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What Ben Santer Has to Say

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“Climate change journalism has gotten worse,” says Dr. Ben Santer, researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and one of the world’s top scientists studying the attribution of climate change.

The decline in the quality and accuracy of climate change coverage over the years is quite a paradox. Surely, now that this issue has been in the public sphere for over twenty years, journalists and media outlets should be able to get it right. You would expect that their reporting would get better over time, not worse. That’s not so, says Dr. Santer.

“One would hope that in journalism it was similar [to science]”, he continues, “that in the midst of complex issues there would be some attempt to really get to the bottom of them. I’ve seen little of that search for understanding in the journalism on climate change.”

Coverage of ClimateGate, the scandal that wasn’t, gets Santer particularly riled up. He describes it as “reflexive, knee-jerk, reactive, not thoughtful, and rather asymmetric too: devoting a lot of publicity to the stolen emails without really trying to understand context or trying to understand issues.”

As if it wasn’t enough for the media to treat information vital to our future so lightly, they have also helped to spread unfounded accusations of fraud against climate researchers. Scientists are people just like anyone else, and should not be subject to such harassment. “These attacks on people like Phil Jones,” Dr. Santer agrees, “had tremendous personal cost. He was nearly driven to suicide by the hatred that he encountered.”

Indeed, Dr. Phil Jones, the director of CRU – the British research group that had their security system hacked and their private correspondence stolen – suffered from depression and suicidal idealation due to the barrage of hate mail and death threats he received following the media’s hostile coverage of the incident.

Who goes into scientific research expecting death threats? “[Jones] has done more than almost anyone in the world to improve our knowledge of observed changes in the temperature of planet Earth,” says Santer. “He was not deserving of this kind of treatment.

“So much attention was devoted to some incautious phrases in these emails, rather than to ask, “What kind of pressure has this guy been labouring under and operating under for years now? What sort of systematic attack by Freedom of Information Act has he been trying to deal with?

“Was Phil Jones angry and frustrated? You bet.”

Another long-standing aspect of climate change journalism that puzzles Dr. Santer is artificial balance – when neutrality is prized above all else, even above objectivity and truth. Sometimes the two sides of an issue, especially one of a scientific nature, aren’t equal, and shouldn’t be treated as such. Doing so, says Santer, “reinforces in [people’s] minds the opinion that the science is not settled, that experts are split 50-50 on human effects on climate, and that’s fundamentally wrong. That’s not the way things are. We have a few vocal individuals, who, for whatever reason, have very powerful voices in the media, and that have received attention out of all proportion to the scientific quality of their work.

“These fringe voices now have megaphones,” he continues, “and have means of amplifying their voices and trumpeting shoddy, incorrect science. We’ve seen the rise of the blogs, we’ve seen the rise of these “independent public auditors” who believe that they have carte blanche to investigate anyone who produces results they don’t agree with, and if that individual doesn’t comply with their every request, they indulge in this persecution campaign on their blogs and make your life very uncomfortable. I’ve had direct personal experience with that.

“The irony is that at a time when the public, more than ever, needs sound information on the science of climate change, needs plain English accounts of what we know and what we don’t know, there’s this cacophony, there’s this huge sea of noise – and, unfortunately, the people who shout loudest and contribute to this sea of noise are those who are often least informed.”

So where do we go from here? How do we repair public understanding of a scientific issue that many perceive as a purely political one? How will the media move past polarized reporting that misses the mark more often than not? Dr. Santer offers his two cents.

“I think that the media have to decide, ultimately, whether their goal is making money and satisfying their shareholders, or whether it’s reporting in the public interest, on issues that are of overwhelming importance to our generation and to future generations.

“I would argue that climate change is one of those issues, and the media have a civic responsibility to get it right, to get the reporting right, to get the science right, to devote resources to these issues… and they’re failing. They’re not living up to that responsibility.

“I don’t see an easy way of changing it; I do think that something has to change.”

One strategy could be to build the dwindling pool of science journalists back up. Santer stresses the importance of having such specialized reporters, rather than sending out general reporters to cover complex scientific issues. “Just like you can’t build a computer model of the climate system overnight from scratch, you can’t create a science reporter overnight from scratch either,” he says. “That familiarity with the issues and with the people, and with the right questions to ask. That takes time.”

