COURTESY: LIVERPOOL.CO.UK

EDITOR’S CHOICE: Terence Corcoran writes in the National Post “The last of three British investigations into the notorious Climategate emails, the Independent Climate Change Email Review, landed yesterday and left behind enough cherry-pickable material to give all sides an opportunity to claim modest vindication. The review provides plenty of evidence that climate science has been and remains an uncertain shambles.”

Defenders of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, the source of the emails, will be able to spin the 168-page review as proof that the CRU did little wrong. For climate skeptics and others, the review provides plenty of evidence that climate science has been and remains an uncertain shambles.

Before we begin our own cherry-picking, the words of Sir Muir Russell, who headed the review, will undoubtedly carry the day for the global community that is rock-solid behind the climate scientists at CRU and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“The honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt,” he said. “We have not found any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the IPCC processes and hence call into question the conclusions of the IPCC assessments in this area.”

That said, let’s move on to the review itself, which actually does quite a bit to undermine the science of climate change. While protective of CRU, the Russell review is far from a whitewash. It provides enough cover to allow the scientists to hang around and claim that the gods are on their side. But it mostly raises serious questions about the process by which official IPCC science was turned into a “consensus” that climate science is settled.

For all the defence it runs for CRU and the IPCC, the Russell review portrays climate science as a field filled with uncertainty, debate, lack of openness, data hoarding and ill-will. Modern science, especially climate science, it says, deserves better. “There needs to be better communication, as well as greater openness enabling more scientific debate.” (See update in the Partick J. Michaels article which follows).

The Climategate emails, made public last November, have already rocked the climate science world, and climate science — even in the wake of this review — will never be the same.

The popular launch pad for the consensus proof that man-made climate science is a crisis was the famed Michael Mann 1999 hockey stick graphic that purported to show that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere in the last half century were the hottest in 1,000 years. The Russell review, tip-toeing through the landmines in the emails about the “trick” of “hiding the decline,” ends up with the watery conclusion that the hockey stick graph was indeed “misleading.” In magic, being misleading via sleight of hand to hide something is pretty much the heart of a trick, but the Russell review twists itself around to downplay the trick element. “When used by scientists, [trick] can mean for example a mathematical approach brought to bear to solve a problem.”

But in the hockey stick graph, no such math was involved. The creators of the hockey stick took a thousand years worth of tree ring temperature data, eliminated some of the data from 1960 forward that didn’t support the 1,000-year claim, and then spliced on actual temperature data, without telling anybody what they had done. Then they magically announced they had found a smoking climate graphic that became a global icon for the climate crusade.

Since the 1999 hockey stick achieved that “iconic significance” and was used later in IPCC documents, the Russell review says, the presentation of the hockey stick was “misleading.” The misleading element was not the graph itself, but the fact that the trick was not disclosed. The review, therefore, has no problem with the later 2007 IPCC report on climate science that used a similar hockey stick graph but explicitly spelled out the use of a mixture of historical temperature sources.

The 2007 version, blending a slew of temperature data sets, was not technically misleading, says the review. But was it good science? It says “the depiction of uncertainty is quite apparent to any reader.” There are clear temperature trend divergences and discussion of uncertainty is “extensive.” Not extensive enough, however.

Ross McKitrick, the University of Guelph professor who with Steve McIntyre broke the hockey stick story, says the Russell review still misses the point. The 2007 version, for all its disclosure of uncertainty and the blending of unblendable temperature records, did not explain that key contradictory Siberian tree-ring data was deleted for the post-1960 period.

The story behind all this and other issues does not make for comfortable reading for IPCC supporters. On IPCC science, the Russell review takes a side shot at the official risk-rating system. The IPCC typically issues statements such as “the present is likely warmer than in the past.” What does this mean? The review has doubts. To issue such assessments “as objectively as possible would require a complex (and difficult) study to perform hypothesis resting in a mathematically rigorous way … We are not aware that this has been done in the producing of IPCC reports to date.” Is it therefore highly likely that the IPCC risk assessments are not based on good science and math?

