Copenhagen Not Coping So Well

Oh, goody. Things at the climate change conference are getting a little, um, hot...

The Copenhagen climate change conference appeared to be imploding from within and exploding from without on Wednesday.

Police fired tear gas, brandished batons and detained more than 200 protesters who tried to push through the security cordon around the Bella Center, as negotiations inside bogged down, for the second time this week, over differences between China and the West over emissions, funding issues and transparency.

"People around the world [are] actually expecting something to be done from us,” red-faced Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen lectured delegates from nearly 200 nations.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the highest-ranking American yet to appear at the talks, urged attendees to put aside their differences and “make Friday our day of success.”

Minutes earlier — in a surprise move that captured growing uncertainty over conference — Denmark’s climate minister, Connie Hedegaard, stepped aside as president of the conference, handing the gavel to Rasmussen, as head of the host country.

Outside, Danish police — who have been accused of heavy-handedness by human rights groups — clashed with thousands of environmental activists who descended on the complex from a nearby train station and demanded entry to the Bella Center.

...On Tuesday, Hedegaard made an emotional appeal for countries to put aside their differences to finalize a deal — after the G-77 bloc of developing nations accused her of trying to ram through an agreement amenable to the U.S. and other big industrialized nations.

But no sooner had Rasmussen assumed the presidency than those tensions burst out in the open again, with China, India, Bolivia, South Africa and Sudan saying they would block attempts by the Danish delegation to produce a draft text favored by most Western countries.

Minutes after taking the gavel, Rasmussen angrily denounced developing countries for seeking to delay consideration of the text, accusing them of focusing on "procedure, procedure, procedure."

He was immediately rebuked by a representative of China, a member of the G-77 bloc, who said moving forward too quickly was tantamount to "obstructionism" and a bullying attempt by the West.

This thing was bound to have problems, if John Kerry was involved. And that's before we consider the implications of Climategate, where the evidence keeps piling up that data was being manipulated, and the integrity of the data sets worldwide is now open to serious question. Indeed, Charlie Martin does a pretty good job explaining how access to the full set of data has already cast doubt on the controversial "hockey stick" graph. As he notes, the trick that was used to "hide the decline" actually looks much worse when we have all the data placed into the graph.

Brian Micklethwaite sums up the situation...

I've just been watching this video, of Lord Monkton laying into the Climategate gang. What makes it so potent is that he is quite bluntly calling them crooks, and calling anyone who still follows their fraudulent prophecies dupes and fools. He names names, and crimes. Yes, crimes. And yes, criminals. Criminals with names. Monkton does all this in his posh British public school voice. Nevertheless, you can almost see him doing that thing that fist fighters do, but with their beckoning hands rather than with their mouths, and pointing at their own chins. Come and get me! Give me your best shot! I say you are a pack of scoundrels. Prove me wrong! I say that the logical thing to do about "climate change" is: nothing. Nothing. Why on earth do you still have the damned nerve to think anything else? Such pugilistic vulgarities are not to be found in the text of the talk. Monkton is too canny, too cool, to get that excited. But that is the subtext.
...You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof. Unfair to all the fraud detectives (Watts, McIntyre, and the rest of them, including Monkton himself) though it undoubtedly was, those noble toilers, until the Climategate revelations erupted, had to prove everything, in defiance of the default position. Their every tiny blemish was jumped upon. Their major claims were ignored. Now the default position is slowly mutating into: It's all made-up nonsense. And the burden of proof is shifting onto the shoulders of all those who want to go on believing in such ever more discredited alarmism. In short, our side is winning this argument, big time.

And it turns out that the rich countries do indeed wish to remain rich, as I merely hoped was the case a week ago. The underlying point being: nobody is actually as scared about climate change as they were a few months back. Doubters who feared that there might have been "something in it", "no smoke without fire", etc., now doubt far more completely. All but the craziest warmists are now going rather quieter. The people who matter no longer feel deep in their guts, those of them who ever did, that there has to be a deal, or the earth will fry. All potential parties to it are now more willing than they were to walk away from Copenhagen with no deal, because the fear of being blamed for not reaching a deal is now (in the nick of time) being replaced by the fear of being accused of having reached a bad deal.

(hat tip: Instapundit) Sounds a bit like (a) the health care debate, and (b) a tipping point on climate change debate. The real problem for folks who believe that global warming is a real problem is that their credibility is in doubt, and that's going to be difficult to re-establish now.

It's Still the: Best. Science. Scandal. Ever.

Give credit where credit's due -- Jon Stewart provides a pretty good report on Climategate...



"He was just using a trick to hide the decline. That's just scientist-speak for using a standard statistical technique to... trick you into not knowing... about the decline." Although the Penthouse and polar bear lines are even better.

Meanwhile, Megan McArdle, in a post addressing some of the issues, zeroes in on the efforts of the climate researchers to avoid FOIA requests...