Our future hangs on information and understanding, as it has ever since our species gained the ability to destroy what supports us. The only thing that can save us from ourselves is ourselves. “If people are to do the right thing about climate change,” says, Santer, “then they need good information, not wishful thinking, not disinformation.

“The sad thing is that many folks don’t want to know about the science at all. They just want to have business as usual and really not consider even the possibility that we might be changing the climate of planet Earth, that they might be culpable in that, and that they might need to think about the future.

“Lots of folks really don’t want to be confronted by the future,” he concludes. “It’s scary.”

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So What Happened with ClimateGate?

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Remember back in December, when the news was buzzing each day about the stolen emails from top climate researchers? They were described as “the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming”, or worse. Apparently, the scientists had written things that severely compromised the underpinnings for the idea that human activity was causing the Earth to warm. We could now all stop worrying and forget about cap-and-trade.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. There were no less than four independent investigations into the contents of these emails – conducted by scientists, universities, and governments, not general reporters rushing off a story about an area of science with which they were unfamiliar, and trying to make it sound interesting and controversial in the process.

So what did these investigations find? Is the Earth still warming? Are humans still responsible? Can we trust the scientific process any more, or should we throw peer-review out the window and practice Blog Science instead?

Actually, all four of the investigations concluded that absolutely no science was compromised by the contents of the emails. The CRU scientists weren’t as good as they should have been about making data easily accessible to others, but that was the only real criticism. These scientists are not frauds, although they are accused of it on a daily basis.

Pennsylvania State University, over a series of two reports, investigated the actions of their employee, Dr. Michael Mann, who is arguably at the top of the field of paleoclimatology. They found that, contrary to most accounts in the mainstream media, he did not hide or manipulate any data to exaggerate global warming, delete any emails that might seem suspicious and be subject to Freedom of Information requests, or unjustly suppress skeptical papers from publication. After a second investigation, following up on the catch-all accusation of “seriously deviating from accepted practices within the academic community”, Penn State exonerated Mann. They criticized him for occasionally sharing unpublished manuscripts with his colleagues without first obtaining the express permission of the authors, but besides that minor (and somewhat unrelated) reprimand, they found absolutely nothing wrong.

The British House of Commons investigated the actions of CRU director Phil Jones, and came to a similar conclusion. They found that his “actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community”, that he was “not part of a systematic attempt to mislead” or “subvert the peer review process”, and that “the focus on CRU….has been largely misplaced”. They criticized CRU’s lack of openness with their data, but said that the responsibility should lie with the University of East Anglia, which CRU is a part of. So these scientists should really catch up to the climate research team at NASA, for example, which publishes all of their raw data, methodologies, and computer codes online, with impeccable archives.

The University of East Anglia conducted their own investigation into the actions of CRU as a whole. They found “no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda”, and asserted that “allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid”. They also explored the lack of transparency in CRU, but were more sympathetic. “CRU accepts with hindsight”, they write, “that they should have devoted more attention in the past to archiving data and algorithms and recording exactly what they did. At the time the work was done, they had no idea that these data would assume the importance they have today and that the Unit would have to answer detailed inquiries on earlier work.” They also note that CRU should not have had to respond to Freedom of Information requests for data which they did not own (such as weather station records).

Just last week, the final investigation, headed by Sir Muir Russell on behalf of UEA, found that “their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.” Is this starting to seem a bit repetitive? To illustrate their point, over the course of two days, they independently reconstructed the global temperature record using publicly available data, and came to the same conclusion as CRU. Again, there was the criticism that CRU was not as open as it should have been. They also noted that an obscure cover figure for a 1999 World Meteorological Organization report, constructed by Phil Jones, did not include enough caveats about what was proxy data and what was instrumental data. However, the more formally published, and much more iconic, graphs in Mann 98 and the IPCC TAR, were fine.

