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I have waited awhile to chuck my tuppence into the ‘Climategate’ ring as I am not a true believer and have preferred to see how things played out over time. I personally favour the hypothesis that humans are causing some climatic effects but I do not believe the evidence is sufficient to prove my opinion correct. I have an open mind towards those who are weakly opposed, which is to say those who are waiting on data to prove me wrong. If one were to place my opinions on a dartboard, I would fall pretty close to the one labeled Bjorn Lomborg.
I am far more worried about the collateral damage the CRU researchers have caused. Their machinations, exposed by these ‘Pentagon Papers’ of the oughties, is damning and damaging to public trust in science. It opens the door to all sorts of pseudo-science by making their expositors appear superficially to be as trustworthy as the real thing. This is bad. This is very bad.
‘Climategate’ is not the first case of serious scientific fraud in recent years but may be the most damaging and far reaching one. Other well known cases included South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk who falsified his work on cloning and Bell Labs Physicist Jan Hendrik Schön who faked results in numerous papers. Schön used the same fake graph, with modified labels, in three totally different papers. That was just a starter. His massive misdeeds caused a gravity wave ripple through the Physics world as every paper citing his work had to be reconsidered.
Since all CRU citations must now be treated as problematic, the potential of ‘Climategate’ is not a ripple but a terrible and destructive tsunami. The researchers responsible for this have set their field back by years and should be disciplined by their peers accordingly. Cleaning primate cages is too good for them.
A second facet of ‘Climategate’ is the reported shortcomings in the model code base. Part of the document release included source code. In a discussion with Rand Simberg over breakfast in LA earlier this month I heard that some very knowledgeable open source programmers are having a go at it. If half of what he told me turns out to be true, the models used by IPCC are worse than useless.
I have several times in my career translated serious numerical modeling code from Fortran to modern languages and thus had to deal with the issues of validating the results. In the real world mistakes cost money and sometimes lives. Most recently I translated some aerodynamics code for a New Space company. I spent weeks doing nothing but validating and checking to be sure the output was reasonably trustworthy for questions within the realm of interest. When Rand told me the CRU model code did not even handle numeric overflows I was speechless.
Let me explain. Computers represent numbers in binary. Any signed representation (ie one that handles plus and minus) will use some formatting trick to differentiate the two. The problem is, if a positive number gets incremented to be one bit too big… it may suddenly become a negative number. Regardless of what does happen, any calculation using the value after an overflow might as well be a random number generator. The results are totally, utterly worthless. There is not a chance in hell that the output will be meaningful.
There are ways of dealing with this sort of thing but I will not go into that sort of techno-detail here. My goal is simply to point out that if the statements I heard are true, I must cease to believe the validity of any output from CRU and CRU related models.
There is really only one acceptable way for the field to recover credibility and reinvigorate trust. The code for models must all be made open source. It must be released into the public domain where experts in numerical programming can openly argue about the validity of the code, the mathematical techniques and the mathematical and physical simplifications and assumptions it contains.
I will no longer believe results which lack this corroboration. If an author refuses, I am going to assume they have misdeeds to hide.
Early in this article I said I lean towards pro on the hypothesis of human caused climate change. I should expound upon that a bit more. It is my belief that we are causing some change at present and if things went on as they are now there might be some serious, but not civilization threatening results.
However, things are not going to stay the same. A collapse in carbon output is going to occur and the reasons for it have nothing to do with cap and trade or Copenhagen or any other State or NGO foisted crisis plan. By the middle of this century liquid fuels such as gasoline will be generated using the Fischer-Tropsch process in some updated form. It will be carbon neutral because part of the feedstock will be free for the taking: atmospheric CO2. It will be split using either grid power, mechanical nanotechnology or genetically modified algae (some of which is purportedly working already). With the addition of energy, CO2 -> CO + O, and the Carbon Monoxide may be fed into the same FT process that was used to fuel the Nazi war machine. Towards the end of World War II this was nearly the only source of fuel available to Germany. Anyone who believes this technology is unproven on an industrial scale is simply historically ignorant.
