Tom Palmer, Tyler Cowen, Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and Eazy-E
No, I’m not angling for Google hits. This EPJ post really does involve all of the above. What’s the connection with Eazy-E? Simple. When I read Wenzel’s post I thought of a song that I discarded when I realized I didn’t want my young son ever stumbling on my CDs from college.
Yet More Climategate
I am starting to run out of steam on this issue, but really, I am only posting stuff that increases my shock at just how much these guys were doing to hide their data and techniques. If you have 15 minutes and the interest, I strongly recommend this now-famous blog post by the amateur guy who probably made the first Freedom of Information request to CRU. He shows that Jones et al. were planning their strategy (to avoid divulging) before they got a single FOI request. He then goes through the emails chronologically, outlining the progression of their various attempts to do damage control.
What’s really neat is that the guy intersperses the internal CRU emails with the official rejection letters he was getting regarding his requests for their station data. So you can see that they were truly just inventing BS excuses to refuse his request. At one point, one of the rejection letters contradicts the claim of the first rejection letter. They actually say at one point that they don’t have a list of all the temperature stations they currently use to construct their official temperature series. (!!)
Climategate Repercussions: Head of CRU, Phil Jones, Steps Down Pending Investigation
LONDON — Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.
The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.
The allegations were made after more than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists were posted to the Web following the security breach last month.
The e-mails were seized upon by some skeptics of man-made climate change as proof that scientists are manipulating the data about its extent.
Potpourri
* Gold broke $1,200.
* Larry Kudlow’s open letter to Tiger Woods. (Yes, he goes there.)
* Wesbury and Stein on anti-Obama-stimulus hypocrites.
* A fantastic Richard Lindzen op ed. Sometimes I think the climate change skeptics I respect the most don’t make their strongest points in a pop forum. But this one is out of the park. My favorite part, which needs some explanation:
The IPCC’s Scientific Assessments generally consist of about 1,000 pages of text. The Summary for Policymakers is 20 pages….However, it has been my experience that even the summary is hardly ever looked at. Rather, the whole report tends to be characterized by a single iconic claim.
The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn’t reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
To understand Lindzen’s powerful argument, you need to know exactly what it means when leading climate scientists say that there is strong evidence of “anthropogenic [manmade] global warming.” Let me reproduce my earlier summary of their evidence:
Richard Lindzen…thinks that the cutting-edge models do not correctly model certain processes in the atmosphere at the “micro” level. Orthodox climatologists concede the point, but then challenge Lindzen to tweak their models in order to come up with a better simulated fit with historical observations (on temperatures, rainfall, etc.). Thus far Lindzen has been unable to do this, because the fastest computers would not be able to run a simulation of the entire world, at a scale small enough to capture the effects Lindzen points to, and obey all the laws of physics.[1] What has happened (it seems to me) is that even the latest generation of climate models necessarily make some heroic simplifying assumptions, in order to render the model tractable. Lindzen isn’t accusing the modelers of being lazy. Even so, he maintains that their models are still crude and give very misleading results. The connection between the work of Paul Samuelson and, say, Israel Kirzner should be obvious.
What is particularly worrisome to me is that the case for anthropogenic global warming runs basically like this (and see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report [IPCC AR4] section here [pdf] in their own words, especially Frequently Asked Question 9.2 on page 702): When the modelers simulate the 20th century, they achieve a closer fit to the historical trends if they assume large, positive feedback effects from human greenhouse gas emissions. If the modelers adjust the dials (so to speak) and turn down the possible influence of human emissions, then, so long as we insist the models obey the laws of physics, the fit between the simulated temperatures and observed temperatures gets worse.
OK now with that background, you can understand the power of Lindzen’s WSJ argument. Global temperatures have undeniably risen quickly in the 20th century. Skeptics say that we can’t be sure human activities are driving this trend, because there is so much about natural variability that the computer models don’t take into account. But the IPCC standard bearers come back and say these models are good enough for the purpose, and from what we know of internal, natural variability, we can’t get the models to reproduce the warming of the 20th century. Only if we assume that human impacts on greenhouse gases (through emissions and cutting down forests etc.) have a large effect, can the latest computer models do a good job simulating the observed climate changes.
