Reading the Climategate books

The ongoing turmoil from the release of the Climategate papers continues. With the Guardian catching up with the rest of the British media and having finally got around to reading the e-mails, it begins to look as though the chances of this being swept under the rug, at least in the UK is becoming less likely. In the United States the administrators that were looking into the case against Professor Mann at Penn State have rendered an initial opinion. The fact that they did not completely exonerate him, but instead referred his conduct to a faculty committee is not quite as good a result for him as he appears to pretend. The quality of the judges means that they will be more disinterested in him personally, and likely more certain to consider the evidence. But it really depends on the individuals, and a couple of strong opinions either way can have quite an impact on the final outcome.

Were they wise they could do considerably worse than to read some of the books and articles that have now come out to explain both the background and some of the issues that have been revealed by the release of information. I was fortunate to get a copy of A.W. Montford’s book on “The Hockey Stick Illusion,” (not easily accessible yet in the USA) as well as Steven Mosher and Thomas Fuller’s "Climategate: The CRUtape Letters.” Prior to reading these two I had just finished Christopher Booker’s “The Real Global Warming Disaster,” and after reading that I read the “Climategate Analysis,” by John Costella . Then I read Climategate, and finished with Hockey Stick.


Now you might think that I oversaturated on information, but in fact each takes a somewhat different focus to the information, and two of them are more directed at events before Climategate, than the e-mails and programs themselves. So, as it happens, I was lucky in getting the books and reading them in the order that I did, because it gave a much better picture of some of the issues that are not all that evident in the day-to-day exchanges and comments that one see on the blogs and in the press. And, if you have the chance, I would recommend that you read them in a slightly different order to the one that I did. (And slightly guilty confession, both Booker’s and Montford’s books kept me reading far later in the night than I intended, until they were done). But start with Chris Booker’s.

One of the irritating habits of those who espouse the arguments of the AGW leading us to imminent catastrophe is that they claim that the issues are complex, and that you really have to be a climate scientist to understand them. Well, on a matter of fact, if you read these books you don’t have to have that pre-existing knowledge. For in reporting the stories, and explaining their impact and relevance, the information is clear, concisely given and explained in context. (On the other hand, to be mischievous, the critical papers on which much of the AGW crowd has fixated– the Mann, Bradley and Hughes paper in Nature of April 1998, and that in Geophysical Research Letters in 1999, which introduced the “Hockey Stick” shape to the historic global climate community– have been described as “obscure” in the Wegman Report, among other places).

Booker goes into some detail on the origins of the IPCC, and those who have moved it to the prominent place that it now holds in so many discussions relating to the global future. He goes through the operations of the IPCC, and their successive reports to the nations on the “state of the climate.” And he has some uncomfortable conclusions about the path that the British Government is following in its commitment to reducing the generation of greenhouse gases.

It is important that this issue be raised, because this is not some academic exercise, where a couple of faculty have been caught doing naughty things behind the potting shed. It is difficult to over-emphasize the impact that this topic has had on national governments around the world. And Europe has been in the forefront of modifying plans for its future, based on the predictions that have been presented, largely unchallenged, on the impact of the greenhouse gases. (And as a side note it is only this week that Ofgem, has warned that the planned future supply of energy to the United Kingdom is going to come up short, and sooner rather than later.)

One of the key pieces of information that has been used to justify the “precautionary principle” argument for reducing carbon dioxide emissions is the MBH papers and their generation of the infamous “hockey stick” where global temperatures were shown to have declined since the year 1,000 AD until around 1900, when they suddenly started to rise at an ever increasing pace. This shape is not dissimilar to that of a hockey stick, with the shank being the slow decline over nine centuries, and the blade being the rising temperature. And it was assembled from a number of different proxies, one of which, a feature that the Penn State Review panel apparently missed, suddenly stopped working, but which was quickly hidden and glossed over in the formation of the telling image. A.W. Montford explains the criticality of this graph to the global warming argument.

As some of you may have noted from earlier posts, I am convinced that there was a Medieval Warming Period (WMP), and that it was warmer than the present. It was followed by a Little Ice Age, which we have been leaving, as the globe has warmed for the last 150 – 200 years. But that is an embarrassment to the AGW argument, and thus the adulatory reception (obscure language non-besides) for the MBH papers, since they did away with the MWP and the need to explain why this warming was remarkable. As I said Montford’s book was the second to keep me awake into the wee hours (and this is not as though I hadn’t earlier spent time at both Climate Audit and RealClimate web sites reading a lot of the background information that is covered here). Chronologizing the events that led to the widespread acceptance of the curve (few of whose acolytes likely understand how it was derived) and explaining its problems while interweaving the story of how Steve McIntyre fought to get the data to show that it was in error, it is, as others have said, a fascinating detective story.

