The Last Two Months in Climate Science

Q4 2009 has not been good to True Believers of Anthropogenic Global Warming so far. Two big revelations have cast a shadow on, as far as I can tell, basically every piece of science¹ supporting the theory that human-created greenhouse gasses are having a catastrophic impact on the planet.

Breaking the Hockey Stick

First came a must-read article by Ross McKitrick: Defects in key climate data are uncovered. In it, he describes a number of problems surrounding the [in]famous “hockey stick” graph which is often used to demonstrate that the temperature on earth has sky-rocketed in response to the dramatic increase in greenhouse gasses produced by people. Among the claims presented in the article are:

• The original hockey stick was based on flawed mathematical procedures. To wit, those procedures would produce a hockey-stick-looking graph from any data fed into it, even data with no trend whatsoever.
• The original graph having been discredited, proponents of it fell back on other studies which demonstrated the same marked increase in temperature.
• Those other studies all made use of data that was long held secret, even when the studies were submitted to peer-reviewed journals.
• The spike in the “secret” data came from an incredibly small, and not statistically significant, number of core samples.
• Those core samples were used despite the availability of more data points (to which the study’s authors had access) and that the inclusion of the additional core samples essentially removed any uptick.
• Most of the studies making use of this bad data were published by a close-knit group of colleagues “only the names are in different orders”.

The reason that this is relevant, at least to me, is that many, many sites try to rehabilitate the hockey stick graph by pointing to these other studies, but those other studies are plagued by the exact same problem: data that appears to be hand-picked to produce a desired result.

Take, for example, the site Skeptical Science which attempts to debunk the claims of “climate skeptics” with more science. They explain that the hockey stick graph was never debunked as follows:

Since the hockey stick paper in 1998, there have been a number of proxy studies analysing a variety of different sources including corals, stalagmites, tree rings, boreholes and ice cores. They all confirm the original hockey stick conclusion: the 20th century is the warmest in the last 1000 years and that warming was most dramatic after 1920.

They post a link to a graph supporting their point. Wonderful! Except for one minor detail: virtually every study on that graph had at least one author named in McKitrick’s article as being one of those who used the flawed “secret” data. How many — if any — of those studies are actually valid? How many of their “hockey sticks” would flatten out when they were to use the full dataset?

But the hockey stick controversy is only the beginning.

Hiding the Decline

There are any number of innocent explanations for the hockey stick snafu. None of them constitute “good science”, but it’s easy enough to concoct an explanation that doesn’t amount to scientific forgery or other malicious behavior.

Earlier this week, hundreds of emails and documents were released. It is asserted that these emails and documents are legitimate and were stolen from Britain’s Climate Research Unit. The emails appear to show well-known climate scientists conspiring to evade freedom of information act requests, delete data, and even modify data to avoid having to face uncomfortable questions from “idiots” and “skeptics”².

A good number of quotes can be found here. Specifically, it appears that these scientists are struggling with the fact that recent readings are not showing any significant warming this decade, and they don’t know why:

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) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

There are two issues remaining: validation and context.

As to the former, while nobody has come out and validated the entire released archive, there have been some validation of individual emails and there have also been no challenges by anyone involved that they didn’t write what the archive suggests that they wrote. As to the latter, while some of these words might be better explained by context, some of them — like deleting data and documents or trying to stifle requests for their data (so that it doesn’t fall into the “wrong hands”) — seem impossible to defend.

What it’s important to keep in mind, though, is that nefarious deeds by those on one side of a debate does not mean that they are incorrect. Still, it casts doubt on every study done by those involved. How far back does this go? How much of the research is pure and trustworthy? How many of the scientists are trustworthy?

Politicizing the Science

These things are big problems in and of themselves, sure, but I believe that they are mere symptoms of a larger problem. Global Warming is no longer a scientific endeavor — it’s a political one. On both sides.

This is no way to find an answer.

There are those who would be disappointed if it turned out we weren’t destroying the climate as it would eliminate a an angle to push their political goals. There are those who would be delighted if AGW turned out to be bunk, but not because they care about environment, but because altering our behavior to reduce emissions will have serious consequences.

Nevertheless, the thing we should all want to find out is the truth. I don’t want to burden business or consumers with taxes based on bad science. Nor do I want sea levels to rise 30 feet if there’s something we can do to stop that.

These sorts of gambits end up hurting more than they help, because they serve to discredit the entire “side” of the debate. This is of little consequence if AGW is a myth, but if these sorts of tricks set the public opinion back a decade when we’re actually pushing temperatures upward, they could have caused irreparable harm.

But this, too is a symptom: if so many in the international scientific community hadn’t already pre-determined the answer they believe to be correct and, subsequently, cast a less critical eye to data that fit within their accepted worldview, we might never have gotten into some of these situations in the first place as data would have been demanded to be produced and these issues could be avoided.

Especially with respect to the hockey stick issue. It’s not difficult to imagine that the ensuing scientific work would be much different if the data behind the hockey stick had been scoured before years of science were laid on top of it.

Even still, as we near the end of 2009, there are some climate scientists who have some serious explaining to do.

1. and “science”.

2. Read: people who disagree with their findings.

Tags: Global Warming, Science!