Climate Change - "Those" e-mails and science censorship

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In my last video I looked at a couple of emails that had been held up as exhibit A for fudging climate data. And as we saw it is not quite as simple as that. This goes for the other area I said I'd be happy to look at which is the contention that the emails were trying to stifle scientific debate and block alternative ideas.

First, let me clear up any misunderstanding about how these papers get published and especially the process of peer review. It's a system that's been around for over 200 years and its purpose is to keep bad research out of scientific literature. Referees look through submitted papers for obvious mistakes and flaws in methodology and advice the editors of the journal accordingly. Papers are excluded if the mistakes and flaws are very obvious. A paper should not be excluded simply because a referee or an editor disagrees with its contents or its conclusions. The question is did the emails want to keep the papers from being published because they disagreed with them or because the papers were full of basic errors. The assumption among conspiracy theorists is the former.

The rational the emails themselves give is that the research is crap. And we even see them rebutting privately and publicly what deem to be crap coming from their own colleagues who support climate change. I couldn't find one comment about wanting to keep a paper out because it highlights flaws in a climate change model. Of course the emails could be lying. But if they are a part of conspiracy communicating privately why would they lie to each other?

Here's an email that's been held up in the media and on skeptic blogs as a prime example. I didn't cherry-pick this, it's been cherry-picked by hundreds of blogs and media commentators out of thousands of emails that had been already cherry-picked. So, if you think I shouldn't be talking about it blame them, not me. It refers to boycotting the journal "Climate Research" following the publication of a 2003 paper by climate skeptics Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. At first sight it seems like a very clumsy attempt at censoring a paper that didn't conform to the consensus model.

But let's look at some of the background. Their work wasn't original research, it was a review of around 240 previously published studies. They looked at climate proxy records such as tree rings, lake sediments, and ice cores over the last thousand years and concluded that, overall, the 20th century doesn't contain the warmest anomaly of the past millennium. The problem with the paper wasn't that it contained mistakes or the methodology was flawed - a lot of papers get published and then mistakes and flaws are found afterward. The problem was that the mistakes were SO obvious and the methodology SO clearly flawed, climatologists say the paper should never have been published in the first place. Even authors of the papers being cited as source material objected to the way their work was misinterpreted. One problem may have been that Soon and Baliunas, who are astrophysicists, were looking at things like tree ring data with little knowledge or expertise in that field. A number of climatologists later critiqued the study. They found that Soon and Baliunas had confused tree ring growth due to warmth with tree ring growth due to rainfall. They had compared historical proxies with average temperatures for the 20th century as a WHOLE instead of the LATE 20th century which is the period of anomalous warming. They had assumed that LOCAL variations in temperature could be interpreted as GLOBAL variations. If this had been an undergraduate paper it would have been returned with an "F". Soon and Baliunas's paper was so bad that half the editorial board of the journal "Climate research" resigned after one of the editors was refused permission to publish an editorial pointing out the mistakes.

This is some of the background in context that's missing from the line that Phil Jones and his colleagues were threatening to boycott the journal because they wanted to "stifle alternative views". Scientific journals aren't like books or news magazines, their purpose isn't to give unsubstantiated opinions or stir up controversy or spark debate. They're supposed to document observations and give conclusions that are consistent with those observations. Once a paper is published it can be legitimately used to support future papers. It's impossible to keep all flawed research out of scientific literature because, as I said, sometimes the flaws aren't found until after publications. But if the mistakes are blindingly obvious then there's absolutely no excuse for publishing them.

What concerned ME when I saw these emails wasn't that the emails objected to crappy papers being published in reputable journals - I expect scientists in any field would be similarly opposed. What concerned me was that they might also be trying to keep out well-written scientific papers simply because they didn't conform to the consensus. If you've watched my climate change series from the beginning you'll know my position. I'm very much in favor of publishing well researched studies that challenge the climate change model. Challenges are for scientist to test their evidence and oblige them to look at alternative explanations.