There have been some great comments on the results of these investigations since they were released, especially by scientists. Here are some samples:

[The CRU researchers] are honest, hardworking scientists whose reputations have been unjustifiably smeared by allegations of unscrupulous behaviour…I hope that the media will devote as much attention to this comprehensive dismissal of the allegations as it did to promoting the hysteria surrounding the email theft in the first place. Will the Daily Telegraph now retract its claim that the emails revealed “the greatest scientific scandal of our age” and apologize unreservedly to Phil Jones? Will there now be a public inquiry about the erroneous, shallow and repetitive nonsense promulgated in the media over this affair? If there is a scandal to be reported at all, it is this: the media stoked a controversy without properly investigating the issues, choosing to inflate trivialities to the level of an international scandal, without regard for the facts or individuals affected. This was a shameful chapter in the history of news reporting. -Raymond Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts

The call for greater transparency and openness among scientists and their institutions is necessary and welcomed, but certainly they aren’t the only ones who deserve that reminder. What institution on the planet would pass muster under such intense scrutiny? Certainly not the U.S. government agencies, which often deny or impede FOIA requests, or global corporations like BP, Massey Energy and Koch Industries, which seem to revel in hiding information from the public all the time. More transparency is needed everywhere, not just among scientists in lab coats. -Brendan DeMelle, freelance journalist, DeSmogBlog

[The Muir-Russell report] makes a number of recommendations for improvements in processes and practices at the CRU, and so can be taken as mildly critical, especially of CRU governance. But in so doing, it never really acknowledges the problems a small research unit (varying between 3.5 to 5 FTE staff over the last decade) would have in finding the resources and funding to be an early adopter in open data and public communication, while somehow managing to do cutting edge research in its area of expertise too. -Steve Easterbrook, computer science professor at the University of Toronto

I agree with these statements. I think that we are holding scientists in general, but especially climate scientists, to a far higher standard than any other group of people in the world. We need to relax a bit and realize that scientists make mistakes, and that innocent mistakes are not evidence of fraud that will bring a long-standing theory tumbling down. We need to realize that scientists are employees like any others, who don’t always follow ideal actions in every professional situation, especially when they are under intense pressure that includes death threats and accusations of criminal activity.

However, at the same time, we need to start holding other groups of people, especially journalists, to a higher standard. Why has the media been able to get away with perpetuating serious allegations without first investigating the what really happened, and without publishing explicit retractions and apologies when the people whose reputations they smeared are found innocent? Why haven’t there been four official investigations into who stole these emails, and why?

Mind the Gap

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This is the script of a presentation I will make to several groups of high school students on Earth Day. I was originally going to use the same script from my PowerShift presentation, but in light of recent developments and my ever-expanding thoughts on climate change, I decided to create an entirely new presentation.

I would greatly appreciate any thoughts, input, suggestions, etc. Keep in mind that I don’t have my PowerPoint created yet, so some of the text may seem a little confusing without the visuals I’ll be pointing to.

Enjoy!

Update: Thanks for all the helpful comments and critiques. I’ve made some changes here, but feel free to keep them coming.

Welcome everyone, nice to see you all here. My name is Kate, I’m in my last year of high school, and I am here to talk to you about climate change, or global warming. After I graduate I want to be a climate scientist, so until then, I’m channelling my obsession into a website. For the past year, I’ve been writing the blog ClimateSight.org, which has allowed me to meet a lot of cool people and correspond with a lot of scientists.

I’ve spent several years doing a lot of research on climate change, and something that’s been really interesting to me is the link between climate scientists and the public – the communication between these two groups. And the very first thing I want to talk about is assessing credibility, which is probably the most important tool I can give you. How much weight should you give different statements from different sources about scientific issues?

The scientific community that is actually studying the issue is going to be more credible than the media and the public. And that scientific research starts with scientists. They write peer-reviewed articles, published in journals like Nature or Science. Anything that is a serious scientific idea will be in one of these journals at some time or other. But there are thousands of journal articles published every month, and because they’re generally studying the frontier of their field, it’s inevitable that some of them are going to be proven wrong later. That’s why there are scientific organizations and assessment reports that look back at all these papers and compile what we know about the major issues. So statements from organizations like NASA, or from assessment reports like the IPCC, means that something has stood the test of time.

Among all the people who are not scientists, some know more than others. People who communicate science, like journalists and high school teachers and some politicians, are held a little more accountable for what they say than just any random person on the street.

So let’s see what the different levels of the credibility spectrum say about global warming. Who would disagree – who would say that humans are not causing the Earth to warm? 0% of scientific organizations say no. Pretty much 0% of peer-reviewed articles say no – there is the odd one out there, but they’re so small in number that they round right down to zero. And less than 3% of publishing climatologists say no. But 57% of articles in leading newspapers say no (or probably not, or maybe, maybe not), and 53% of the public says no.

As you can see, there is a big gap right here. The top half of the credibility spectrum is very confident about human-caused global warming, and the bottom half is very confused. Why is this? How can an issue that is so important to public policy have such drastically different levels of support between those who study it and everyone else?

