Climategate, Copenhagen And Making Sense Of It All

December 14th, 2009 | Author: boders

With the second week of the Copenhagen conference underway a post about the goings on in the ongoing discussion of climate change is merited. I know that I haven’t been following the Canadian media’s response to ‘Climategate’ as much as I should, but I was still surprised and saddened when a link to this blog posting was sent to me. The US blogosphere has been afire since a series of emails that were hacked from servers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were posted on the internet in late November. Apparently these emails not only debunk all existing climate research, but also expose a vast conspiracy by the world’s scientific institutions to forge and falsify evidence of global climate change. On the one hand it is relatively easy to highlight any number of falsehoods that climate change deniers fabricate. Unfortunately it is harder to compete with the volume and ferocity of many of those voices crying FOUL (and more!) in response to a selective reading of an email exchange from more than a decade ago. Look, they are so organized they even have a Facebook group!

So, to attend to my first claim; it is easy to demonstrate falsehoods and disingenuousness in the stance that many have taken in response to these emails. Not until these emails came out had I heard so much about the CRU at East Anglia. If they were the only scientific body doing climate analysis, did not subscribe to any kind of peer review process and were demonstrably falsifying data then there would be a big problem. None of these things are the case. First, from Bradford Plummer at the New Republic:

CRU isn’t the only group in the world tracking global temperature trends. As Michael Schlesinger, a climatologist at the University of Illinois, points out, there are at least three other groups, including NASA, NOAA, and the Japan Meteorological Agency, that have been analyzing surface temperature data for well over a century (there’s a fair bit of overlap in what raw data they use, but they all have their own ways of analyzing it).

He was even kind enough to include a chart with each of these groups datasets plotted on it:

Global Temperature Departures

I’m no statistician but that sure looks like an upward trend to me. Plummer goes on to say:

[Y]es, climate scientists should take pains to be as transparent as possible, and some of the CRU e-mails cut against that. That needs to be remedied. Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry also has a sharp take, noting that good-faith engagement with skeptics can be a positive thing. But there’s no evidence that climate data has been fudged, and even if there was a smoking gun in the CRU e-mails, the basis for what we know about man-made climate change still comes from a vast array of sources.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has a good post about a common tactic that deniers use quite frequently.

[Jim Lindgren] passes along an analysis by Willis Eschenbach claiming that the instrument data for Darwin Airport in Australia shows flat or declining temperatures if you look at the raw data, and only shows an increase if you “homogenize” it. Conclusion: the evidence of warming isn’t from the data at all, but only from the manipulation of the data! But via Tim Lambert, here’s an excerpt from the original NOAA paper that explains how the homogenization was done:

A great deal of effort went into the homogeneity adjustments. Yet the effects of the homogeneity adjustments on global average temperature trends are minor (Easterling and Peterson 1995b). However, on scales of half a continent or smaller, the homogeneity adjustments can have an impact. On an individual time series, the effects of the adjustments can be enormous. [Italics mine.]

So, if you’re a climate denier, what would you do? You’d look for local effects and you’d look for an individual time series. Look hard enough and you’re bound to find some with large changes due to the homogenization. And then you’d cry foul. The books are being cooked!

And it just so happens that a similar approach was taken in the ‘conflicting’ data that is presented in the blog posting that I cited at the beginning of this post; the dataset was taken from recording that cover part of Europe in an individual time series.

Kevin’s post was in response to a questioner who asked if the ‘analysis’ from Eschenbach undermined his faith in the science behind global warming. It didn’t change his mind, and the link that I received did not sway mine. After noting that he is not qualified to judge most aspects of the ‘debate’ about climate change science (neither am I), Drum adds:

it’s easy to make a pretty graph that looks damning and then demand that the scientific community address it. And when they don’t — because it’s amateur crap and isn’t worth anyone’s time — the deniers have a scalp. Look! The scientific community is so corrupt they won’t even look at our evidence! And Fox and Drudge and the Wall Street Journal [and the National Post's blog] all merrily pass it along.

Rinse and repeat. Unfortunately, it’s working pretty well.

Indeed. It would be most heartening if climate change wasn’t an issue that deserves focus and attention. Alas, that is not the case. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has put together a fantastic pdf that compiles all the various assertions made by deniers based on a faulty analysis of what the leaked emails say and refutations of them. As discouraging as it is to need to engage in push back against these claims, it is necessary. That pdf fact sheet is a great place to start to arm yourself with knowledge of the latest ‘controversy’.

Excerptcize

Climategate, Copenhagen And Making Sense Of It All

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