This is horrifying, and I simply cannot understand why so many of their supporters are willing to downplay it. A couple of sample quotes: "Unfortunately, there are also a couple of messages that suggest an effort to destroy emails that might have been subject to a Freedom of Information request. That's a genuine problem, though it's not clear to me just how big a problem it is. . . . So on a substantive level, there's really very little to this." that's from Kevin Drum, who I greatly respect. More worrying is Real Climate: "Suggestions that FOI-related material be deleted ... are ill-advised even if not carried out. What is and is not responsive and deliverable to an FOI request is however a subject that it is very appropriate to discuss."

Words fail one, reading that latter comment. Ill-advised? Deleting data in order to avoid an official information request is a crime, as is trying to coordinate same, even if you fail in the execution. It's also grossly unethical, and hard to reconcile with any reasonable understanding of science. Moreover, it's the sort of thing that is often done by people who have nasty secrets, so it's hard to pass it off with a blithe, "Oh, dear, now that was a wee bit naughty!"

Imagine reading this email exchange coming from, say, senior officials in the Bush administration. Would any of these bloggers regard this as the ethical equivalent of jaywalking on an empty street?

McArdle's right here -- deleting documents and talking about doing so screams cover-up, and lends credence to the worst things skeptics are saying about your claims... which you may not be able to substantiate, or cannot do so with as much strength as you did before. Ronald Bailey sums it up beautifully:

In their zeal to marginalize and stifle their critics, this insular band of climate researchers has damaged the very science they sought to defend. We all now are the losers. That’s the true tragedy of Climategate.

This may well be the case. Of course, anything that leads to more mocking of Al Gore can't be all bad.

Best.Science.Scandal.Ever

As if Climategate wasn't bad enough... the IPCC predicted that Himalayan glaciars may disappear by 2035, based on a 1996 study. Turns out that the study actually says 2350, so they're off by 215 years. (hat tip: Instapundit) This is only a big deal if you think the world might change a little in 215 years. It probably will -- keep in mind that in 1794, George Washington was stuck using dial-up Internet at Mount Vernon, or so I've heard.

Seriously, I'm guessing that this was an innocent error involving transposed numbers, but the IPCC seems to be losing credibility by the hour. The biggest problem for the climate scientists and researchers who believed in global warming is that their own arrogance makes them less credible when even innocent errors like this crop up. John Tierney, while discussing the scandal as a whole, makes this point generally...

As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause.

Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: “hide the decline,” used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit. He was discussing the preparation of a graph for the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization showing that temperatures in the past several decades were the highest of the past millennium.

Most of the graph was based on analyses of tree rings and other “proxy” records like ice cores and lake sediments. These indirect measurements indicated that temperatures declined in the middle of the millennium and then rose in the first half of the 20th century, which jibes with other records. But the tree-ring analyses don’t reveal a sharp warming in the late 20th century — in fact, they show a decline in temperatures, contradicting what has been directly measured with thermometers.

Because they considered that recent decline to be spurious, Dr. Jones and his colleagues removed it from part of the graph and used direct thermometer readings instead. In a statement last week, Dr. Jones said there was nothing nefarious in what they had done, because the problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts.

But the graph adorned the cover of a report intended for policy makers and journalists. The nonexperts wouldn’t have realized that the scariest part of that graph — the recent temperatures soaring far above anything in the previous millennium — was based on a completely different measurement from the earlier portion. It looked like one smooth, continuous line leading straight upward to certain doom.

The story behind that graph certainly didn’t show that global warming was a hoax or a fraud, as some skeptics proclaimed, but it did illustrate another of their arguments: that the evidence for global warming is not as unequivocal as many scientists claim.
...Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium.

Read Tierney's whole piece -- it's measured and well-written by someone who probably believes in manmade global warming, but is at a loss to explain why many of the scientists who made the case for it opted for exaggeration and obfuscation.

Meanwhile, I have to cite my favorite comparison thus far in this scandal -- one reader of Jonah Goldberg's likened the climate researchers to the Underpants Gnomes. In fact, there's something beautiful in referencing that episode, as noted by this point on its Wikipedia page...

The episode satirizes the common complaint of large corporations lacking scruples and driving seemingly wholesome smaller independent companies out of business. Paul Cantor, a literary critic and economic theorist, who has taught college courses revolving around the "Gnomes" episode, has described it as "the most fully developed defense of capitalism" ever produced by the show. Cantor said the episode challenges the stereotype that small businesses are public servants who truly care about their customers by portraying local business owner Mr. Tweek as greedier and having less scruples than that of the corporation he is challenging. At the end of the episode, Kyle and Stan conclude big corporations are good due to the services they provide people, and uphold the notion that the businesses providing the best product deserve to succeed in the marketplace and grow to become larger.
The episode portrays the mainstream media as biased against capitalism during a news report in which the reporter openly speaks in favor of Harbucks' opponents. Cantor said the use of children in the anti-Harbucks commercials demonstrate a liberal tendency to use young people to advance their positions. Economic protectionism, portrayed in the episode as Mr. Tweek seeking a law to ban Harbucks from South Park, is portrayed as a tool used by businessmen to restrict free entry into the marketplace to protect their own profits.

