One more caveat on the dinner plate is that the details for a lot of this are going to come from my recollections. I may be off on some of the details, but I believe I have the overall facts correct. If any of you wish to confirm them, I can provide links and such. Just let me know. My mother was shocked that I was not a believer in the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming that she had read about in the Albuquerque journal and the New York Times. As I was exposed to all of this, I've concluded that The Old Gray Lady ain't what she used to be. Ok, on to our story.
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We can start with the UN. It created a
group, the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to look
into human caused climate change. The first point that we should
note is that they assumed that it existed. The group spawned a
multi-billion dollar industry. The US spends about $5 billion a year
on climate research. This has been going on for a long time.
The IPCC has a number of groups within
it and they selected the group leaders for each. One of the selected
was Micheal E. Mann, a newly minted PhD.
Dr. Mann famously created the ubiquitous hockey
stick graph, which showed that the current world temperature was unique,
dangerous, and projected to kill us all. I'm exaggerating, but not
by much. Politicians like Al Gore picked up some of this and ran
with it. It was obvious from this that carbon dioxide, liberated by modern life was to blame.
The hockey stick graph became the
darling of the early IPCC reports. It's quite dramatic and if you
believed it, you had to react. To this day we are still getting
calls to restrict air travel, the burning of fossil fuels, the eating
of meat, warming your house, and all manner of other things that have
made our current civilization comfortable, healthy, and for some,
happy.
The hockey stick graph may be discussed
another day. There are books out there if you want to look for them.
What I want to talk about an instance in the “science” of
the climate research and how I was drawn into it.
Mann's work reflects his research into the
paleo-record of the earth's climate and temperature. Thermometers didn't exist in the year 900, so
researchers looked for proxies. A proxy is not a thermometer but it
reacts to temperature and retains that information. What are the
properties of a proxy? It has to exist and change due to temperature across hundreds
of years. Certain trees are thousands of years old, there are also
ice cores taken from the Arctic and other areas, and some lake
sediments are thousands of years old. There are others like corals
and such.
Mann used trees for a large part of his discovery of the hockey stick. Trees... If you've done any gardening you might think that plants respond to a lot of things other than temperature. Water is kind of important for plant growth, yes? How about fertilizer? So when some researcher, looking at tree ring widths only, looks you in the eye and tells you he knows the temperature in the year 900, you too might suddenly decide to be skeptic. And when they realized that the tree ring temperatures didn't match the current times when thermometers exist, and they hid that by removing "tree data" and substituting instrument data, you might wonder, if they know that trees don't match the instruments now, how can they be so certain the trees were accurate about pre-instrument centuries?
The longest thermometer record is the
Central England Temperature record. It started in 1659 and has been
updated ever since. But Mann went back further. His research shows
the world wide temperature back a thousand years. He used trees and
sediment records for his proxies.
One of the foundations of the modern
business of science is the peer review process. You send a paper to
a publisher. The publisher sends it out to three reviewers. Usually
the reviewers are not supposed to know who wrote the paper and the
reviewers are not revealed to the writer. The reviewers are not paid
and do it as a duty to their field. The reviewers are experts in the
area of research.
There are a lot of interesting things
about what peer review actually is, what it should be, and what
people who are not involved expect it is. I've been lectured by a
Facebook friend, who holds a doctorate degree, that if it's peer
reviewed, then you should accept and trust the research at face value. Knowing what I know now, I'm saddened by that belief.
Dr. Mann submitted a paper for
publication. One of the reviewers was a Canadian named Stephen
McIntyre. He is associated with the mining industry.
McIntyre got interested in the paleo
data and began to investigate it. He was selected as an IPCC
reviewer, has published in the climate areas, and at this point
probably knows as much as anyone about the proxies used for
temperature reconstruction.
The mining industry has a lot in common
with proxy data and the work I did had a lot of sampling issues.
It's easy to measure something, but if you are going to claim that
the sample is representative of a larger group, you have to be very
careful. The issues of sampling and error bars and uncertainty drew
me in. I knew enough about them and their calculations to find it
worthy of my interest.
For example, Slippery Sam has a property, which has
gold on it and he wants to sell you the mining rights for
$100,000,000. He shows you an assay report that shows that there are
5 ounces of gold per ton of ore in the mine. Gold goes for $1300 an
ounce, so every ton might be worth about $6000. If there are enough
tons, then $100 million might be a reasonable price. But is it?
Let's assume the assayer, Joe, is independent, honest, and knows what
he is doing.