The Hockey Stick Illusion explains the underlying science and what principal components are, and a bit about their use and misuse as it relates to the MBH plots. These are the useful things to know, and not difficult to follow, and because the world has yet to recognize how critical these issues are in the proper understanding of the use and mis-use of climate proxies, it really helps to have it explained. (Ed note – I know a bit about this, and would have explained it slightly differently, but this way may be the best for the layman). The Climategate e-mails were released almost as this book went to press, and so there is only one chapter on their impact, at the end, that points out how much of the conjecture in the earlier chapters was validated, once the e-mails were available.

The CRUtape letters is more of a detailed analysis of those e-mails. It puts them into contextual relevance, with short “cheat sheets” at the beginning of the Chapters, so that you are prepared to understand the ramifications of the selected quotations from the individual e-mails, and thus gives a greater grasp of their meaning. There is a considerable amount of background information given in the book, that gives a contextual understanding of why some of the e-mails have the importance that they have. This is certainly true about the way that the rules were manipulated to allow unpublished papers to be cited in the IPCC reports, which they were not supposed to be. It is a fascinating story of collusion and the ways that the small cabal that controls the climate science debate work to exclude contrary opinions. (And then, of course, they claim that they are the victims of unprecedented PR campaigns against them, when their position has dominated the debate for years).

The alternate approach to that used in the CRUtape letters is to rely on the e-mails themselves to tell the story. That is much more the way in which John Costella tells the story. He also includes more on the Tiljander story ( a pet peeve of mine) without actually using her name, but gives the most complete recounting of that little episode. (Oh, and that summary is free).

Both ways are informative, and there is a lot to be gained by reading both. The machinations behind the scene are somewhat disappointing to read, you realize that there are qualified folk out there who, as a result of this bunch of . . (well the ICO in the UK did say that there have been crimes committed) have had their careers blighted. And sadly the way that the processes, which rely on trust, were blatantly misused with the compliance of journal editors as well as paper authors is a damning record of a shameful period in the history of this young science.

If there is one e-mail that puts this in context, it is this one from Ben Santer

There has been some additional fallout from the publication of our paper in the International Journal of Climatology. After reading Steven McIntyre’s discussion of our paper on climateaudit.com (and reading about my failure to provide McIntyre with the data he requested), an official at DOE headquarters has written to Cherry Murray at LLNL, claiming that my behavior is bringing LLNL’s good name into disrepute. Cherry is the Principal Associate Director for Science and Technology at LLNL, and reports to LLNL’s Director (George Miller).

Pity that there weren’t more folk with that sort of a concern.

The full stories are still a long way from being told, but reading these books will give you the understanding to follow, as the issues continue to play out. The Guardian stories, for example, have not yet got around to grasping the implications of the way in which the data, the press, the public and the science, were manipulated and the impact that this will have on the overall message. Unfortunately the e-mails also show the complicity of several of the main media reporters in selling the story that the cabal were promoting. And while the British press are now in active pursuit of the story, that hasn’t happened in the United States – yet!

The CIA, Climate Change, and the Booker and Plimer books

Thanks to Bruce Everett I gather that just when there are concerns about how well we are handling the war on terror, the CIA is being diverted to look at the evidence for climate change. Now I don’t have any problem with folks making use of data that was acquired while the CIA was carrying out their main responsibility. If the pictures of Afghanistan, for example, looking for terror camps could also monitor where the ice fields are and this can be given to those working in the field then that is a good thing. Afghanistan has a problem with water shortages, and there could be good reason for the CIA to be aware of some of those issues.

However the claim by some of the participants that the program is basically “free” appears to be a bit of an overstatement. And there is more to it than the initial statements would imply.

The monitoring program has little or no impact on regular intelligence gathering, federal officials said, but instead releases secret information already collected or takes advantage of opportunities to record environmental data when classified sensors are otherwise idle or passing over wilderness.

Since it appears that there is more involvement by the CIA than just passing over some pictures.

Controversy has often dogged the use of federal intelligence gear for environmental monitoring. In October, days after the C.I.A. opened a small unit to assess the security implications of climate change, Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said the agency should be fighting terrorists, “not spying on sea lions.”