So, throughout my climate change series I've highlighted alternative models that are being proposed by thoughtful researchers like Eigil Friis-Christensen and Nir Shaviv. But while problems have been found with these models they certainly don't fall under the category of grade "F" papers. As far as I know, no one has bothered to check whether these better quality papers have been similarly opposed. It's not hard, I simply word-searched Christy, Vesa, Shaviv, Lindzen, Svensmark, and Friis-Christensen, skeptics who know their stuff and who've written important papers challenging anthropogenic climate change. Given importance and influence of their research, you would have thought they'd be talked about endlessly in these emails over the last 13 years. And if this is a conspiracy then a lot of that talk would surely be about blocking their papers from scientific literature. But I found only one polite reference to Svensmark and no references at all to Vesa, Shaviv, and Friis-Christensen. No doubt they WERE talked about but the talk didn't make it into the list of 1000 emails guiding us towards a conspiracy. John Christy was mentioned many times because he was in regular correspondence with the climatic research unit. Richard Lindzen's papers came in for a lot of critisism including a point-by-point scientific rebuttal by Kevin Trenberth. But there was no talk of trying to block his papers, the closest I got was this email from Phil Jones which refers to passages by Lindzen and the US climate change science program study. In 13 years of emails I couldn't find any talk of blocking any papers written by any of these prominent skeptics.

So, let me repeat what I said in the first video. This doesn't mean there was no skull-duggery, it doesn't mean there was no rejection of papers on spurious grounds, no fudging of data. But simply reading out these emails and yelling 'Fraud!' tells us nothing, they all need to be properly investigated.

Finally, let me clear up a persistent misunderstanding about tree ring data. We can measure global temperatures quite easily in the industrial era with thermometers and other devices. But pre-record temperatures are measured by other means, things like tree rings, ice-cores, lake-bed sediments and coral. But tree rings present a particular problem. Generally, they're wider when it's warm and narrower when it's cool. Tree ring data fit reasonably well with all the other proxy temperature data. But about 50 years ago temperatures indicated by tree ring data in some trees began to diverge from temperatures recorded by thermometers. While modern instruments show the Earth has been warming over the last 50 years the tree ring data suggest it was cooling. Even skeptics don't doubt that the instruments are right and the tree ring data are wrong, we know the Earth has been warming and not cooling. Skeptics argue that the divergence means tree rings can't be trusted as a proxy and shouldn't be used. Proponents argue that recent tree ring growth has been influenced by post-war industrialisation and since it correlates well prior to that, it should be used. So much fuss is made of this, you'd think it was a central pillar of the theory of climate change. It isn't. The link between carbon dioxide and global temperatures was established before Phil Jones and his colleagues were even born. And that won't change however warm or wide-spread the medieval warm period happened to be. According to a study in 2008 if tree ring proxies are included in the reconstruction the last decade of the northern hemisphere has been the warmest for 1700 years. If tree proxies aren't used we're in the warmest period in 1300 years. The link between carbon dioxide and the recent rise in global temperatures isn't affected either way.

An independent inquiry will now examine the emails including serious allegations that some were destroyed while subject to a freedom of information request. But conspiracy theorists shouldn't expect reality to match the hype of talk-radio - even if you erased all the reconstructions the link between carbon dioxide and global temperature would be unaffected. And if you think a different-shape graph would undermine the idea that the Earth is doomed, or the human race faces extinction, well, it won't do that either: because none of this is in the scientific literature in the first place.

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Are climatologists censoring scientific journals and silencing alternative hypotheses on climate change? This is the second part of my look at the hacked/stolen e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit in the UK.  I welcome intelligent opinions in the forum, but please refrain from posting the same inane comment a dozen times. Debates in science aren't settled by those who argue the longest or the loudest, but by the accuracy of facts and the consistency of hypotheses with the facts.
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