Carbon based grid power is already declining as a relative portion of US energy (30% according to a recent SciAm article). I expect that decline to accelerate as use of ever cheapening and ever improving solar panels really starts to bite. We will also see inputs from Space Based Solar Power growing explosively by 2050. New technology nuclear and perhaps even game changing wild cards like Polywell Fusion will be taking up major roles by then as well.
If you toss in the huge impacts nanotechnology will have on all facets of technological civilization and the expected population decline in the second half of the century one begins to wonder exactly what will be the climate change problem of 2100? If human CO2 inputs collapse and population declines what climatic impact will the modeling of that scenario show?
There is yet another wildcard to consider. What if we are about to hit a Maunder type solar minimum? There is debate on this issue but it is certainly not closed. Such a decline could cover any human global warming until long after we have transitioned to more modern energy sources.
We need Climate Science to cleanse itself of political hacks. Young scientists must learn that Science cannot save Politics… but Politics can certainly ruin Science. Let scientists generate science and leave politicians to deal in the realm of opinion and ‘what people want’.
Declaration of interest – I know a guy who works on an oil rig. That’s my credibility shot then.
– Bishop Hill muses on how any link to Big Oil however tenuous means that your climate scepticism can be ignored by the AGW True Believers.
When an argument is being won and lost, the retreating team does not issue statements saying: By gad, you were right and we were wrong, sorry and all that, we’ll try not to let it happen again. No, the way you spot a victory and a defeat is when you see bits of bullshit (linked to rather admiringly, on account of the piece not being complete bullshit throughout, from here) like this from the Los Angeles Times:
The real scandal illustrated by the e-mails is not that scientists tried to undermine peer review, fudge and conceal data, and torpedo competitors, but that scientists and advocates on both sides of the climate debate continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science. This charade is a disservice to both science and democracy. To science, because the reality cannot live up to the myth; to democracy, because the difficult political choices created by the genuine but also uncertain threat of climate change are concealed by the scientific debate.
Actually that is pretty much exactly what the real scandal was, except that they missed out the bit about sabotaging the entire world economy.
But allow me to draw your particular attention, just in case you missed it, to this bit:
… scientists and advocates on both sides …
Position one: Our guys are right and your guys are wrong. Position two: Yes, it’s true that our guys are wrong, but … but … so are your guys! “If we have the decency to admit that our bad guys are bad, now that your good guys are proving it, can’t you at least be a sport and say that your good guys are bad also?”
No.
How, exactly, do the AGW sceptics “continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science”? How has their conduct earned them the insult of being part of a “charade”? How have the sceptics been undermining science? Or democracy? There has been a charade. But the sceptics are busily unmasking it, and replacing it with truth.
This is a classic retreat from fraudulent moral superiority to fraudulent moral equivalence.
Once again, as so often in this ruckus, I’m thinking: Cold War. “Yes indeed, Communism is not working very well and many of the communists are very bad people, but capitalism and those who support it are no better …” No, communism was indeed a catastrophe, but capitalism was and is colossally, world-transformingly better. I despised the fraudulent army of anti-anti-communists then, and I despise the fraudulent and soon-to-be-huge army of anti-AGW-sceptics now.
James Delingpole delivers the goods on the latest blow against AGW alarmism. It has come from Russia. The story is not quite so “John Le Carre” as the theory put up recently by Sean Gabb, however.
Happy Christmas!
Following on from Brian’s post immediately below this one, is what can only be described as an encouraging story by Bloomberg, stating that the chances of a deal being agreed by world leaders in Copenhagen are remote. Excellent if true.
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.
Here is some other evidence that those with the job of chasing crooks are now getting interested in this.
I agree with Johnathan Pearce in the previous posting that the old-school media are definitely, albeit belatedly and with much embarrassment and confusion, starting to notice all this. 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.
In other good news: Gordon Brown is backing the Copenhagen Conference to be a success.
