilateral talks with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, which had established a negotiating bloc.
The plainly-declared common position of these four developing nations had been the one beacon of clarity and common sense at the foggy fortnight of posturing and gibbering in the ghastly Copenhagen conference center.
This is what the Forthright Four asked for:
Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.
Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.
Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.
Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.
After President Obama’s dramatic intervention to save the deal, this is what the Forthright Four got:
Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.
Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.
Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.
Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.
Here, in a nutshell – for fortunately nothing larger is needed – are the main points of the ”Copenhagen Accord”:
Main points: In the Copenhagen Accord, which is operational immediately, the parties“underline that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time”; emphasize their “strong political will to urgently combat climate change”; recognize “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 C°” and perhaps below 1.5 C°; aspire to “cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible”; acknowledge that eradicating poverty is the “overriding priority of developing countries”; and accept the need to help vulnerable countries – especially the least developed nations, small-island states, and Africa – to adapt to climate change.
Self-imposed emissions targets: All parties will set for themselves, and comply with, emissions targets for 2020, to be submitted to the secretariat by 31 January 2010. Where developing countries are paid to cut their emissions, their compliance will be monitored. Developed countries will financially support less-developed countries to prevent deforestation. Carbon trading may be used.
New bureaucracies and funding: Under the supervision of a “High-Level Panel”, developed countries will give up to $30 billion for 2010-12, aiming for $100 billion by 2020, in “scaled up, new and additional, predictable and adequate funding” to developing countries via a “Copenhagen Green Fund”. A “Technology Mechanism” will “accelerate technology development and transfer” to developing countries.
And that’s it. Expensive, yes. Unnecessary, yes. But earth-shaking? No.
By Gerald Warner — When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?
No contest: stop issuing three rainforests of press releases every day, change the heading to James Bond-style “Do not distribute” and “leak” a single copy, in the knowledge that human nature is programmed to interest itself in anything it imagines it is not supposed to see, whereas it would bin the same document unread if it were distributed openly.
After that, get some unbiased, neutral observer, such as the executive director of Greenpeace, to say: “This is the single most important piece of paper in the world today.” Unfortunately, the response of all intelligent people will be to fall about laughing; but it was worth a try – everybody loves a tryer – and the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics.
But boy! Was this crass, or what? The apocalyptic document revealing that even if the Western leaders hand over all the climate Danegeld demanded of them, appropriately at the venue of Copenhagen, the earth will still fry on a 3C temperature rise is the latest transparent scare tactic to extort more cash from taxpayers. The danger of this ploy, of course, is that people might say “If we are going to be chargrilled anyway, what is the point of handing over billions – better to get some serious conspicuous consumption in before the ski slopes turn into saunas.”
This “single most important piece of paper in the world” comes, presumably, from an authoritative and totally neutral source? Yes, of course. It’s from the – er – UN Framework Committee on Climate Change that is – er – running the Danegeld Summit. Some people might be small-minded enough to suggest this paper has as much authority as a “leaked” document from Number 10 revealing that life would be hell under the Tories.
This week has been truly historic. It has marked the beginning of the landslide that is collapsing the whole AGW imposture. The pseudo-science of global warming is a global laughing stock and Copenhagen is a farce. In the warmist camp the Main Man is a railway engineer with huge investments in the carbon industry. That says it all. The world’s boiler being heroically damped down by the Fat Controller. Al Gore, occupant of the only private house that can be seen from space, so huge is its energy consumption, wanted to charge punters $1,200 to be photographed with him at Copenhagen. There is a man who is really worried about the planet’s future.
If there were not $45trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake, this would be the funniest moment in world history. What a bunch of buffoons. Not since Neville Chamberlain tugged a Claridge’s luncheon bill from his pocket and flourished it on the steps of the aircraft that brought him back from Munich has a worthless scrap of paper been so audaciously hyped. There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though: some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the smellies. Otherwise, this event is strictly for Hans Christian Andersen
Barack Obama emerged from the chaotic final hours of the Copenhagen summit last night having salvaged an agreement for action on global warming – and his own reputation as a politician who can bridge the most challenging of political divides.
After 15 hours of negotiations, an exhausted looking Obama said he managed to secure a deal on climate change incorporating America’s three main goals of emissions cuts, financial aid for the poorest countries, and a measure of accountability for emissions pledges from developing countries.
But he acknowledged the skimpy 2.5 page draft produced at the end of his effort was not the comprehensive agreement he had come to Copenhagen for.
“I think it is important that instead of setting up a bunch of goals that just end up not being met, that we get moving,” he said. “We just keep moving forward.”
Obama’s hectic day of negotiations began immediately on his arrival in Copenhagen, when he encountered what he described as a “fundamental deadlock” between rich and developing countries.
Much of that was a product of the deep resentment at America for its emissions reductions target: a 17% reduction over 2005 levels by 2020. That offer too was conditional on Congress passing climate change legislation. In the final days of the summit, a more vexing issue emerged over America’s demands that China and other rapidly emerging countries offer an accounting of their actions to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate scientists who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet
COPENHAGEN, Denmark-I’m not sure whether it was the chicken-suited followers of Supreme Master Ching Hai wandering about or the experience of freezing slowly for seven hours as I waited to get into the Bella Center, but something happened in the last 10 days to convince me, once and for all, that the United Nations climate negotiations will never quite work. As the dust settles on this year’s talks and observers try to understand exactly what happened here, one thing is for certain: The U.N. process can no longer be the central focus of global efforts to confront climate change.
By Lord Christopher Monckton — The mountains shall labor, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”.
By Gerald Warner — When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying – what do you do?
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