There are all kinds of common objections that you and I hear about global warming. What if it’s a natural cycle and we’re just coming out of an ice age? What if the Sun is heating up? And how could there possibly be global warming when it is so cold outside? There are all kinds of arguments against the idea of climate change that everybody knows. But the scientific community is still saying this. They are still sure that yes, it’s going on and yes, it’s us.

So there are three possible explanations. Scientists could be ignorant and overconfident. Maybe they never considered the idea it could be a natural cycle. Scientists could be frauds, part of some Communist conspiracy to take over the world somehow. Or, maybe scientists know what they’re doing, and have evidence to say what they’re saying. So let’s look at the evidence that they do have.

We’ve been studying this problem for a long time, and it all started in the 1800s, when the greenhouse effect was discovered – the gases in the atmosphere that trap heat and keep the planet warm enough for life. The idea that emissions of carbon dioxide from our burning of fossil fuels – like coal, oil, and natural gas – would eventually cause warming was first proposed in 1896. So this is not a new theory by any means.

We began measuring the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere in the 1950s, and we can see that it’s steadily going up. Over the last 2.1 million years, CO2 never exceeded 300 ppm, but right now it’s at 390. This might not seem like a lot, but 390 ppm of arsenic in your coffee would kill you.

We can confirm that this increase in CO2 is due to human activity because of its isotopes. The carbon in CO2 from fossil fuels has fewer neutrons, on average, than CO2 from natural sources like volcanoes or the ocean. That makes it lighter, so we can tell the difference in samples from the air.

So we know that an increase in greenhouse gases causes warming, and we know that we are increasing greenhouse gases. So it’s not really a surprise that we’re starting to see the warming show up. There are five independent research teams worldwide that measure the average global temperature, some from weather stations and some from satellites, and all five of them are finding a very similar pattern of warming since about 1975.

But what if it’s a coincidence? What if something else was causing the warming, and it just happened to be at the same time that we were dumping fossil fuels into the air? Something that a lot of people don’t know is that there are ways that we can confirm that the warming is caused by us. First of all, there’s nothing else going on that could be causing it. Actually, if you took human activity out of the picture, we would be slowly cooling: the cycles of the Earth’s orbit show that we should be very very slowly going into a new ice age.

There is also a specific pattern of warming we can look at. If warming were caused by the sun, the entire atmosphere would warm in a uniform fashion. But if greenhouse gases were causing global warming, the first layer of the atmosphere (the troposphere) would be warming, but the next layer up, the stratosphere, would be cooling. This is referred to as the “fingerprint” of greenhouse warming, because it’s like DNA evidence or the smoking gun. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing – stratospheric cooling. (Randel et al, 2009).

So we can be very sure that yes, our activities are causing the Earth to warm, at a rate that we haven’t seen for at least the past 55 million years, which was before humans even existed. That’s really the problem – the rate of change. It’s not the actual temperature that poses a threat, it’s all about how much it changes and how fast. The world has been plenty warmer than this at times, like when dinosaurs were around. And dinosaurs were okay with that because it had been like that for a really long time and they had adapted to it. But a change in temperature at the rate we’re seeing now? It might seem slow to you and me, but on a geological timescale, it’s incredibly quick, too quick for species – including humans – to adapt. Yes, the climate has changed many times before, but it never really ended well.

For example, the largest extinction in our Earth’s history, the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, was most likely caused by warming from greenhouse gases that came out of supervolcanoes much larger than anything we have today. It got so warm that the ocean couldn’t hold any oxygen and produced hydrogen sulphide instead. That’s what makes rotten eggs smell bad, and it’s actually poisonous in large enough quantities. It killed 97% of species in the ocean and 70% of species on land. It has been nicknamed “The Great Dying”. So this is the absolute worst-case scenario of what can happen when too many greenhouse gases go into the atmosphere at once. It means a whole lot more than just nicer Winnipeg winters.

So, to the people who really look at this issue, the evidence is undeniable. In academic circles, there really is no argument. All the objections that we have – they thought of them long ago, and covered them all, and ruled all of them out, before you and I even knew what global warming was. The evidence for climate change is not a house of cards, where you take one piece out and the whole theory falls apart. It’s more like a mountain. Scrape a handful of pebbles off the top, but the mountain is still there.