OK, so now Lindzen is bringing up a different point: It is well known that since 1998, global temperatures either have slightly fallen or have been flat (depending on whom you quote), even though greenhouse gas emissions grew faster than the models predicted they would. The models that the IPCC uses predicted that global temperatures would have risen from 1998 onward, of course subject to natural variability.
So what Lindzen is here claiming, is that the IPCC apologists are undercutting themselves. In order to explain away the lack of (modeled) warming in the last decade, they need to rely on a large variance in natural climate factors. But then this weakens their claim that natural variability alone is insufficient to explain the warming of the 20th century.
Before Climategate, I would have been much less likely to pay credence to Lindzen on this particular claim. I would have believed a Gavin Schmidt if he said, “We are correctly accounting for both ends of the issue, and we’re in the sweet spot middle. Our models have just enough natural variability to explain the recent flat temperatures, but not enough natural variability to explain the overall warming trend in the 20th century.”
Yet after seeing Michael Mann wonder aloud if he and his colleagues have actually checked that this explanation about post-1998 temperatures is consistent with their models, I am much more inclined to believe Lindzen’s take.
Tyler Cowen Never Fails to Disappoint: His Evolving Views on Climategate
For those of you who don’t know, Tyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University. When I realized he had a popular blog, I was very excited because GMU students (whom I liked) had told me, “Tyler is the smartest libertarian alive” and things of that nature. So I was preparing to be dazzled.
Well, just like Star Wars Episode I, Tyler did not live up to my impossible expectations. So I really think that explains why I get so frustrated with him.
Anyway, one of the cute things about Tyler is that his opinions are as unstable as global mean temperatures. Take Climategate for instance. When the scandal first broke Tyler said:
I’ve had many readers emailing me, asking what I think of the “trove” of emails unearthed from climate change researchers. I’ll admit I haven’t read through the rather embarrassing revelations, I’ve only read a few media summaries and excerpts. I see a few lessons:
1. Do not criticize other people in emails or assume that your emails will remain confidential, especially if you are working on a politically controversial topic. Ask a lawyer about this, if need be. “Duh,” they will say to you.
2. The Jacksonian mode of discourse, or mode of conduct for that matter, can do harm to your cause, especially if you are otherwise trying to claim the scientific high ground.
The substantive issues remains as they were. In Bayesian terms, if it turns out that many leading scientists do not practice numbers one and two, I am surprised that you are surprised. It’s very often that the scientific consensus “sounds that way.”
In other words, I don’t think there’s much here, although the episode should remind us of some common yet easily forgotten lessons.
I should add that this episode will seem very important to you, if you conceive of the matter in terms of the moral qualities of “us vs. them.”
OK so the Bayesian response is that this shouldn’t affect your opinion of the underlying science of climate change.
Oops that’s not quite right. After further review, today Tyler now says:
Good vs. evil thinking causes us to lower our value of a person’s opinion, or dismiss it altogether, if we find out that person has behaved badly. We no longer wish to affiliate with those people and furthermore we feel epistemically justified in dismissing them.
Sometimes this tendency will lead us to intellectual mistakes.
Take Climategate. One response is: 1. “These people behaved dishonorably. I will lower my trust in their opinions.”
Another response, not entirely out of the ballpark, is: 2. “These people behaved dishonorably. They must have thought this issue was really important, worth risking their scientific reputations for. I will revise upward my estimate of the seriousness of the problem.”
I am not saying that #2 is correct, I am only saying that #2 deserves more than p = 0. Yet I have not seen anyone raise the possibility of #2. It very much goes against the grain of good vs. evil thinking: Who thinks in terms of: “They are evil, therefore they are more likely to be right.”