And yes, I know, a huge amount of institutional infrastructure remains in place, created partly by means of these climatic lies, before people had to justify believing in them and when critics of that apparent scientific consensus (Monkton has interesting things to say about that) had to justify believing in anything else. The Copenhagen Conference, for all that it now looks like being a huge disappointment to the more incurable of the AGW alarmists, will still do quite a lot of harm. The war isn’t over, to put it mildly.
But winning arguments is no small thing. During the 1980s I vividly recall being told, by people whose pessimism about the Cold War was so profound that they might as well have been Soviet agents of influence for all the use they were to the side they claimed to be on, that merely proving that despotic state centralism was an economic disaster would make no difference. Those wicked Soviet Communists – who were, they claimed, so very much cleverer than any of us – would still eat us all alive, and all the more horribly on account of having run out of stuff to eat in Russia and surrounding parts. Well, it turned out that winning that argument counted for quite a lot. And winning this one will count for a lot too.
Al Gore has been caught out basing scary scenarios on what turn out to be highly questionable figures. What I am starting to notice – despite the efforts of some, not all, parts of the MSM – is that AGW scepticism is getting more of a hearing in the media. The effects of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia are not fading; if anything, the momentum behind this story is building.
Near where I live in central London, there is a big construction site and one of the most impressive things about the work going on has been to watch the crane-driver deftly move the huge arms of the crane around to lift and place different materials. I don’t suffer from vertigo but I certainly would not have the guts to sit up in the cab at the top, or be able to easily face the long climb up and down. The crane-drivers are one of those group of construction workers that make much of the modern urban skyline possible. So here’s to them. And here is a nice article about this feature of the modern urban landscape.
I yesterday went shopping for an LCD television for a friend of mine. I went to Richer sounds (a splendid and rather uncharacteristic British retailer known for selling high quality electronic merchandise at low prices from relatively unfashionable locations where the rent is low, providing fine customer service and treating employees well), and I ended up buying a Sharp TV. Interesting company, Sharp. People sometimes think the name is a little odd. For what it is worth, the company originally made mechanical pencils for engineering purposes, and they wanted to make it clear that they were very sharp (true story).
Japanese companies seem to divide into two kinds. There were pre-WWII monoliths – the so called zaibatsus. American policy after the war was that these were far too powerful and that they were to be broken up into smaller companies. This American policy failed. They zaibatsus were theoretically broken up into smaller units, but they retained a complex arrangement of holding companies and cross shareholdings in which management control largely remained in place even though the companies had theoretically been split up. They evolved into post war industrial groupings known as keiretsus. These companies remained politically well connected, and when Japan attempted to grow its exports through government directed industrial policy, these were the beneficiaries of it. These keiretsus included Mitsui/Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Matsushita (Panasonic), and others.
As I said, these well connected companies were recipients of government largesse, and those who would wish to praise government industrial policy would tend to construct a story that this led to Japan’s industrial success in the 1970s and the 1980s.
But of course, the story is more complex than this, There is a really good book about this, We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age by Bob Johnstone. The interesting part of the story is that although the keiretsus did benefit from the growth of the Japanese electronic industry, they were not where its innovation came from. The companies that were the heroes in this regard were small, non-existent or unfashionable in 1945, or were discarded or disdained pieces of broken zaibatsus, In particular, we are talking companies like Seiko-Epson, Canon, Yamaha, or even Sanyo or Honda or Suzuki (the Japanese government tried to micromanage the car industry, but the motorcycle industry was seen as less interesting, and so that is where the interesting companies ended up coming from).
In electronics, in the 1970s, Sharp’s research was led by Sasaki Tadashi, whose enthusiasm earned him the truly glorious nickname of “Dr Rocket” – personally I would almost kill for such. In that era Sharp pretty much invented the electronic calculator and the LCD display. Sharp remains a leader in LCD display technology to this day.
