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The Runaway Climate Train
By Lykke E. Andersen*, La Paz, 8 February 2010.
I have been awfully quiet about climate change issues since the
“Climate Gate” scandal broke on November 17th 2009.
But by now there are several associated issues, such as “Glacier
Gate” (1) and “Amazon Gate”
(2), and it is time to figure out what
it all means.
Climate Gate was the release (by a hacker or an insider) of
thousands of e-mails and commented source codes from the Hadley
Climate Research Unit (CRU). There is enough fascinating
material to write books about it (3),
but one of the e-mails that have attracted most attention is one
from November 1999 where Phil Jones of CRU wrote to Michael
Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes (the authors of the
famous “hockey stick” graph that suggested unprecedented warming
during the last century) saying: “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.” By itself, that could mean
anything, but the source code of the related computer program
makes abundantly clear that they substitute Keith Briffa’s
original tree ring temperature proxy with Hadley’s instrumental
record from 1961 onwards in order to hide the apparent decline
in temperatures indicated by the tree-ring data
(4).
The general impression that one gets from reading the material
is that a small group of generously funded researchers have been
torturing the temperature data from all over the globe to get it
to show a 0.8ºC increase over the last 150 years, and,
amazingly, they (together with Al Gore, IPCC and others) have
managed to convince most people that such an increase is
unprecedented, caused by human CO2 emissions, and
disastrous for all life on the planet.
One of the other main issues in the climate gate scandal is that
the Hadley Climate Research Unit has resisted releasing data and
methods, so that other researchers could verify their results.
The scientific method in general requires researchers to make
their data and methods available for independent replication,
and the British Freedom of Information Act specifically requires
publicly funded institutions to do so, but the hacked e-mails
make clear how the involved climate researchers have resisted
and evaded legal and reasonable information requests.
Glacier Gate, on the other hand, is the debunking of the claim
in the IPCC’s fourth assessment report that Himalayan glaciers
are receding faster than in any other part of the world and
could “disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner”. This
statement has proven to be completely unfounded, and one
glaciologist, Professor Cogley at Ontario Trent University,
believe the IPCC has misread the date in a 1996 report which
said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350. The IPCC has
now officially retracted the statement (5),
but what makes it particularly embarrassing is that the IPCC
chairman had ridiculed Indian scientists who refuted the claim,
calling their work “voodoo science” (6).
Amazon Gate is another example of the flimsy evidence on which
the IPCC have based their claims of climate calamities. In the
Working Group II report of 2007 they state that “up to 40% of
the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight
reduction in precipitation” on the basis of a non peer-reviewed
WWF report whose lead author, Andy Rowell, is a free-lance
journalist. If you follow the reference used by WWF, it leads to
a 1999 article in Nature about the impacts of logging.
IPCC could have used that reference, as it is at least
peer-reviewed, but the problem may have been that the Nature-article
mentions nothing at all about climate change
(2).
However, by now it doesn’t matter much what the evidence shows
or does not show. The Climate Change Train is going at full
speed and it is difficult to get off. Many institutions, which
jumped on the climate change bandwagon before the Copenhagen
summit, have committed themselves and their budgets to climate
change activities instead of their usual activities, and now
find it difficult to backtrack.
Bolivia has planned a big
Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s
Rights
for April, and I hope this conference will try to assess what
are real threats to people and Mother Earth and what are
imaginary threats concocted by headline grabbing journalists,
researchers trying to get the results their employers wants, or
bureaucrats trying to secure funds for their institutions.
Admittedly, it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff
in this area, but somebody has to fight for effective solutions
to real problems rather than ineffective solutions to imaginary
problems.
Related articles:
-
Reconciling melting glaciers and falling temperatures in the
Bolivian highlands
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Climate Feedbacks: Positive or Negative
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How We Know What Isn't So
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Does the World Benefit from Being Deceived?
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Tipping Points
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Fighting Climate Change: Cures worse than the disease?
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Managing Change
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The Cynical Economist: Getting Our Priorities Straight
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