As for the second option, that scientists are part of a conspiracy – if you stop and think about it, like, really? Scientific fraud happens, but on the scale of one paper, or at the most one scientist, not an entire field stretching back for over a century. Scientists are not that organized. And that only leaves one explanation – that the field of climatology does know what it’s doing, and does have evidence to say what it’s saying: that humans are causing the Earth to warm, and it’s not going to be good.

We’ve established that the top half of the credibility spectrum is the one that we can trust on this issue. So what’s going on in the communication between the top and the bottom so that the public has got totally the wrong idea? This is what I spend most of my time working on, and there are a lot of factors involved, but it really comes down to three points.

Firstly, climatology is a complex science, and it’s not a required course in high school, so the public doesn’t understand it the way they understand Newton’s Laws of Motion. Most people do not know all this stuff I just told you, and that’s only scratching the surface; there is so much more science and so many more lines of evidence. And when you only have bits and pieces of this story, it’s easy to fall prey to these kinds of misconceptions.

Second, there are, sadly, a lot of people out there trying to exploit number one. There are a lot of very prominent people in the media, politics, and industry who will use whatever they can get – whether or not it’s legitimate, whether or not it’s honest – as proof that global warming is not real. You’ll hear them say that all scientists said an ice age was coming in the 70s, so we shouldn’t trust them now. In reality, most scientists were predicting warming by the 70s, and the single paper to talk about an ice age was proven wrong almost immediately after its publication. You’ll hear them say that volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans, but volcanoes only emit about 1% of what we do. They’ll say that the Greenland ice sheet is getting thicker, so therefore, it cannot be warming. But the reason that Greenland is getting thicker is that it’s getting more snow, caused by warmer temperatures that are still below zero.

Some of these questionable sources are organizations, like a dozen or so lobby groups that have been paid a lot of money by oil companies to say that global warming is fake (Hoggan and Littlemore, 2009). Some of them are individuals, like US Senator James Inhofe, who was the environment chair under George W. Bush, and says that “global warming is the greatest hoax ever imposed upon the American people.” Some of them have financial motivations, and some of them have ideological motivations, but their motivations don’t really matter – all that matters is that they are saying things that are inaccurate, and misleading, and just plain wrong.

The third reason that the public is so confused about climate change is that the media has been very compliant in spreading the message of these guys. You would expect that newspapers and journalists would do their research about scientific issues, and make sure that they were writing science stories that were accurate, but sadly, that’s not what’s happening.

One of the major problems is that there are fewer journalists than there used to be, and there are almost no science journalists in the mainstream media – general reporters cover science issues instead. Also, a few decades ago, journalists used to get a week or two to write a story. Now they often have less than one day, because speed and availability of news has become more important than quality.

And, finally, when it comes to climate change, journalists follow the rule of balance, or presenting “two equal sides”, staying neutral, letting the reader form their own opinion. This works really well when the so-called controversy is one of political or social nature, like tax levels, a federal election, how we should develop infrastructure. In those cases, there is no real right answer, and people usually are split into two camps. But when the question at hand is one of science, there is a right answer, and some explanations are better than others. Sometimes the scientists are split into two equal groups, but sometimes they’re split into three or four or even a dozen. And sometimes, like we see with climate change, pretty much all the scientists are in agreement, and the two or three percent which aren’t don’t really publish, because they can’t prove what they’re saying and nobody really takes them seriously. So framing these two groups as having equal weight in the scientific community is completely wrong. It exaggerates this extreme minority, and suppresses everyone else.

All these problems are perfectly explained by a man named James Hrynyshyn, a journalist himself. He says, “Science journalism….is too often practiced by journalists who know so little about the subject they’re covering that they can’t properly evaluate the reliability or trustworthiness of potential sources. The result is that sources with no credibility in the field routinely appear alongside genuine experts as part of an effort to provide balance.”

One of the best examples of how this kind of journalism can really go wrong happened quite recently. Someone hacked into the email server of the Climatic Research Unit in the UK, stole thirteen years of emails between scientists, sifted through them all to find the juiciest ones, and put them on the Internet. The police are trying to figure out who did this, because it’s quite illegal, but it wasn’t some teenage kid in their basement.

Some of the emails certainly were embarrassing, the scientists said some things that weren’t very nice and insulted some people. But can you imagine if all of your email was released to the world? Scientists are people too, and they say stupid stuff that they don’t mean over email just the same as you and I do – especially when there are so many people actively spreading lies about their work.

