Warning — grumpy engineer.
An odd editorial from Nature today. Apparently according to this ‘scientist’ anyone who sees anything wrong with the emails is a denialist and “obstructionist politicians’ will use it to disrupt the cap and trade legislation coming this spring. I don’t know who the goofball was that wrote this rubbish, but cap and trade is a scheme to allow politicians arbitrary control over money distribution. Taxing CO2 directly is simply a method to repress industry. And frankly those of us who are not extremist industry hating leftists can usually see right through it.
Denialist appears 8 times
Conspiracy appears 3 times
Besides the fact that this was apparently written by Michael Mann’s communist brother and ostrich-like in it’s open mindedness, they do finish up saying that being open with the data is important. WELL THANK GOD FOR THAT!!! Jeeez .. Like pulling teeth from a friggin’ alligator with tweezers.
Since the obvious and foolish intent of the editorial is to marginalize the “crazies” like US. I’ll point out a few details….
#1 -McIntyre and McKitrick star bad guys of these emails are not denialists. They never make any such point.
#2 – The files were intentionally released HERE. This blog who’s proprietor ADMITS GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL – Every other damn day it seems. — NOT A DENIALIST!!
#3 – VonStorch who strongly questioned the motives of these researchers – IS NOT A DENIALIST!!
#4 – Zorita who wants Mann, Jones and Rohmsdorf removed from IPCC processes – IS NOT A DENIALIST!!
#5 – I’ve read no articles which conclude global warming is proven wrong by this, there may be some but ya know – WHO ARE THESE DENIALISTS?
#6 – Monibot – IS THE FURTHEST POSSIBLE EXTREME FROM A DENIALIST!
#7 – Roger Pielke’s are not DENIALISTS!!
Ok, that took a little pressure off, I had to get the BP below 150. Here’s the article.
Editorial
Nature 462, 545 (3 December 2009) | doi:10.1038/462545a; Published online 2 December 2009
Climatologists under pressure
Abstract
Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.
The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ‘smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.
This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.
First, Earth’s cryosphere is changing as one would expect in a warming climate. These changes include glacier retreat, thinning and areal reduction of Arctic sea ice, reductions in permafrost and accelerated loss of mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Second, the global sea level is rising. The rise is caused in part by water pouring in from melting glaciers and ice sheets, but also by thermal expansion as the oceans warm. Third, decades of biological data on blooming dates and the like suggest that spring is arriving earlier each year.
Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability. But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide held fixed, the results bear little resemblance to the observed warming. The strong implication is that increased greenhouse-gas emissions have played an important part in recent warming, meaning that curbing the world’s voracious appetite for carbon is essential (see pages 568 and 570).
————–
Maybe instead of posting this embarrassing political silliness at Nature they should start a blog to let some steam off. haha. So if the major critics of these emails aren’t global warming denialists what does that make the people who wrote this piece?
I would like to formally offer the editors who wrote this to feel free to contact me with their own guest posts here. The scientists have too much pressure and need a spot to let it loose. The ski trips and constant travel wear on a person. They might as well let off steam at the Air Vent because it’s kinda embarrassing to do it in front of everyone at Nature.
Crazy times.
the Air Vent 
Now Jeff tell us how you really feel and don’t hold back.
#1, it is the Air Vent.
This is the same stunt that liberals who want to introduce quotas in hiring and college admission use. They call them “affirmative action” then when you complain about the quotas the indignantly say “how can you be opposed to affirmative action!” You defend yourself by saying you’re for affirmative action and they then respond that you are just paying lip service and don’t really mean it. The Democrat health care bills are promoted using the same tactics.
Any critique of the climate papers gets the same treatment. Pointing out that the paper is crap doesn’t get a defense of the paper, just a scream of “denialist!” . Protesting that it’s the paper not the physics that you are critical of only gets the same treatment. If you don’t swallow the dogma hook line and sinker then you’re a heretic.
“Third, decades of biological data on blooming dates and the like suggest that spring is arriving earlier each year.”