To the extent, that in this day of LCD television, Sharp is the only Japanese company worth mentioning in this market. Sony – a company that rode a totally unique route between the keiretsu and the post war upstart, but which in the end did a better job of selling itself as a brand than an innovator – was the undoubted leader in the era of CRT televisions, but (perhaps as a consequence) totally missed the transition to flat screens. A lot of fancy televisions are sold today under the Sony brandname, but these were generally actually made by Samsung, or (in certain high end cases) by Sharp. The only Japanese company that actually makes televisions today is Sharp. The company that always was the great innovator: the company that Sony pretended to be.
Which is why I was happy to buy such a set for my friend.
Within a few seconds of cranking up my computer this morning I was reading this posting by Steve McIntyre, which I got to via Bishop Hill, who says of it:
McIntyre has posted his first analysis of some of the emails. It’s not looking good for the Hockey Team, with their scheming to remove the divergence problem and “hide the decline” from the IPCC reports laid out in horrifying detail.
There are going to be months of revelations like this.
So that’s two links to the McIntyre posting in this already. The internet already contains a lot more. Watch it go viral, much as this just did.
A commenter on McIntyre’s posting, Jonathan Fischoff, says:
Every time I hear people say “the emails are out of context!” I think, be careful what you wish for.
Chris S says:
People are now beginning to realize how “so much was owed by so many” IPCC Summaries, “to so few”.
Indeed.
What of Al Gore‘s other argument (beside the taken-out-of-context argument), that all these CRU emails are ten year’s old, so, really, what the flip? As thousands have already pointed out, many of the CRU emails, which Gore has clearly not read or even read very much about, are far more recent. But yes indeed, the emails scrutinised in this latest McIntyre posting do indeed go back a decade. But what that shows is: so does the scientific dishonesty. Gore is saying: “Relax, it goes back a long way, these guys have been conning us for a decade.” This doesn’t really work as a put-down, does it?
Will “the media” give this McIntyre posting the attention it deserves? I am increasingly thinking that it doesn’t matter what these people say or don’t say about this story, or about anything else. McIntyre’s posting, one of the many fragments of this far bigger mega-story, is now out there, for anyone with internet access who wants to read it, and read about it. Tens of thousands of comments on it, attached directly to it, and such as this one that you are reading now, are even now being concocted, by and for all who care. Whether the old-school journos join in (Delingpole is a good example of that trend) and thereby become part of the new media, or prefer to keep looking away (see Delingpole’s excellent recent posting about the pathetic Climategate non-performance so far of Private Eye) this says more about their own future than it says about the story itself. As with the named and shamed CRU scientists, the exact motivation behind each particular item of old-school media deception, neglect or misdirection is a matter of debate. The fact of it is not, and any who want to can now see this.
Michael J just emailed me this link to a piece by a scientist. The point is, guys like this can now can now say all this. He no longer needs any journo to open the door for him.
Here is a witty description of the way the Climategate story is unfolding, from someone called David Solway:
Witnessing the spectacle of climate warmists scampering hither and thither in the face of predatory evidence that they and their pet theories may be doomed, I’m put in mind of the behavior of hamsters who suddenly find themselves trapped in a cage with a hungry snake. The ensuing drama is instructive.
First the hamsters freeze as if in a state of petrifaction induced by utter disbelief. When it dawns on them that they have what looks like an insoluble problem on their tiny paws, they begin to shake and fidget, and soon they are darting feverishly from one side of the cage to the other, endlessly back and forth, seeking an escape hatch which simply isn’t there. It occurs to them that they are cornered, there is no way out, and they start digging furiously into the sand floor, emitting plaintive squeals of fear and despair as the snake slowly uncoils from its torpor and begins its relentless approach.
Like David Solway, and like our own Johnathan Pearce, I am optimistic about how the Climategate story is unfolding. It will, hamster like, run and run. How many other climate scientists cooked their data, and how outrageously? Which politicians, and which journalists, took the lead in swallowing this story? Who has been paying all these climate scientists to find AGW by fair means or foul and then to recommend global statism? The questions are endless, the answers will be fascinating, and the dextrosphere won’t let go of this now.
