Posted By Blake Hounshell
Monday, February 15, 2010 - 4:00 PM
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Historian Walter Russell Mead dings the New York Times for allegedly not writing about the controversy over the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, its embattled leader Rajendra K. Pachauri, and a related story about stolen emails at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit and the fallout that has damaged the reputation of its head, Phil Jones. He points to a story in today's Washington Post headlined "Series of missteps by climate scientists threatens climate-change agenda." [UPDATE: See Mead's thoughtful response, and my response to his response.]
I have worked with Mead and know him as a careful writer and steward of the facts. So I will assume he's not fully informed, and I hope that he'll change his mind after reading this. Because the real story here could just as easily be headlined, "Climate skeptics seize on editing errors, poor IPCC communications to manipulate willing British press and credulous blogosphere." (For the scientific take and full context for what is happening, read this careful explanation by a group of climate scientists at RealClimate.org.)
Exhibit A is this story in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid well known in the UK for its carelessness with facts, headlined, "Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995." The Daily Mail headline badly distorts an interview Jones gave to the BBC, in which he says the following:
Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
There's nothing new here; Jones is simply being careful in sticking to what he knows. He later goes on to say explicitly "I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity," which the Daily Mail conviently neglects to note.
Nor is it true that the Times is ignoring the story. I agree with Mead that the controversy deserves more prominent discussion, but longtime environmental reporter Andrew Revkin has been following it closely on his climate blog, Dot Earth, and his colleague Elisabeth Rosenthal weighed in on allegations that Pachauri has a conflict of interest (although that story had deep flaws). Here's science writer John Tierney opining on the East Anglia emails back in November. Here's reporter John Broder alluding to the controversies in a story about the misleading use of weather as a political football. Here's another Broder story about how Penn State scientist Michael Mann -- famous for producing the "hockey stick" curve showing a dramatic uptick in global temperatures in recent years -- was cleared of wrongdoing over the hacked East Anglia emails.
Mead also links uncritically to the writings of the Telegraph's Christopher Booker and the Times of London's Jonathan Leake, who are widely and persuasively criticized in the scientific community for exhibiting bias and reportorial sleight of hand. Take this section from Leake's recent story (run under the misleading headline, "World may not be warming, say scientists"):
Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.
His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.
Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.
Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.
In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.
Among numerous other problems with his story, Leake doesn't mention that NOAA -- in a peer-reviewed study (pdf) published in the Journal of Geophysical Research -- actually looked at Watts's findings and found a cooling bias among the weather stations. Whoops. [UPDATE: Watts says the paper only uses an early version of his data. I'm going to check it out.]
And that's just one example; I could go on and on and on. What the New York Times might want to dig into more deeply is: Just who are the folks behind all this Drudge bait? And just what are the track records of the journalists flogging this story? I bet the answer they find is that they are far, far worse than the IPCC's.
UPDATE: I should note that not all British papers are behaving badly. The Guardian has an exhaustive 12-part series on "climategate" that doesn't whitewash the failings of climate scientists, but puts the issue in its proper context. Good reading.
Be careful where you're sticking your nose
That "careful explanation" at the top of your article does a good job of ignoring most of the critiques at the heart of the criticism. Yes, the two "admitted errors" in the IPCC are not necessarily central to the core argument, but they do highlight, quite prominently, the conflict of interest issues of many of the players.
You also repeat a rather glaring scientific error in your "summary". Back when I taught college physics, one of the most basic lessons we taught was the error of false precision. On the issue on if there has been statistically significant warming since 1995, Dr Jones admits quite clearly that the data shows none. Yet, you go on to defend him when he claims that he "knows" there's warming. What's at question is not what he knows, it is what the data shows.
You (and the RealClimate article) completely ignore the criticisms of Rodger Pielke-- who also is claiming significant errors and misrepresentation in the IPCC report on the subject of the effect of warming on natural disasters.
The RealClimate article itself is a prime example of political spin. It claims the "hide the decline" comment is "plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted and then hyped". But the comment about "hide the decline" is very fundamental to the debate. The decline that the CRU scientists are hiding is the concept of "divergence" in tree ring data, which questions the very idea of basing scientific "fact" of historical temperatures on that same data. I highly suggest that you google the phrase "The most influential tree in the world".
