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The 7 Biggest Lies About “Climate Gate.”

By Shoq, on December 2, 2009, at 2:37 pm

Well, it took much too long, but Huffpost finally posted some ammo you can use to rebut the noise about the embarrassing, but absurdly overblown email theft story that has become the right wing's latest shiny object. (At least until last night's speech on Afghanistan by President Obama.) 

To people who believe liberalism is fascism, evolution is a myth, and Obama was born in Kenya, the two emails, taken out of context and combined up with a complete lack of understanding about how science–and peer science–works, are a magical gift of deliverance from the Sky Fairy.  But as with most of what they believe, it's been ginned up by the professional denier community into something of ACORN proportions.  And yet, in the end, as with that story, it's mostly much about mostly nothing:

"Even if every bit of mud slung at these scientists were true, the body of scientific work supporting the theory of human-caused climate change—which spans hundreds of thousands of scientific papers written by tens of thousands of scientists in dozens of different scientific disciplines—is too vast to be budged by the flaws in the works of the three or four scientists being subject to the fiercest attacks."

The slide show in this piece, by Katherine Goldstein is just the sort  of brief explainer approach I've been wanting to aim for in this blog (when some tools I've been helping out with are finally programmed).

Related:

Kevin Grandia blogs: "Stolen climate science emails just ain't the conspiracy some want it to be."

 


The 7 Biggest Lies About “Climate Gate.”
December 2nd, 2009 | Category: Politics
  • The climate change deniers have a major gullibility issue. Believing in a conspiracy to fabricate a global warming hoax is the same as believing the Apollo moon landings were shot in a studio in Hollywood.

    If these conspiracy nuts are right, then it means that tens of thousands of scientists, who have never met, working in different fields over the last 40 or more years, all spontaneously decided to punk the world, then found somebody to hack into every weather and photographic satellite ever launched to change the pictures they're taking of the planet.

    Yeah... I'd sooner believe Bigfoot was hidden on the grassy knoll taking potshots at Kennedy before I believe that. But then again, I'm not a gullible idiot like some people.
  • What I draw from these e-mails and the reactions is that there is an unfortunate politicization of science. There is a vast difference between science and other fields, which is that in science nobody cares about your opinion. As long as there is no falsification of data, it really doesn't matter what result a scientist might have wished for.

    In this case, the scientist is accused not of tampering with the raw data, but of graphing a hybrid trendline, combining both reconstructed and measured temperatures in a single line, rather than graphing them separately, which would have looked like a downward trend. Now in any other field of science, graphing the two lines separately would not have been worth the trouble of correcting, and I have often seen such graphs. Everyone reading the journal would know that the extrapolation of a high-order polynomial beyond its range is completely meaningless and no one would have given this downward curve another thought. After all, the real measured temperatures are right there. But in this case the authors put extra effort into the graph in order to ensure that the irrelevant graphing artifact didn't cause confusion. This is where we start to slip into the side of the political, where unlike science, everything is a matter of opinion and where the presentation of data and the character of the the presenter are fair game in convincing people of a point of view.

    Now anyone with a high school education and a spreadsheet program could have used the same data to draw the graph extrapolating to a downward trend. But any paper that tried to conclude from this graph that temperatures are decreasing would not get published. Not because of the conclusion but because of the methodology. It is done by using an extrapolation known to be meaningless whose error coefficient can easily be calculated, and by omitting relevant data, the measured temperatures. Hundreds of subsequent papers by different authors using different methodologies which take into account every possible factor do show a warming trend that fits the actual data very nicely, so any result that differs from this would immediately cause a rush of verification, not to disprove it but to account for the difference between one set of results and another much larger set.

    However the onus would probably be on those who conclude that there is a long-term cooling to justify their result with new science, which would be pretty exciting. Global warming is not a theory and has no new science attached, the results of applying perfectly classical scientific calculations to the best possible measurements always give roughly the same results, which match other measurements. From a scientific point of view the field is pretty boring. If you want exciting science and new theories don't look at climatology, look at the Large Hadron Collider or something, where actual new theories can be tested and disproven.

    The other revelations are pretty juicy - the ones that show an intention to block the publication of someone else's papers. That's reprehensible and I sincerely hope that this attempt was unsuccessful. It has no bearing on whether his results were accurate, again, I don't care about his opinions, but if it led to obstruction of the progress of knowledge it's worth checking that the anonymous peer review system resisted this type of manipulation.
  • Well said, Martin. I'm delighted you found your way to my little "emerging caldron of hate" (as it was recently termed by a former Bush official). I am going to refer your post to a few thousand others, right now :)
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