Uh-huh, and a lot of farmers in the Midwest bought into this. They started planting 95, 100 and 105 day corn. It never quite panned out. Especially last year and this season. Their bins are now full of mushy immature corn that will cost a fortune to dry.
Nature, please limit your hype to college campuses and not push it on people who depend on the weather.
There is now a heck of a lot of farmers who once were enthralled with Ethanol, windmills and all things green, who are now mad as hell.
3- “If you don’t swallow the dogma hook line and sinker then you’re a heretic.”
True, but they don’t say “heretic” because that would be implying too much of a faith based belief. Instead they use “denialist”, “crazy” and “paranoid” as their ad homs.
Pitiful from a “scientific” publication – all they’d have to do is put data, evidence and argument in a straight line and we’d all be happy.
#5 we might not be ‘happy’ but we’d be on board making the right choices.
Want to take odds on Phil Jones authoring that editorial?
Sorry – got giddy just at the thought! 🙂
Nature has got to be the absolute epitome of a crap journal with much undeserved prestige. Well, then again, Science is pretty god awful, too.
But this Editorial is the absolute worst. They don’t just say what the emails don’t show, they come right out with political advocacy! The (not “a” you will notice, but the) climate bill is “badly needed”.
These people should just make it official and put a disclaimer on their cover that says “A Left Leaning Publication”.
I too noticed the repeated use of “denialist”. I commented over at Roger’s site:
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/12/when-nature-attacks.html?showComment=1259803165529#c9084136133627522870
Jeff:
It’s just science boys being science boys. We all know how science boys are…. nothing to see here, just move on. It’s the conclusions that are important.
The Nature editor bases his entire reasoning on, “But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations… climate models. And yet, every test of climate models show they are entirely unreliable; short term,long term, regional, global. Unreliable. Demonstrated in valid peer-reviewed papers.
Apart from climate models, there is nothing observably worrying about the centennial trend in climate or sea level, apart from the usual concerns of standard episodic extremes.
Nature regards itself as the premier forum for science, and their editor demonstrates clear evidence that he doesn’t understand the basics of the discipline. Insanity is often defined as persistence in an irrational fixation. Regard the editorial equivalent in science: Nature 462, 545 (3 December 2009) | doi:10.1038/462545a.
Please excuse my profound ignorance.
This is an ‘editorial’ in a ‘science journal’?
You’re kidding me!!!!
🙂
If you were a person with a grudge against this jounal and you wished to damage its credibility – could you have possibly come up with something, anything, that is as bad (let alone worse) than what they have done to themselves here?
ahh.. by the way… who the hell wrote that thing in the first place? Jeff, did you hide the name of the author to protect him?
I’ve looked at several places now, and no one has posted this retromingent bozo’s name. Does he have the courage to step forward and take responsibility for what he has written? I doubt it. “Nature” has just become the brand-name for a bird-cage liner.
There is no global warming.
It was all made up.
It’s being pushed because there is so much money in the carbon credit trading hoax.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, the only thing people can do to save the fortunes they sunk into this lie is to keep lying.
There is no global warming.
What is so terribly depressing about this is summed up by Daniel Henninger of the WSJ when he said
“Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.”
How hard is it to envision a world with advanced energy sources. Not hard, over the time spans that we are talking about.
In the movie the other night on NatGeo (the world w/out humans, or something) one conclusion was that excess CO2 would be fixed by plants and the ocean in 200 years.
Let’s pretend that’s correct. So if it take 50 years for us to get a fossil fuel free energy source then 250 years from now the CO2 will be back to “normal”
So rather than putting a bunch of EU/US/UN technocrats in charge of our lives and running the risk of destroying our economy, why not go for the advanced energy?
We are over constrained. The Lilliputians are in charge.
http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/dirty-laundry/#comment-3003 refutes virtually every assertion in the Nature editorial. The emails cited in this post are literally jaw-dropping, particularly T. Wegley’s expression of unease over MBH. All I can picture is Feynman holding up the wet o-ring that had been soaking in the ice-water.