But what I want to know is: how does David Solway know all this, about how hamsters behave when set upon in a cage by a snake? His description is suspiciously vivid. Has he actually done this experiment? Has he seen hamsters in a cage being attacked by a big snake, on account of him having just put them there? If so, and if he then did nothing to rescue the poor hamsters, because science is more important than being nice to hamsters, then: what a complete bastard. The Climategate scientists put themselves into their cage, but this cage is only metaphorical and nor are their critics literally going to eat them, however much some of them might deserve such a fate. But David Solway’s actual hamsters did nothing to deserve such torment.
He adds:
One feels for the caged hamsters.
Oh, one feels for them, does one? But not enough, it would seem, for one actually to try to rescue them.
Maybe David Solway just saw this on You-Tube. Or maybe he, or some equally nasty friend of his, set all this up personally, but then later, in the nick of time, he (or they) did rescue the hamsters (in which case David Solway is still a bastard but not as much of one). Either way, I think he should have said.
He ends his piece thus:
Unless, of course, a miracle should occur, the cage door open, and an indulgent hand reach inside to rescue the hamsters from their plight, ensuring that the snake starves to death while the hamsters frolic in relief and gratitude. This, too, could happen. As we know all too well, there is more than one indulgent hand ready to perform an act of tender, self-interested, and hamster-friendly mercy.
It’s almost as if a friend of David Solway’s read everything above this ending, and said what I just said, isn’t it?
As a description of Climategate this final reversal contradicts everything before it. “This too could happen.” How? An “indulgent hand”? What hand?
The idea of such pieces is to raise the morale of David Solway’s side and mine in the Climategate argument. Keep it up lads, we’re winning. And then he goes and ends by saying, for no reason: but then again, maybe we’re not winning.
Why do writers do this? Something to do with ending intriguingly and amusingly, perhaps, with a final and surprising U-turn that you did not see coming? Or maybe it’s a doomed attempt to mollify the unmollifiable opposition, an attempt to turn them into neutrals by being nice to them, an attempt to be inclusive, a friendly nod to all the people who aren’t reading in the first place.
Or maybe David Solway just wasn’t sure that his piece is actually right, in which case I think his doubts would have been better handled by appearing at the start alongside his hypothesis, on a this-may-not-be-right-but-here’s-a-thought basis.
Or, in this case, did he simply want to look less like a hamster-torturing bastard but forget that his way of trying to do this contradicts his entire argument?
What I want to know is, were those actual hamsters actually rescued?
This evening I am doing a recorded conversation with Bishop Hill, and by way of preparation have been rootling around in his archives. And I just came across this, which the Bishop posted on November 19th 2006:
In this connexion the thing to be remarked is that the Whigs proceeded by the negative method of repealing existing laws, not by the positive method of making new ones. They combed the Statute-book, and when they found a statute which bore against “the liberty of the subject” they simply repealed it and left the page blank. This purgation ran up into the thousands. In 1873 the secretary of the Law Society estimated that out of the 18,110 Acts which had been passed since the reign of Henry III, four-fifths had been wholly or partially repealed.
Excellent, apart from the odd spelling of “connection”.
That’s not by Bishop Hill himself. It was recycled from somewhere called “Outside Story”, the link to which no longer works. But there’s no reason to doubt theis particular story, which should now inspire us all. For too long we have been ruled by politicians who measured their success by how many laws they could pass. Because of these fools, we now need politicians who measure their success by how many laws they can unpass.
Bishop Hill’s latest posting, as I write this, is to this. Well worth reading. Climategate is not nearly over. It is just getting into its stride. At Copenhagen, lots of laws, seemingly unshiftable from then on, will be made, maybe not as many as would have happened without Climategate, but still, most of us here surely fear, a lot. But the point is: laws can be unmade. There can be, and there must soon be, another great purgation.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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