This is a scandal where we can reference both Ghostbusters and one of my favorite episodes of South Park, while criticizing a graph that's been called a hockey stick. If someone could find a way to make a beer or Jessica Alba reference, this might be the Best.Scandal.Ever that didn't involve actors, musicians, or sports stars.

Maybe Global Warming Is Caused by Hot Air Coming From Climate Scientists

Claudia Rosett asks an important question about ClimateGate...

Climate bureaucracy has become a major aspect of employment throughout the UN system, with almost every UN agency and program enlisting fresh bevies of staff to work the climate angles. On its climate “Gateway” web page, the UN lists more than three dozen UN-system “partners on climate change,” from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to the UN Development Program (star of the Cash-for-Kim scandal two years ago in North Korea) to the International Telecommunications Union. On the basis of calculations performed deep within the entrails of UN bureacracies that thrive these days by attributing the world’s troubles to climate and then allocating blame, penalties, bonanzas and UN commissions on the basis of the IPCC “scientific consensus,” this same UN climate Gateway web page informs us that “Seven of ten disasters are climate related.” To fix this, the UN tells us, we need only trust to the UN’s guidance. That would be the same UN that not so long ago dealt with its own propensity for corruption by disbanding its anti-corruption task force; the same UN that once claimed Oil-for-Food was the most heavily audited program it had ever run; the same UN that can’t tally its own global budget.

And of course, just ahead lies the Copenhagen climate summit, with Ban calling for a deal to be sealed which, with great pain for the world’s most productive societies, and great gain for the UN’s expanding empire of carbon-0-crats, “satisfies the demands of science.” That would be the UN version of science, which, if it bears any resemblance to the UN version of book-keeping, should give great pause. The UN has immense vested interests here, and is clearly prepared to roll right over the disclosures of climategate. These are decisions which within the UN go way beyond the IPCC, and involve UN officials — all the way up to Ban Ki-moon — ignoring any genuine scientific dissent that doesn’t fit their plans, or fill the UN coffers. What would we see were we able to peer into the “climate” emails exchanged throughout the UN system over the years? Just asking.

(hat tip: Instapundit) The proponents of global warming reforms seem unwilling to acknowledge that there is a problem, when the head of the IPCC wants to blame Big Oil for the leak of the data, presumably because they have a lot of money invested in proving the global warming crowd wrong. Unfortunately for that idea, it can go both ways, as illustrated by Bret Stephens...

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

...None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

Including garbage sounds like the basis for wonderful science, doesn't it? Clive Crook, who's not exactly a conservative, appropriately rips the scientists who worte the emails...

The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And, as Christopher Booker argues, this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process. It is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David Henderson called the environmental policy milieu [subscription required]. It goes to the core of that process.

One theme, in addition to those already mentioned about the suppression of dissent, the suppression of data and methods, and the suppression of the unvarnished truth, comes through especially strongly: plain statistical incompetence. This is something that Henderson's study raised, and it was also emphasised in the Wegman report on the Hockey Stick, and in other independent studies of the Hockey Stick controversy. Of course it is also an ongoing issue in Steve McIntyre's campaign to get hold of data and methods. Nonetheless I had given it insufficient weight. Climate scientists lean very heavily on statistical methods, but they are not necessarily statisticians. Some of the correspondents in these emails appear to be out of their depth. This would explain their anxiety about having statisticians, rather than their climate-science buddies, crawl over their work.

I'm also surprised by the IPCC's response. Amid the self-justification, I had hoped for a word of apology, or even of censure. (George Monbiot called for Phil Jones to resign, for crying out loud.) At any rate I had expected no more than ordinary evasion. The declaration from Rajendra Pachauri that the emails confirm all is as it should be is stunning. Science at its best. Science as it should be. Good lord. This is pure George Orwell. And these guys call the other side "deniers".
...Megan McArdle adopts a world-weary tone similar to The Economist's: this is how science is done in the real world. If I were a scientist, I would resent that. She has criticised the emails and the IPCC response to them, then says she still believes the consensus view on climate change. Well, that was my position at the end of last week, and I suppose it still is. But how do I defend it? There is far more of a problem here for the consensus view than Megan and ordinarily reliable commentators like The Economist acknowledge. I am not a climate scientist. In the end I have to trust the experts. That is what we are asked to do. "Trust us, we're scientists".

Remember that this is not an academic exercise. We contemplate outlays of trillions of dollars to fix this supposed problem. Can I read these emails and feel that the scientists involved deserve to be trusted? No, I cannot. These people are willing to subvert the very methods--notably, peer review--that underwrite the integrity of their discipline. Is this really business as usual in science these days? If it is, we should demand higher standards--at least whenever "the science" calls for a wholesale transformation of the world economy. And maybe some independent oversight to go along with the higher standards.

I think the best summary of what Crook is saying in the last two paragraphs comes from Jonah Goldberg, who, when describing the IPCC response, cited the Bill Murray line from Ghostbusters: "Back off, man. We're scientists." The fact that the leading climate change scientists are parroting the same defense isn't good. Perhaps we can take solace in knowing that Dr. Venkman and his colleagues were correct in their assertions... but then again, they had real proof that the ghosts existed.