There are scores of other highlights in the review that point to a science community in need of openness and reform, and as many that point to areas where the Russell review either evaded certain facts or fell into stiff technical treatment of instances where somebody obviously engaged in thuggish suppression of papers, but the evidence pointed no fingers — despite the emails. “Emails,” said the review, “are rarely definitive evidence of what actually happened.”

True, in one sense, but tell that to Wall Street bankers who have gone to criminal trial on the basis of a few lines of email.

National Post
tcorcoran@nationalpost.

PATRICK J. MICHAELS  writes “Climategate  Whitewash Continues” in the July 12 2010 Wall Street Journal/Opinion Journal:

“Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world's leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called "a nice, tidy story" of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.

Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, "nothing to see here." Last week "The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review," commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia. The review committee was chaired by Sir Muir Russell, former vice chancellor at the University of Glasgow.

Mr. Russell took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other academics, as independent. He told the Times of London that "Given the nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to either the university or the climate science community looks at the evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find.

No links? One of the panel's four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—the source of the Climategate emails—was established in Mr. Boulton's school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia "adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity."

This purportedly independent review comes on the heels of two others—one by the University of East Anglia itself and the other by Penn State University, both completed in the spring, concerning its own employee, Prof. Michael Mann. Mr. Mann was one of the Climategate principals who proposed a plan, which was clearly laid out in emails whose veracity Mr. Mann has not challenged, to destroy a scientific journal that dared to publish three papers with which he and his East Anglia friends disagreed. These two reviews also saw no evil. For example, Penn State "determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community."

Readers of both earlier reports need to know that both institutions receive tens of millions in federal global warming research funding (which can be confirmed by perusing the grant histories of Messrs. Jones or Mann, compiled from public sources, that are available online at freerepublic.com). Any admission of substantial scientific misbehavior would likely result in a significant loss of funding.

It's impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren't looking. In a famous email of May 29, 2008, Phil Jones, director of East Anglia's CRU, wrote to Mr. Mann, under the subject line "IPCC & FOI," "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report]? Keith will do likewise . . . can you also email Gene [Wahl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce] to do the same . . . We will be getting Caspar [Amman, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research] to do likewise."

Mr. Jones emailed later that he had ‘deleted loads of emails’ so that anyone who might bring a Freedom of Information Act request would get very little. According to New Scientist writer Fred Pearce, ‘Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this.’

The Russell report states that ‘On the allegation of withholding temperature data, we find that the CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data.’ Really? Here's what CRU director Jones wrote to Australian scientist Warrick Hughes in February 2005: ‘We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it[?]’

Then there's the problem of interference with peer review in the scientific literature. Here too Mr. Russell could find no wrong: ‘On the allegations that there was subversion of the peer review or editorial process, we find no evidence to substantiate this.’

Really? Mr. Mann claims that temperatures roughly 800 years ago, in what has been referred to as the Medieval Warm Period, were not as warm as those measured recently. This is important because if modern temperatures are not unusual, it casts doubt on the fear that global warming is a serious threat. In 2003, Willie Soon of the Smithsonian Institution and Sallie Baliunas of Harvard published a paper in the journal Climate Research that took exception to Mr. Mann's work, work which also was at variance with a large number of independent studies of paleoclimate. So it would seem the Soon-Baliunas paper was just part of the normal to-and-fro of science.

But Mr. Jones wrote Mr. Mann on March 11, 2003, that ‘I'll be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor,’ Chris de Freitas of the University of Auckland. Mr. Mann responded to Mr. Jones on the same day: ‘I think we should stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues . . . to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.’

Mr. Mann ultimately wrote to Mr. Jones on July 11, 2003, that ‘I think the community should . . . terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels . . . and leave it to wither away into oblivion and disrepute.’

Climate Research and several other journals have stopped accepting anything that substantially challenges the received wisdom on global warming perpetuated by the CRU. I have had four perfectly good manuscripts rejected out of hand since the CRU shenanigans, and I'm hardly the only one. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has noted that it's becoming nearly impossible to publish anything on global warming that's nonalarmist in peer-reviewed journals.

Of course, Mr. Russell didn't look to see if the ugly pressure tactics discussed in the Climategate emails had any consequences. That's because they only interviewed CRU people, not the people whom they had trashed.”

Mr. Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia from 1980-2007, is now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.”