(Which views or goals of yours would you behave dishonorably for? Are they all your least correct views or least important goals? With what probability? Might it include the survival of your children?)
I do understand that this line of reasoning can be abused: “The Nazis went to a lot of trouble, etc.” The Bayesian point stands.
So now–if you were a sloppy reader–you would come away thinking the Bayesian response is to increase your estimate of the probability of the severity of manmade climate change.
Now clearly something must have happened to make Tyler change his initial reaction–this shouldn’t affect your opinion of the science at all–to his new reaction: This could very well mean you were previously underplaying the significance of the threat.
I wonder which of the CRU emails made him change his mind? (A Bayesian can only change his mind when new evidence comes in, to make him update his priors.) Remember, the sophisticated Tyler thought people were naive for not realizing how saucy academics could be in the first reaction.
So what method of dishonorable behavior shocked even Tyler–which he read about after his first post–that made him realize this was unusual indeed, and that maybe the problem was more severe than the average person would have initially thought?
I cannot rule out with 95% confidence the null hypothesis that Tyler wakes up every morning and says, “How can I annoy Bob Murphy today?”
UPDATE: Okay I put my finger on something else that really bothers me about Tyler’s latest. It’s not as if these scientists (especially the RealClimate guys) in the spotlight have been meek about telling the public how serious the problem is. So for Tyler’s story to work, the Bayesian would have to reason like this:
“Wow! Before when these scientists were telling me it was urgent that we stabilize CO2 concentrations at x ppm or else our grandchildren were going to drown, I thought they were lying. But now that I see they are willing to delete emails, bully journal editors, and tinker with graphs to remove doubts in the mind of the reader, I no longer think they were lying about how serious the problem is.”
Last point: What is also annoying is that I think Tyler plays favorites. He is a really sharp guy and he uses his creativity to invent (what are in my opinion) absurd rationalizations for things that often increase State power. That per se doesn’t make him wrong, it just annoys me because I think he’s inconsistent and flippant on things that have serious consequences. For example, suppose after the waterboarding stuff broke someone on Fox News had argued, “You see, the critics think this has all been about Bush funneling money to Halliburton, but it really is about protecting Americans. Do you really think they would waterboard someone 100+ times, if they didn’t really think they were saving lives?” Now would Tyler have blogged about what a great epistemologist this hypothetical commentator was? I seriously doubt it.
Gold Flirting With $1,200
Can it do it? Yes it can!
(My son has been watching Bob the Builder lately.)
Clarification on Climategate
If you want to follow this stuff on the cutting edge, the site to visit is ClimateAudit, which is run by Steve McIntyre, the intrepid outsider who caught Mann with his pants down on the “hockey stick” graph. (Actually ClimateAudit is overwhelmed right now with new visitors because of Climategate, and so McIntyre is placing his new posts at a mirror site, here.)
The problem with McIntyre is that he shares Ludwig von Mises’ expectations on the knowledge of the reader. Just as Mises would make one-off comments about Bohm-Bawerk’s capital theory or the Weber-Fechner physiological law, so too does McIntyre assume all of his thousands of readers are totally familiar with the history of climate science and just want McIntyre to give them the actual freaking computer code to replicate Jones graph from 1999. (!!)
So anyway, that’s why you have me here. Lately my purpose has not been to invent new material but to translate the work of other giants into a version that you, the unwashed masses, can understand…
Now that I’ve made the opening funnies, let’s get down to business. I had been aware of this (vaguely) but it didn’t really hit me until a commenter at ClimateAudit said it explicitly. To set the context, PaulM first said:
Steve I really think you need to explain things more clearly for the thousands of new readers who are now reading your blog. Most of them will not understand this. I’ll have a go, please correct:
The green line is tree-ring data on the left. On the right it has been smoothly merged into temperature data. This is Michael Mann’s trick, that he falsely claims is never done. The reason they do it is to hide the fact that otherwise the green tree-ring data curve would go down in the late 20th century rather than up, showing that the tree-ring data is useless at representing temperature. Hence “hide the decline”.