You ignore the entire discussion of the Medieval Warm Period, and Professor Jones indirectly admitting that the record overwhelmingly shows that it probably existed.
Your writeup seems to be largely avoiding much of the scientific critiques, and instead relies on ad hominem attacks and blind appeals to authority--the very same authorities who have been caught red-handed manipulating data. You're correct, btw, that many of the recent headlines have more to do with non-scientific questions about conflict of interest than the underlying science. But that is still a very significant discussion, and only starts to highlight many of the arguments that you choose to ignore.
By the way, to answer the question in your headline: Yes. Yes it has.
For a discussion of statistical significance, see here. On Yamal, see here. On the Medieval Warming Period, Jones simply acknowledges that it's a possibility that it was global.
Here's the exchange:
G - There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)
was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a
global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the
premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter
part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?There is much
debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or
not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the
North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in
extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the
tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few
palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.Of course,
if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than
today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then
obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On
the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today,
then current warmth would be unprecedented.We know from the
instrumental temperature record that the two hemispheres do not always
follow one another. We cannot, therefore, make the assumption that
temperatures in the global average will be similar to those in the
northern hemisphere.
How many of those links did you read?
Blake,
Okay, let's take those one by one.
First off, on statistical significance. Sure, there MAY have been warming over the past 15 years. Longer timelines may validate what Prof. Jones thinks he knows. But as far as the data we have, it is inside the bounds of statistical significance, so it is incorrect to say that it HAS been warming. From your own link "The simple fact is that short time spans don’t give enough data to establish what the trend is". Period, end of story. I am not a warming denialist, it is certainly possible. But the science isn't as certain as most news stories, or so called scientists like Prof. Jones, make it out to be. The burden of proof is on those advocating drastic political action, and there is a definite chicken little syndrome.
Two, on the Yamal data, read again McIntyre's responses. Briffa is completely non-responsive in the linked article. Show me where in that article where he explains why he included some samples and why he exclude others. He simply attempts to refute McIntyre by coming up with an entirely new set of data (note: not peer reviewed!) that shows the same results. Cherrypicking is still cherrypicking. The linked article does not even attempt to explain why most of the trees for the latest years in the Yamal dataset were not used in his initial analysis, nor why the trees he did use _all_ showed warming, and those he excluded didn't.
Three, let me highlight some of Prof Jones' response on MWP:
"The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions."
So, to paraphrase, he's saying that the places we have data shows warming. But, there's places we don't have a lot of data, so therefore we can just ignore the whole idea?
Once again, you ignore the points made by Roger Pielke. You ignore that the very real divergence in tree ring data shows that tree ring size just might in fact be influenced by something other than just temperature. You ignore the very real statements in the climategate emails where the scientists attempt to strongarm publications and authors who don't toe the line.
How is anything I said misleading? "Misleading" doesn't mean "says something I don't like". Once again, ad hominem attacks instead of simple arguments. Quite clearly, there is enough to this story that the NYT should at least address it.
I note that spam posts about essay writing services are showing up on a number of FP threads, including this one. I suggest these posts be deleted upon detection.
"Exhibit A is this story in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid well known in the UK for its carelessness with facts"
Blake, perhaps you should also note that Foreign Policy recently played fast and loose with the facts in regards to a certain Pakistani diplomat whose name you guys said was "Big Dick " when translated into Arabic.
Pot calling the kettle black?
Anyways, I don't know if you're trying to show your bias here, but I recommend you be fair to both sides when doing any reporting.
I believe climate change is happening, but I also recognize that those who support increased governmental action play fast and loose with the facts and don't take seriously or treatly fairly the sometimes legitimate issues skeptics bring up. Doing so causes those writing about climate change to lose credibility, as I believe you have done with this piece.
The issues brought up in regards to the IPCC, the email scandal, etc, are serious matters and the NY Times has not given it proper attention. The fact that you defend them exposes your lack of objectiviity and fairmindedness.
As soon as we discovered the Pakistani ambassador story was wrong, we corrected it. Has the Daily Mail issued a correction?
A mistake is putting a decimal in the wrong place. A mistake is confusing inches per century and centimetres per century, or Celsius and Fahrenheit.