The most important thing, though, is that there was nothing in there that compromised any science, any data sets, anything that we know about climate change. Nothing actually changed…..but the scary part was that a striking amount of the media reported that the entire field of climate science was potentially a political scam.

For example, some scientists are working on reconstructing temperatures from before we had thermometers, using tree rings or ice cores or ocean sediment. In one of the most widely circulated emails, the scientists discussed how to “hide the decline” in a set of tree ring data that’s known to have some serious problems – the tree growth is going down while thermometers show local temperatures going up, which is the opposite of what you’d expect. It probably means there was a drought or something. So they were trying to see if they could still use the first part and cut out the useless part at the end. They’re only hiding it in a mathematical sense, they’re not hiding it from their colleagues or from the media. In fact, they’ve written about this decline in one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, so if they’re trying to pull off a conspiracy here, they’re not doing a very good job.

But somehow, in the media, the story changed. Instead of saying that scientists were “removing regional tree ring data known to be erroneous,” the media said they were “covering up the decline in global temperatures”. That’s so fundamentally different, so removed from the facts – these scientists don’t even work with global temperatures! – but you heard it everywhere. The story that reached virtually every newspaper in the world was that the world is cooling and scientists are trying to hide it from us.

That’s only one example of how a single phrase can be taken out of context and have its meaning completely twisted. It doesn’t surprise me, you see it from these guys all the time, but what absolutely amazes me is how the media just sat and lapped it right up without doing any research into the validity of these serious allegations.

Subsequently, two independent investigations into the contents of these emails have been released, and the scientists involved were basically cleared in both cases. The British Parliament found that “the focus on CRU has been largely misplaced”, that the scientists’ “actions were in line with common practice”, that “they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead”, and that all of the CRU’s “analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified”. (British House of Commons, 2010). The University of East Anglia found “no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the CRU”, “no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda”, and that “allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid”. (UEA, 2010) So this affirms what the climate science community already knew: the stolen emails do not change the science one bit.

But look at what newspapers told us for weeks on end. Every time the Winnipeg Free Press mentioned the emails, they would say something along the lines of, “The correspondence appears to suggest researchers may have manipulated data to exaggerate global warming.” These are very serious allegations to make, and they were made without evidence in serious, credible and widely read newspapers, and they’re not being retracted or corrected in the media now that the investigations are coming up clear.

Spencer Weart, who is a science historian, had some great words to say on this issue: “The media coverage represents a new low. There are plenty of earlier examples of media making an uproar without understanding the science….but this is the first time the media has reported that an entire community of scientists has been accused of actual dishonesty. Such claims….would normally require serious investigation. But even in leading newspapers like The New York Times, critics with a long public record for animosity and exaggeration are quoted as experts.”

Many of the scientists featured in the emails received death threats. Phil Jones, the director of CRU, says that he’s been suicidal. The story of these stolen emails is not a story of scientists engaged in conspiracy – it is a story of how desperate some people are to make it seem that way, and how gullible and irresponsible the mainstream media can be.

And not long after that, story after story broke that the IPCC, which is a huge UN publication about everything we know about the science of climate change, had all kinds of mistakes in it. So what were these mistakes? In 3 000 pages, two examples of overestimating climate change were found. First, the report said that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, and we now know that it’s going to take a lot longer than that. Second, it said that 55% of the Netherlands is below sea level, when in fact 55% of the Netherlands is susceptible to flooding, and only some of that is below sea level. This last one is background information. It really isn’t all that relevant.

So should that have happened? No. But does it actually matter to our understanding of the science? No.

Then several British journalists managed to invent five or six other “IPCC scandals”. When these were investigated more seriously, they were found to be completely false. But they were still reported in virtually every newspaper around the world. Again.

However, the IPCC has made a lot of mistakes, much more serious than these, that none of the newspapers are reporting. The difference is that the mistakes that make the media scream scandal are examples of overestimating climate change, while the ones you don’t hear about are examples of underestimating climate change. There was recently a report published that evaluated the last IPCC report, and this is what it found:

Over the past three years, there was about 40% less Arctic summer sea ice than the IPCC predicted, and melting in the Arctic is far exceeding its worst case scenarios. Recent observed sea level rise is about 80% more than the IPCC predicted.  Global sea level by 2100 is expected to rise at least twice as much as the IPCC predicted. (Copenhagen Diagnosis, 2009)

So which seems more important? The exact date at which a specific glacier is expected to melt? Or the amount of sea level rise we can expect all over the world? I have yet to find a newspaper in the world that covered this, but I have yet to find a newspaper in the world that did not cover this. Yes, the IPCC makes mistakes, but they are almost always mistakes that say, “oops, it’s going to be worse than we thought.”