Then to endorse this take (which I endorse as well, for what that’s worth), Calvin Ball said:
Paul, that’s my take. And I agree that this is important for the masses to get; the popular interpretation of “hide the decline” is somehow concealing the lack of warming over the past decade. This is completely wrong, but it’s catching on.
Does everybody get what he’s saying? When Jones said in the infamous CRU email that he used “Mike [Mann]’s Nature trick…to hide the decline,” he was NOT talking about a decline in actual global temperatures that thwarted the claims of global warming.
On the contrary, he was talking about a decline in the proxy for global temperatures based on tree ring observations. So what happens is that from 1960 on, the proxy starts dropping while the actual temperatures go up. (See the divergence in this post.) Ironically then, if actual global temperatures had NOT risen in the last half of the 20th century, then there would be less of a problem to “hide.”
Now you might ask, “Huh? Why do they need to hide the decline in a proxy of temperature, when we already know the actual temperature post-1960?”
Good question; I’m glad you asked. The answer is that to make the claim that the warming of the 20th century is unprecedented in the last x years (I don’t remember the actual number the alarmists use, but it’s big)–meaning it must be due to human activity and not natural variability–we need to know what the global temperature was, say, 800 years ago. And unfortunately all the educated people back then were busy copying the Bible by hand, rather than setting up temperature stations (and being careful to filter out the Monastery Heat Island effect).
So in order to demonstrate that the 20th century warming is unusually rapid, the climate scientists have to construct a proxy of global temperatures going back before the period of modern instrumentation. One of these series is based on tree rings.
Now you see the problem. If the tree-ring proxy diverges sharply from actual recorded temperatures from 1960 onward, then we can’t trust it when it tells us that temperatures have been fairly stable before modern economic growth. Hence the claims of the alarmists are undercut.
In conclusion, Jones was not trying to “hide” the lack of global warming since 1998, as many people are probably concluding. So the problematic phrase in his email is “hide,” not “the decline.”
(I am pretty sure my explanation above is correct, but by all means if someone thinks I have botched a particular point please bring it to my attention.)
Two Honest Opponents on Climate Alarmism
Part of why I am skeptical of some of the loudest proponents of large-scale government intervention to fight climate change is that, even on their own terms, the suggested remedies won’t stave off disaster.
However, a few of the people on the other side of this issue seem very sincere to me. I still disagree with them, but I think it is truly an intellectual disagreement. One is George Monbiot, who reiterates his feeling “alone” in condemning the leaked CRU behavior. He writes:
I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.
The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people’s denial. Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We’ll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.
It is true that much of what has been revealed could be explained as the usual cut and thrust of the peer review process, exacerbated by the extraordinary pressure the scientists were facing from a denial industry determined to crush them. One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
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[Jones’] message looks awful. It gives the impression of confirming a potent meme circulated by those who campaign against taking action on climate change: that the IPCC process is biased. However good the detailed explanations may be, most people aren’t going to follow or understand them. Jones’s statement, on the other hand, is stark and easy to grasp.
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When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.
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The crisis has been exacerbated by the university’s handling of it, which has been a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond. RealClimate reports that “We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.” In other words, the university knew what was coming three days before the story broke. As far as I can tell, it sat like a rabbit in the headlights, waiting for disaster to strike.When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU’s opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped “no comment” and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean “guilty as charged”. When I got hold of him on Saturday, his answer was to send me a pdf called “WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999”. Had I a couple of hours to spare I might have been able to work out what the heck this had to do with the current crisis, but he offered no explanation.
By then he should have been touring the TV studios for the past 36 hours, confronting his critics, making his case and apologising for his mistakes. Instead, he had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Now, far too late, he has given an interview to the Press Association, which has done nothing to change the story.