@Jeff ID
The Nature piece is simply astounding, and I’m in complete agreement with all of your numbered points, except #5.
Unfortunately, there have been personalities such Glenn Beck and Christopher Monckton running around essentially saying the emails prove all of AGW is a hoax/scam, as well as a whole bunch of randos commenting the same thing in news stories’ comments and on general news aggregators like Reddit and Digg.
It would be wonderful if these people who aren’t able to express an actual understanding of the issues surrounding the emails would just quiet down until they’re able and ready to do so, so that the strawmen they’ve been handing to HuffPo, Rawstory, RC, and *sigh* Nature, etc. would have less credibility with those generally unfamiliar with the climate issue.
#20
The trouble is the alarmists have a much larger number of uninformed noise generators running around trying to discredit skeptics as shills of big oil or suggesting that there is some ‘denial industry’ coordinating a disinformation campaign to protect their financial interests.
Because of this I don’t believe that sceptics would get the political traction they need without the Glenn Becks and the Monctons of the world.
Time magazine recognises tAV-
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1929071_1929070_1943516,00.html?iid=tsmodule
@Raven (#21)
I think I understand where you’re coming from, but respectfully, I think an ends-justify-the-means approach is one of the major problems identified with certain climate scientists in the CRU emails, and welcoming inaccurate arguments against something you take issue with just because they’re loud seems to me to be a similar approach.
I’m a believer that, at least eventually, the majority of the public – especially that segment of it that concerns itself with issues of policy and science – will eventually come to understand the difference between reality and propaganda on most given issues. In my view, degrading one’s arguments into counter-propaganda doesn’t help this come about; instead it’s allowing propagandists to force you into their game, and in this case, it’s an unevenly matched game in terms of funding, media access, and more.
The goal here is to encourage proper, accurate science with fully acknowledged uncertainties, and to argue for reasonable and intelligent methods for developing climate-related policy, isn’t it? Just one person’s take on things, but it seems to me that conflict with alarmists should be incidental to pursuing this goal, rather than an end in itself.
This was written by an Editor?
“Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability”.
Perhaps irony is just the 26th element in the periodic table?
Can’t we screw with these people and use some anti vilification legislation or something?
I submitted the following to Nature Blogs – wonder if they will let it through
“Hard to know where to begin on this. Just three points. First the Mann trick is to use actual instrumental data to smooth the proxy data so that the smoothed proxy data series goes up in the late 20th century instead of down, This may be clever, but it’s misleading. Secondly the fact that the Briffa series is truncated at 1960 because it goes down instead of up should lead to questions about the adequacy of the proxies to reconstruct earlier years – the reasons for the post 1960 divergence are unknown, so there is no reason to suppose divergence did not happen in 1400 as well. Finally Nature bears some responsibility for this mess. The original Mann article misdescribed what it had done – it did not use conventional principal components. And although Nature had the chance to set the record straight it did not take the opportunity.”
This is a great Finnish documentary on the Pre-CRU Whistleblower problems in Global warming
It might be worthy of its own post, and has great interview clips with McIntyre, and some of the more notable skeptics.
http://dotsub.com/view/19f9c335-b023-4a40-9453-a98477314bf2
I am a denialist. I deny AGW is real, I don’t deny the earth warms and cools by its own whim though.
I also take issue with calling the released e-mails as ill-begotten. Far too often it is stressed that they were obtained illegally. It is blatently obvious that they were leaked and not hacked.
What has sickened me is that how many other scientific studies are manipulated in this same way. One example is happening right in front of me. Fishermen in my home town are being driven out of their livelyhood based on studies and fish stock predictions. Since the same type of agenda driven people were behind the studies I seriously question (and have for years) their findings.
When Bayesian analysis is scoffed at you know there is a problem.