So, as you can see, the real message about the reality and severity of climate change is not getting through. Communication of science is always important, but it’s especially important for climate change, because it could potentially screw up our civilization pretty bad, and we want to minimize that risk.

Scientists, in general, are not that great at public communication – that’s why they’re scientists and not journalists or salesmen or whatever. They want to sit in the lab and crunch numbers. And there’s always been sort of a stigma in the scientific community against talking to the media or the public. But the one good thing about all these rumours and all this awful journalism is that it’s finally making the scientific community wake up and realize how bad things are and how much their voice and their input is needed.

In the period of just a few months, over 300 American climate scientists signed an open letter to the US government about how two small mistakes in the IPCC do not impact the overall message that humans cause climate change, and should not impact our efforts to stop it.

And the National Academy of Sciences, which is one of the most prestigious organizations in the world – 1 out of 10 members have a Nobel Prize – has all sorts of plans for public lectures and articles in newspapers and a science show on prime time television.

The one good thing about things getting this bad is that it makes the people involved mad enough to step up and finally try to stop it. To finally narrow this gap that has existed for so long. That’s why I’m here today, that’s why I’ve been writing my blog for over a year, because I’m mad, and if I don’t do anything about it my head is going to explode. I cannot just sit and watch while these rumours threaten our ability to preserve a good future for me and for us and for everyone who will come after us. And I sincerely hope that all of you will not just sit and watch it happen either. We need to fix this together.

What The Press Should Cover, and Won’t

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The first of three investigations into the CRU emails has been released. You can read the British House of Commons’ entire report here, but I found the summary on page 7 to be just as useful. In part, it reads:

We believe that the focus on CRU and Professor Phil Jones, Director of CRU, in particular, has largely been misplaced. Whilst we are concerned that the disclosed emails suggest a blunt refusal to share scientific data and methodologies with others, we can sympathise with Professor Jones, who must have found it frustrating to handle requests for data that he knew – or perceived – were motivated by a desire simply to undermine his work.

In the context of  the sharing of data and methodologies, we consider that Professor Jones’s actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community. It is not standard practice in climate science to publish the raw data and the computer code in academic papers. However, climate science is a matter of great importance and the quality of the science should be irreproachable. We therefore consider that climate scientists should take steps to make available all the data that support their work (including raw data) and full methodological workings (including the computer codes). Had both been available, many of the problems at UEA could have been avoided.

We are content that the phrases such as “trick” or “hiding the decline” were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead. Likewise the evidence that we have seen does not suggest that Professor Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process. Academics should not be criticised for making informal comments on academic papers.

In the context of Freedom of Information (FOIA), much of the responsibility should lie with UEA. The disclosed e-mails appear to show a culture of non-disclosure at CRU and instances where information may have been deleted, to avoid disclosure. We found prima facie evidence to suggest that the UEA found ways to support the culture at CRU of resisting disclosure of information to climate change sceptics. The failure of UEA to grasp fully the potential damage to CRU and UEA by the non-disclosure of FOIA requests was regrettable. UEA needs to review its policy towards FOIA and re-assess how it can support academics whose expertise in this area is limited.

DeSmogBlog also has a great summary which you can read here.

We know that the system of climate science is not perfect, and that the folks at CRU did not handle things in the best of ways all the time, but who ever does, especially when you are the target of organized campaigns to discredit your field? The real problem, though, is that everyone who keeps up with North American or British news heard that climate scientists were accused of fudging and manipulating data. There is no evidence to support these allegations, and the House of Commons’ report confirms this. However, I’m not naive enough to believe that the media will cover the result of this “scandal” as intensely as they covered the allegations themselves.

Imagine that you read in the newspaper that a man has been charged with murder. It will be months before you find out the verdict of his trial, and unless it’s OJ Simpson, you probably won’t hear the verdict at all. Many, perhaps most, people would assume that the man is guilty.

We assume that allegations have merit, when – at least when it comes to climate science – they just as often do not.