A mistake is using the half flush instead of full flush after you've done a crap in the toilet. This is the equivalent of taking a dump in the lounge room and using the cushions to wipe your butt after ;)
This was a deliberate attempt by someone to get action on climate change by appealing to feelings instead of reason.
This is why this "mistake" was allowed to happen.
If it was truly simply about science, someone would have notice the error 8 years ago during the correct processes to make things "scientific".
Don't get me wrong: I don't think for a moment this invalidates any other claims about global warming - too much other evidence does exist. Nor do I think it's a massive conspiracy to form a world government - people are too stupid and self involved for a conspiracy on such a grand scale to actually work; nor anything else like that someone will probably accuse me of.
This is simply a sign that for all people's blustering about the sanctity of the scientific method and scientific evidence, politics plays as big a part in climate science as everything else.
Exactly. The problem is that the discourse on the issue is too simplistic: either "Climategate" is an unmitigated disaster that proves there's no global warming, or it's a witch hunt by the right in order to discredit the scientific community. It seems logical that there's too much evidence of global warming and human causation to dismiss it out of hand, but that there are still people who try to stretch the truth to push an agenda. Unfortunately the majority of American media have no interest in a two-sided story: their goal is simply to pander to people's preconceived notions of the debate without engaging them. Why would a Left-leaning outlet offend its audience by questioning the motives of climatologists or a right-leaning outlet challenge its audience's view of the global warming debate?
Your publication recently published a piece in which you called those who do not worship at the altar of global warming 'deniers', as in Holocaust deniers. This blew any credibility your publication had on this subject for me, and probably others.
They did not look at Watt's findings
"Among numerous other problems with his story, Leake doesn't mention that NOAA -- in a peer-reviewed study (pdf) published in the Journal of Geophysical Research -- actually looked at Watts's findings and found a cooling bias among the weather stations. Whoops. "
Actually, they did not look at Watts "findings". They looked at his work in progress when he only had 43% of the weather stations surveyed and before he was finished even quality controlling that 43%. Since his whole project is a wiki-style volunteer effort, the work in progress has to be posted as a guide to the work that needs to be completed.
You can read all about it here.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/rumours-of-my-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerated/
I read the Mead article and I read this article, plus all the links this article contains. I'd say Mead is exaggerating the lack of reporting in the New York Times, but this article is exaggerating both Mead's argument and the NYT reporting.
Mead did not say that the NYT was engaged in a cover up, which a mere reference to the controversy (such as the allusion in the Broder article) would disprove.
He alleged that the NYT has not _covered_ the story. That they should (but have not) investigated it and written at least one and probably several articles reporting on the specific matters that are currently being alleged/debated.
And the fact is, they have not. The closest they came to an article squarely addressing the controversy was the linked article on Pachuri's alleged conflict of interest. In that article they disclosed many of the allegations against the IPCC report (and Mead should have acknowledged this in his article) but they mostly just referenced them; they didn't cover the allegations or the responses on the science in any depth. And in any case, they were mostly just background to the conflict of interest story.
Blogs (such as Dot Earth) do not affect Mead's point one way or the other. He is criticizing the paper, not the website.
And an article gleefully reporting Mann's exoneration by an investigation the paper had never previously mentioned makes Mead's point perhaps more strongly than his own article does.
The fact is, the New York Times is not investigating, reporting on and (in a word) covering this story. It may get "alluded to" here and there, and it may be written up on their blog but the paper itself has not addressed it the way other papers (such as the Washington Post) have done.
The Leake "peer-reviewed" study
You really should do an updated post on that Leake study. Not only was it scientifically dubious in the extreme to do a "study" on a mere 43% of Watts' data (naturally, the first sites to be measured were the ones in the most easy-to-reach--namely, urban--locations); it was also professionally discourteous, even unethical, to rush out a study using another person's data before that person has had a chance to do their own study and quality control on the data.
I'm surprised you weren't aware of this. This is why I like to check out not just Real Climate, Joe Romm's site, etc., but also McIntyre, Watts, Pielke, etc. on a regular basis. These guys are good at reality-checking each other, but not always at issuing updates and corrections when they're the ones being reality-checked.
Re Your update re the Guardian
For more clarity, please see RC's posts detailing some of the more egregious errors in the Guardian series.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/the-guardian-disappoints/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/close-encounters-of-the-absurd-kind/
Thanks.
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