I caught the tail end of a program on BBC4 last night, discussing the scientific input to policy making (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00p2z8m if you’re in the UK – Moral maze). Apart from the program seeming to present a fairly balanced view on how science can be biased and mis-used, I was horrified to get an insight into how people with a arts/humanities background view science and scientists.
Scientists seem to be incredibly rare, only understand their specific field of training, and are often treated as outsiders. Scientific opinion is regarded as irrefutable fact, and scientific data is read with a strong emphasis on semantics and the letter of the publication, rather than any attempt to use the underlying facts.
The most amazing quote I remember was that ‘politicians should be skeptical of scientists, and challenge their views’. There was much discussion around the issue of bias, but I didn’t see politicians being accused of bias – it seems they are allowed to propose policies of their own without needing to justify their actions (and there are many many examples of governments admitting years later that they made serious ethical misjudgements)
Hey Jeff
Don’t be so down on your engineering fraternity. I started life as a quantum physicist/chemist. I now design industrial ventilation and air pollution control systems and do computer modelling of stack discharges. In many ways I had to morph into an engineer to cut the mustard in the real world. No one wants to pay for an a-priori analysis of a problem by a theoretical physicist that has been solved 1000 times over by standard engineering procedures. I think perhaps the temperature record guys could do with a dose of that. Might be worth their while to buy a copy of “Perry’s”.
After the collapse of the Soviet union and communism, and the disappearance of once proudly confessed Marxists, could it just be that climate change is the new religion for these lost souls. After all the aim as clearly stated in the Copenhagen treaty is to achieve the distribution of wealth.
Well, on the other side, there will be an article in Nature today that refutes claims (by Al Gore for instance) that the loss of ice on Mount Kilimanjaro is solely caused by AGW. According to the molecular paleontologist dr. Sinninghe Damsté, the melting of the icecap on Mount Kilimanjaro is a recurrent phenomenon, caused by long periods of drought. His research indicates the current icecap was formed at the beginning of the Holocene (11500 years ago) during a period of heavy monsoon rains, followed by much drier conditions. According to Sinninge Damsté, this period of drought may be near its end.
See this press release in Dutch.
You remember the old saying about shooting oneself in the foot. Well that ain’t the case here. Nature just skipped over all the extremities and went straight for the head, it’s own head and didn’t miss.
Jeff,
Have you noticed the strong similarities between Nature’s reaction to the CRU leaks and Muslims reactions to the cartoons? Both were about religious fundamentalists who were furious that publication would cause people to laugh at their gods.
Chris Wood #30
It’s not distribution of wealth, its a power grab. This is just the latest meme they’ve latched onto. It doesn’t even matter whether it’s true or not as far as they’re concerned.
Elitists looked at Communism as a way for them to run things, since they feel that the lumpen proletariat are not capable of knowing how to run their lives. Notice that CAGW solutions all involve the same elites running things. Wealth redistribution is only a catch phrase to gain the support of the masses. Think about it. Did you ever see or hear of the Kremlin higher ups standing in line for anything. They even had their own car lane! Do you see Al Gore traveling coach? Do you see him living in a one bedroom walkup?
#2 – The files were intentionally released HERE. This blog who’s proprietor ADMITS GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL – Every other damn day it seems. — NOT A DENIALIST!!
Let’s not let a little name calling alter the trajectory of the evidence presented. Roger Peilke has pointed out that there is 90%-95% overlap between the data of the msin temperature histories; Hadcrut3, Giss, and NOAA. NOAA provides all of the raw data to GISS and GISS is the consistent outlyer of the three, always showing spurious and unwarranted extra heat. NOAA has it’s data set confined to major metro areas, nd has systenaticly moved away from higher elevation toward more temperate latitudes as shown by Chiefio. This gives a false warming before the data is augmented by whatever hocus pocus Jimmy Hansen’s boys apply.
That leaves Jones et al. What if he has his thumb on the scale also? Is he the type of person who would do that? Hell yes he is.
His comrade in New Zealand has been shown to cook the temp.
Warwick Hughes has discovered the same cooking of data in Australia.