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But the deniers’ campaign of lies, grotesque as it is, does not justify secrecy and suppression on the part of climate scientists. Far from it: it means that they must distinguish themselves from their opponents in every way. No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science. We should be the first to demand that it is unimpeachable, not the last.
Exacto-mundo. Those people who have been citing the “peer-review process” and “the science is settled” for years should have been shocked by ClimateGate. They don’t have to say, “Wow I guess it was all a hoax,” but to dismiss this as taking “technical terms” out of context is absurd. You don’t need to be a climate scientist to know what “delete any emails” means.
We also have James Hansen–Al Gore’s mentor and head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies–publicly saying that cap-and-trade is a phony solution (HT2 MasterResource):
Science reveals that climate is close to tipping points. It is a dead certainty that continued high emissions will create a chaotic dynamic situation for young people, with deteriorating climate conditions out of their control.
Science also reveals what is needed to stabilise atmospheric composition and climate. Geophysical data on the carbon amounts in oil, gas and coal show that the problem is solvable, if we phase out global coal emissions within 20 years and prohibit emissions from unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands and oil shale.
Such constraints on fossil fuels would cause carbon dioxide emissions to decline 60% by mid-century or even more if policies make it uneconomic to go after every last drop of oil.
Improved forestry and agricultural practices could then bring atmospheric carbon dioxide back to 350 ppm (parts per million) or less, as required for a stable climate.
Governments going to Copenhagen claim to have such goals for 2050, which they will achieve with the “cap-and-trade” mechanism. They are lying through their teeth.
Unless they order Russia to leave its gas in the ground and Saudi Arabia to leave its oil in the ground (which nobody has proposed), they must phase out coal and prohibit unconventional fossil fuels.Instead, the United States signed an agreement with Canada for a pipeline to carry oil squeezed from tar sands. Australia is building port facilities for large increases in coal export. Coal-to-oil factories are being built. Coal-fired power plants are being constructed worldwide. Governments are stating emission goals that they know are lies – or, if we want to be generous, they do not understand the geophysics and are kidding themselves.
Is it feasible to phase out coal and avoid use of unconventional fossil fuels? Yes, but only if governments face up to the truth: as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, their use will continue and even increase on a global basis.
Fossil fuels are cheapest because they are not made to pay for their effects on human health, the environment and future climate.
Governments must place a uniform rising price on carbon, collected at the fossil fuel source – the mine or port of entry. The fee should be given to the public in toto, as a uniform dividend, payroll tax deduction or both. Such a tax is progressive – the dividend exceeds added energy costs for 60% of the public.
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Cap and trade with offsets, in contrast [to a carbon tax refunded to the poor], is astoundingly ineffective. Global emissions rose rapidly in response to Kyoto, as expected, because fossil fuels remained the cheapest energy.
Cap and trade is an inefficient compromise, paying off numerous special interests. It must be replaced with an honest approach, raising the price of carbon emissions and leaving the dirtiest fossil fuels in the ground.Are we going to stand up and give global politicians a hard slap in the face, to make them face the truth? It will take a lot of us – probably in the streets. Or are we going to let them continue to kid themselves and us and cheat our children and grandchildren?
I strongly oppose Hansen’s call for a carbon tax and refund, but given his stated views, it makes sense. And in particular, if Hansen really believes we have a very short window to prevent utter climate catastrophe for our children, then he is being heroic for publicly denouncing the fraud of the Copenhagen meetings. (Or at least I think he is: For all I know he Obama secretly loves Hansen’s push for an explicit carbon tax, just as Paul Krugman isn’t really “speaking truth to power” when he says the stimulus is way too small.)
So I want to acknowledge that there are some climate change alarmists who at least have the courage of their stated convictions. If you really believed the computer models showed we have to wean ourselves from fossil fuels quickly to avoid disaster, then you should be mortified by the CRU emails and by the politicians’ discussions of Copenhagen. On that score, I respect Monbiot and Hansen.
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