It’s a sordid tale of a graph that overthrew decades of work, conveniently fitted the climate models, and was lauded triumphantly in glossy publication after publication. But then it was crushed when an unpaid analyst stripped it bare. It had been published in the highest most prestigious journal, Nature, but no one had checked it before or after it was spread far and wide. Not Nature, not the IPCC, not any other climate researcher.
In 1995 everyone agreed the world was warmer in medieval times, but CO2 was low then and that didn’t fit with climate models. In 1998, suddenly Michael Mann ignored the other studies and produced a graph that scared the world — tree rings show the “1990’s was the hottest decade for a thousand years”. Now temperatures exactly “fit” the rise in carbon!
The IPCC used the graph all over their 2001 report. Government departments copied it. The media told everyone.
But Steven McIntyre was suspicious.
He wanted to verify it, yet Mann repeatedly refused to provide his data or methods — normally a basic requirement of any scientific paper. It took legal action to get the information that should have been freely available. Within days McIntyre showed that the statistics were so flawed that you could feed in random data, and still make the same hockey stick shape nine times out of ten. Mann had left out some tree rings he said he’d included.
If someone did a graph like this in a stock prospectus, they would be jailed. Astonishingly, Nature refused to publish the correction. It was published elsewhere, and backed up by the Wegman Report, an independent committee of statistical experts. In 2009 McIntyre did it again with Briffa’s Hockey Stick. After asking and waiting three years for the data, it took just three days to expose it too as baseless. For nine years Briffa had concealed that he only had 12 trees in the sample from 1990 onwards, and that one freakish tree virtually transformed the graph. When McIntyre graphed another 34 trees from the same region of Russia, there was no Hockey Stick.
Science was ripe to be exploited. Our laws protect investors from being cheated by the corporate world, but there are no police for the laws of science. No one in business would get away with these claims, but in the world of politics, we’ll transform entire national economies based on science that uses data no one can verify or audit.
Data for scientists is like receipts for company accountants. It’s a record of what happened. Yet many climate researchers hide their data, refusing repeated requests to provide it. Phil Jones from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit has refused to give out data despite many requests. In one such refusal, I’ve replaced the word “data” with “receipt”, otherwise this is a direct quote. Imagine he’s talking to the tax office. “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the [receipts] available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.” If the accountants for Enron said this, they would be jailed.
It’s a central tenet of science that once a paper is published the raw data, methods and all related information is made public, so anyone who wants to repeat the work and validate the methods can check it. All reputable science journals have this written into their charters, but strangely many are not enforcing it when it comes to climate research.
Even more oddly, the IPCC doesn’t seem to mind that no one can check results either. Nor does Al Gore complain.
Steve McIntyre has been asking for the global data from the East Anglia CRU since 2002. They have provided it to other researchers, but refused McIntyre saying he’s “not an academic”. So Steve got an academic colleague to ask, but again they were refused, this time because it was “commercial in confidence” and would break agreements. Next they launched legal action to see the agreements, but apart from a few of those, they’re all gone too. There are only so many excuses you can make. Could it get worse? It could, and it did. Apparently the entire original global records of climate data are now ... gone, “lost”. All that the East Anglia CRU can provide is the “adjusted” data. Global temperature records are missing Science has been corrupted. This is public data. They are public servants. We are the public. It’s a scandal.
ClimateGATE:
In Nov 23 2009: Fraud, collusion, corruption documented. Emails leaked or hacked out of the East Anglia CRU show that some scientists have deleted data rather than provided it to meet legal disclosure requests.They adjusted results in order to hide “the decline” in temperatures. They blackban and boycott science journals that publish skeptical material, and they collude to evict skeptical scientists from professional organisations
3 Inquiries found East Anglia U innocent of any wrong-doing
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