Dare to be denier. These people who are asking us to believe there is such a thing as global warming have demonstrated no such thing. Their evidence amounts to “Trust me”.
Dare to disbelieve.
Once more it devolves into name calling.
It is pretty pitiful that that is all the hot earthers have.
I myself am not a denialist, I am a climate infidel!
Nature has once again discredited itself as a scientific journal. The first time, it was when they posted a link to desmogblog the shameful, racist and delationiste site of Hoggan and his minions journalists. The editorial board here takes a position of unrepentent “denial”. The codes have yet to be fully analyzed, but for Nature, all is well.
This reads like a political editorial, not a scientific one: is Nature like the Globe and Mail, like the shameful Pierre Veya, editor of Le Temps in Geneva who rehabilitated the Hockey Stick? These editors have their credibility to lose and are visibly concerned the science they have been promoting is going to be proven wrong. So they decided to anticipate, to O surprise, close the debate before it really starts.
The academic world is no Pangloss house. Yet this is truly “unprecedented” and a sad day for science.
“Want to take odds on Phil Jones authoring that editorial?”
The editorial appears to be written by Simon Gribbin, at least that’s what it shows in the document properties of the PDF version (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/pdf/462545a.pdf).
I think that we must not be distracted by even a science publisher like Nature obviously going advocate and liberally sprinkling its editorial with pejorative references. OK we know a little bit better where that journal is coming from and now lets move on to what we do best: analyzing in detail the evidence and claims of climate science papers.
You can get a lot more attention with these generalized exchanges, but to the science oriented participants they cannot provide much satisfaction. We need to stick to the details like why hiding the decline goes against all scientific instincts and reasoning.
Generalized comments and references like Nature uses in its editorial are obviously beside the point of the issue they intend to address. On the other hand, Jeff ID, throwing around general comments and references like communist and left leaning detract greatly from your skills, insights and statements as an analyzer of climate science papers. If you want to show how the political leanings of the participants in the AGW debate might affect where they come down on the issue, I say that is a legitimate talking point, but leave the name calling to consensus folks.
I fisked this thing at my blog
http://www.di2.nu/200912/03.htm
PS my former boss has found a thrid bug in some 16 lines of cru IDL code
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/12/whoops-theres-third-bug-in-that-code.html
Wordle for the Nature editorial:
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1408514/CRU_email_-_Nature_editorial
Interesting words: theft, stolen, harassment, denialists
Words we don’t see: ethics, hide
Nature needs to place a disclaimer on the inside of the front page…. “A liberal agenda consensus publication which conforms to the following publication rules with a 95% confidence level:
(A) Conclusions to papers submitted for review must be written prior to analyzing the raw data. Any conclusions written after analyzing the date will automatically be rejected.
(B) Data manipulation is acceptable so long as it supports the conclusion.
(C) Suppression of data and code will be enforced to protect the conclusion of the paper.
(D) To encourage and expedite research publications, the Review Panel will consist of the “authors” submitting the paper.
(E) Exception to (D) – Papers submitted for review with a conclusion that does not conform to the consensus will have a minimum 2 year process conducted by a partisan review panel. In addition, Review Panel has final and complete authority to reject submitted paper for “just” cause.
As for the “Nature” editorial, this is supposed to come from a scien-ti-fic journal, not the Globe and Mail!
A scientific journal is supposed to offer objectivity since science is never a priori known, it is developing.
This is a tactical move but the reality will bite these editors: codes are being studied carefully and replication is taking place. Should only ONE replication expose CRUs bad scientific method, the entire editorial panel of Nature will be discredited because of this editorial.
Hasty move from the publisher… imo.
This statement by Nature shows how politically conjoined they are with the corrupt sect of Scientists.
O/T BBC news just briefly mentioned Climategate, hastily followed by a moving story of how climate change has devastated the salt camel trains to Timbuktu, wrecking the lives of the Tuareg who now have to use Jeeps.
You couldn’t make it up (yet they do).