Freedom of Information

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The only real issue that the hacked CRU emails brought up, the only allegation that didn’t fall apart if you were familiar with the literature (*cough cough hide the decline*), was the failure of Phil Jones to respond to some of the FOI (Freedom of Information) requests.

This looks bad on the surface, and it certainly has been spun that way – climate scientists hiding their data because they know it’s wrong and they don’t want anybody to find out. And ignoring FOI requests is a really stupid thing to do, no matter what the situation is. However, as with all the other allegations, some more context as to the nature and volume of these requests makes ignoring them understandable, if not excusable.

The Freedom of Information Act is important to a democratic society, but its major flaw is that it fails to distinguish its abuse. An article from the Sunday Times describes, in an interview with Phil Jones, what the FOI situation at CRU was.

In July 2009 alone, they received 60 FOI requests – most asking for data that was already freely available online. However, turning down a request takes 18 hours of work, and they only had 13 staff at CRU – all of which had better things to do than respond to needless FOI requests.

In another instance, over a matter of days, they received 40 FOI requests, which obviously all came from the same form letter – but each asked for data from a different 5 countries. So in total, temperature data for 200 different countries (again, most of which was already freely available) was requested, and all the forms came to CRU rather than the offices in the countries the data came from, or even the countries the authors of the FOI forms lived in. Phil Jones is sure that this coordinated attack originated at Climate Audit, which “just wanted to waste our time….they wanted to slow us down.”

Out of irritation, Phil Jones made some comments over email to his colleagues about how he wished that they could just get rid of the data rather than do all this work distributing it needlessly. This was purely a hypothetical proposition, though, as CRU doesn’t own any of the data. “We have no data to delete,” he says. “It comes to us from institutions around the world….it’s all available from other sources.”

When you are abused with FOI requests, ignoring them is not the right thing to do, and Phil Jones knows it – “I regret that I did not deal with them in the right way,” he says. His actions and words cannot be excused, but with more context, it’s obvious that his motives were not to cover up flaws in the data or hide it from critics. He just wanted to do his work.

It’s a great example of how the CRU hack compromises the professional reputations of some of the scientists involved, but it does not compromise one iota of the science. “I am obviously going to be much more careful about my emails in future, ” remarks Phil Jones. “I will write every email as if it is for publication. But I stand 100% behind the science. I did not manipulate or fabricate any data.”

CRU was not the only institution to be abused with FOI requests. The field of climate research has been grappling with this issue for the past few years. Take Benjamin Santer, for example. In a story he relays here, he describes how, following the publication of his 2008 paper, an FOI request by Stephen McIntyre asked for all the raw data used in his study so it could be replicated. Santer pointed him to the data, which was already freely available online. But then he was given two subsequent FOI requests, which asked for all of his intermediate calculations and two years of email correspondence related to the data. Obtaining this information is completely unnecessary to replicate a study, and it is certainly not normal scientific practice – the only reason you would want them would be to find material that could be framed as embarrassing and used to discredit the study and the researcher – as if Ben Santer hasn’t been through enough already. So he turned the FOI requests down, and was immediately flooded with hate mail from Climate Audit readers until he released the intermediate calculations, purely because he “wanted to continue with my scientific research…….I did not want to spend all of my available time and energy responding to harassment incited by Mr. McIntyre’s blog.”

Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA, adds to the list of instances of FOI abuse in climate science. He remarked that “In my previous six years I dealt with one FoIA request. In the last three months, we have had to deal with I think eight…..These FoIAs are fishing expeditions for potentially embarrassing content but they are not FoIA requests for scientific information.”

James Hansen, the director of GISS at NASA, has similar opinions. Following the CRU hack, he writes, “I am now inundated with broad FOIA requests for my correspondence, with substantial impact on my time and on others in my office. I believe these to be fishing expeditions, aimed at finding some statement(s), likely to be taken out of context, which they would attempt to use to discredit climate science.”

The broad abuse of the Freedom of Information Act in the field of climate science is worrying, and it calls for some kind of caveat that will distinguish it from legitimate use of FOI. Research into climate change is vital at this point in human history, but if top researchers are forced to spend their time filling out needless paperwork instead, the field will suffer. The past few months have shown us that institutions of climate science are in need of representatives specialized in media relations. Perhaps they also need to employ dozens of students to fill out FOI forms, or lawyers to defend them from the constant attack they are under.