So that there is the cost and opportunity cost for that group which I suspect does not come for nothing. And thus to the comment from Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA), the Chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee, who apparently said

“If you really want to understand where al-Qaida and other bad guys are going to move next, one of the things you have to understand is climate change. Famine and drought cause human migration and poverty. That creates pockets where terrorists can organize.”

I rather suspect that the problems that the terrorists are more able to exploit are those such as the power shortages in countries such as Pakistan, that I have written about before, where load shedding of up to 9 hours a day is already occurring, or the lack of electric power (and the benefits that it brings) in countries such as Yemen.

A report from 2006 notes that rural electricity reaches only 20% of the population.

The low access and the absence of reliable electricity supply have been recognized as severe constraints to economic growth in Yemen, and to the achievement of the Government of Yemen’s poverty alleviation objectives.

It ranks far down the list of nations, on a par with Haiti, and just ahead of Bangladesh and Sudan. Yet such is the focus of the current Administration on Climate Change – despite the growing evidence that the whole program needs a serious review to determine how honest it has been – that more critical concerns are getting subsumed below that effort. And if these involve the diversion of CIA time and effort then it goes beyond just being dumb.

I read a couple of books over the holidays, the first, which I highly recommend is Christopher Booker’s “The Real Global Warming Disaster.” For those who are less cynical of the AGW arguments there is a contrasting review at the Guardian, but that review highlights the way in which those whom I now refer to as the distorters argue when faced with a straightforward investigative report of the evolution of the climate change movement. The book is a very readable and documented assembly of fact leading up to the mess that the United Kingdom Government is rapidly getting itself into with its future plans for energy supply, as it tries to meet EC regulations and its own promises for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The Guardian criticism on the other hand (bearing in mind that Mr. Booker writes for one of their rivals – the Telegraph – in the UK) is the more typical generic global warming diatribe. It is headed with a picture from New Orleans after Katrina hit (a characteristic choice typical of the fear-mongering and “grab anything scary” mentality of the distorters, but given the lack of hurricanes striking the USA last year after AGW proponents had forecast greater damage and frequency of such hurricanes perhaps becoming a bit of an embarrassing one). It is however interesting to read the Guardian comment on the hockey stick graph from Professor Mann.

Predictably, he attacks the infamous "hockey stick" graph, a plot of global mean temperatures over the past 1,000 years produced by two scientists in 1998 which shows little change for the entire period until suddenly soaring in the 20th century.

It is now mostly accepted that the analysis that produced these data was wrong.

Somehow I don’t recall seeing that admission in any Guardian headline. And the Guardian article, rather than specific detailed criticism of the facts in the book (there aren’t any given) relies on “trust me” and “all those scientists couldn’t be wrong.”

Go read the book, I enjoyed it and it was informative.

On the other hand I also am plodding through “Heaven and Earth” by Ian Plimer, which has been acclaimed as providing the “missing science” to the global warming debate. And it does, but largely by bringing together the facts in the 2,311 articles and references that have information that relates to the global warming debate. The problem with trying to integrate such a voluminous amount of material is that it means that there are roughly four different references to a page and thus the information from any one of them can only be slightly discussed as it is integrated into the greater whole.

As a result the book reads much more like one of the dusty textbooks that I used to have to struggle through in an earlier part of my life. The facts are there, they are relatively well assembled, so that if I want to know more about the relative elevation of land after the passing of the great ice sheets from most of Europe the information is collated, there are a couple of contour maps, and there are the references. But while the subject of land subsidence, rather than sea-level rise is covered, and combined with a very brief history of the Thames (which explains in very brief passing why the Thames Barrier has to be raised more frequently with time), the subject is not described in much detail. There is so much that has to be covered, that the pace of the book ends up being too fast, and topics such as that, which could stand more discussion, are already left behind. Of course in covering such a broad field, had that type of coverage been given then the book would likely have been at least three times as thick. The provision of so many references does, however, provide a body of fact, which is as with Booker's book, met with significant criticism not all of which was as well based in the facts, which the book in general provides, either directly or through reference.

And the problem that this can get Professor Plimer into is that because it is such a great compendium of information, it is difficult for him to cover any specific area of the topic in enough detail to get much beyond the superficial comment. And this is a pity because the topics are sometimes covered so rapidly that it is hard to grasp all the meanings of the information, although the references are there so one can follow up on areas where there are questions.

It will probably end up on my reference shelf, not so much for what it says, but so that, when there is a question on a particular topic I can find the references that he uses and chase them up to get the more detailed information that I am looking for.