But let's talk samples for a bit. Joe
probably didn't process a full ton of ore. And he certainly didn't
sample 100 tons of ore. He might have been working with pounds of
rock and then multiplying to get the amount per ton, with
assumptions. Ah, yes, assumptions: the sample matches the rest of
the rock in the mine? Did Slippery Sam grab any old rock to give to
the assayer? Or was he very careful about selection? The old phrase
is “salting the mine.”
If the mining company is interested
they probably take their own samples and use their own assayer and
then do their own calculations of worth. But if you were going to trust Slippery Sam
and his work, then you'd want to know sample number, sizes, the
quality controls used by the assayer, etc. Basically, doing due diligence. I understand that there are some interesting rules in
the mining and mining prospective business. And that's why they have
statisticians to check these kinds of things.
McIntyre's background was well suited
to looking at a research paper.
In the world of science there is a guy
named Richard Feynman, who is known for a lot of things, but he has
stated things about science that are accepted as the way to properly
do science. For example, you have to disclose everything that might
be wrong with your theory. You have to disclose all assumptions you
made. You should be open about your work and bend over backwards to
be honest. If you assume that this is what really happens in
science, then Sam and I have a gold mine to sell you...
Dr. Mann, poster child for a doomed
world view, submits a paper to one of the bigger Climate Magazines.
McIntyre is chosen as one of the reviewers. Stephen requests the
data and the code behind Mann's paper.
Dr. Mann resists the request. The
editor states that in 34 years of publishing research papers, no one
has ever asked for the data behind a paper. He passes the buck to
his editorial board. Mann protests again.
The editorial board decides that the
data have to be made available. This is the current default
requirement for most research today. Sometimes it is even observed.
Back when our current bit of history was going on, data were
considered by some climate researchers as intellectual property and
they were not going to give it up readily. An other quote from Phil Jones, another climate big wig, is, "Why should I give you my data when all you want to do is find something wrong with it?"
At that point Mann had to decide to
comply with the editor or withdraw the paper.
We must discuss why this is an issue
and important to us and not just Dr. Mann. Science has a reputation
to being “self correcting.” There are jokes about this; one of
which is that “science advances one funeral at a time.” The
scientists who command the “idea whose time has come” tend to
circle the wagons and work feverishly to rebut, terrorize, and
intimidate views that differ from the “consensus.” Again, this
is nothing new. The climate scientists did/do this. We know they
were active then because two batches of their emails were made
public.
The other company line was that the
IPCC would use only peer reviewed information when forming their
policies. That was applied very selectively. If the information
came from sources that fit the “proper narrative,” then they were
accepted. If a paper was going to come out that suggested that the
current climate theory was not quite correct, then games were played.
They used due dates to exclude it from the IPCC process, they
pressured editors, and Phil Jones threatened to “redefine” what
peer review was to exclude a paper.
We can look at this as “boys will be
boys” and, I repeat the question, why should you and I care? The
problem is that politicians and governments were/are excited by this
climate “problem.” If you are a politician, you really don't
care if something is true or important, or useful. An excellent
problem should 1) threaten all life on earth, 2) will not be resolved
in a close time frame, 3) will allow you to shame anyone who
disagrees with you, and 4) Allow you to increase taxes.
Environmental issues check all boxes.
Who wants to destroy the earth? We have to act now because in 2100
we project that rain/drought/sea rise/temperature will make the earth
uninhabitable. What, you don't want to save the earth and the polar
bears and stop the spread of malaria? What kind of a monster are
you? Oh, and carbon taxes will be 50 cents per gallon of gas.
A climate scientist has a different
agendum. 1) They have to publish, 2) They don't care much if they
are wrong or right as long as they publish, and 3) They don't want to
be caught doing something too questionable.
Let's return to Dr. Mann, darling of
the Green lobby, defender of the faith, protector of the world.
Presumably his paper was important. The future of all mankind might
well hang on the research and results he's developed. However, he now
has McIntyre, who wants to go over his data and his methods. I don't
know if McIntyre had his current reputation then, but he would have
looked at everything. Imagine a complete IRS audit. So prove
everything and save the world, or retract the paper and move on?
Dr. Mann chose to retract the paper.
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McIntyre wrote extensively about the climate issues as it played out in the various blogs. That battle seems to have moved to Twitter these days, though there are still active blogs. His blog was called ClimateAudit.org and he was interested in data and looking at where and how published papers came to their conclusions. He never took a position on whether we are all doomed, but he took positions on a lot of the high level climate papers and the scientists behind them.
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