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UK Climategate Investigation Conclusion: Hiding the Decline was “Misleading”

19 points by cwan 16y ago

tbrownaw 16y ago
The researchers were not trying to hide evidence of a decline in global temperatures over the last decade we have plenty of actual thermometer readings to show temperatures in recent years. What they were trying to hide was the discrepancy between actual temperature readings and the temperatures suggested by tree ring data. They have relied on tree ring data to show that the earth was cooler in the past. If the tree ring data is not reliable (as the discrepancy in recent years would suggest), then maybe the earth was actually hotter in the past than these researchers would have us believe and perhaps the hot temperatures of recent years do not represent unprecedented global warming but just natural variation in climate. Sounds reasonable (unless there's some other very solid evidence that the trees really are linked to temperature as the model says, and just nobody talks about it because everyone who knows thinks everyone else is too stupid to bother with). Now let’s see if the media can report the result in a way that is not itself misleading. It's the media, their "core competency" is writing to attract eyeballs for advertisers. I'd take that to mean they'll be (accidentally, even) misleading by default, and since they don't know more than the rest of us they won't know to correct for that.
- jacoblyles 16y ago
  As far as I can gleen, this line of thinking is considered completely unreasonable by right-thinking people. As for explaining why this is so, I will need to leave that in the hands of one of those right-thinking people.
alextingle 16y ago
It's 2010, and there are still people pushing this tired old "climate change is all a made up conspiracy" crap?? I despair.
- ax0n 16y ago
  I'm more disappointed that it's 2010 and people are still talking about Climategate on HN.
  - sesqu 16y ago
    You're disappointed that someone posted a followup article to something that received a lot of attention? On the contrary, that's exactly what I like to see (although perhaps not this particular spin). Followups may not be as interesting as the original debacles, but they are more informative.
- fondue 16y ago
  No, they're pushing, "there's no conclusive proof that climate change is driven primarily by human activity." There are plenty of papers written on climate change and lots of evidence for it ... Ice Age evidence, glacier growth and receding, etc,...
pierrefar 16y ago
These guys definitely have a political agenda to push, so take their conclusions with a healthy dose of salt. The Wikipedia entry has more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation
- hugh3 16y ago
  These guys definitely have a political agenda to push, so take their conclusions with a healthy dose of salt. Good advice. Could be usefully applied to just about everything ever written on the subject of global warming, unfortunately. (...except this comment. I am untainted.)
  - jcdreads 16y ago
    That there are badly motivated liars near a debate is not a reason to assume that everyone is lying or badly motivated. Some random scientist is very (not completely, but very) unlikely to care much about the political implications of his results when analyzing his data. A liberal politician looking to build his green credentials is likely to care a lot; as is a conservative Heritage foundation type. But you know, sometimes science comes down on one side or the other. Science has shown pretty conclusively that nicotine is addictive; has suggested pretty strongly that humans affect the atmosphere in ways that affect how heat moves through water and air; and has shown pretty strongly that seeing lots of violence can be bad for children. Politicians from tobacco-growing regions, polticians from regions that produce fossil fuels, and politicians opposing limits on what should appear on television all therefore have the facts more or less not on their side; and unfortunately this usually leads to mendacity (of the sort the Heritage Foundation is displaying here) rather than any reconsideration of previously held beliefs.
  - william-newman 16y ago
    Good advice would be "so be particularly careful to check whether their arguments are logically sound and properly documented;" the original advice to skip past the quality of arguments and data to "so take their conclusions with a healthy grain of salt" is bad advice. The ad hominem fallacy isn't just unsound in principle, it tends to be pretty useless in practice. It can look reasonable at the time if there's enough groupthink, but would anyone like to nominate some cases where with two or more generations of hindsight we can agree that ad hominem arguments were a better guide to truth than simply addressing the technical arguments? And it can be wrong no matter how impressively much circumstantial evidence suggests that there could easily be a political motive: see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest .
gjm11 16y ago
The linked article is dishonest. It does quote the investigation report correctly, but then expands on what it allegedly means in a way that is entirely inconsistent with what the explanatory text in the report (which they don't quote) says. So, after the text they quote ending "... the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading", the investigation report says: We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain -- ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text. So the complaint is not that there's anything wrong with the results, but that they should have said more about the procedure by which they were obtained. The Heritage Foundation, on the other hand, says: What they were trying to hide was the discrepancy between actual temperature readings and the temperatures suggested by tree ring data. They have relied on tree ring data to show that the earth was cooler in the past. If the tree ring data is not reliable (as the discrepancy in recent years would suggest), then maybe the earth was actually hotter in the past than these researchers would have us believe -- and perhaps the hot temperatures of recent years do not represent unprecedented global warming but just natural variation in climate. So the Heritage Foundation's complaint is that the tree-ring reconstructions might be just plain wrong, and that the CRU's material obscures that and therefore suggests more confidence in AGW than is justified by the data. Note first of all that none of that is supported by the material from the investigation report. Secondly, it happens that the investigation report does comment on the issue of whether recent divergence between tree-ring data and temperature shows what the Heritage Foundation suggest it shows. Here's what the report says: 21. We do not find that the way that data derived from tree rings is described and presented in IPCC AR4 and shown in its Figure 6.10 is misleading. In particular, on the question of the composition of temperature reconstructions, we found no evidence of exclusion of other published temperature reconstructions that would show a very different picture. The general discussion of sources of uncertainty in the text is extensive, including reference to divergence. In this respect it represented a significant advance on the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR.) 22. On the allegation that the phenomenon of "divergence" may not have been properly taken into account when expressing the uncertainty associated with reconstructions, we are satisfied that it is not hidden and that the subject is openly and extensively discussed in the literature, including CRU papers. In other words: when you look at the bit of the investigation report that's concerned with the exact issue the Heritage Foundation is complaining about here, it turns out that they think that complaint is invalid. But of course that doesn't fit the Heritage Foundation's agenda, so instead they quote a different portion of the report and pretend it says what they want it to say.

19 points by cwan 16y ago

The researchers were not trying to hide evidence of a decline in global temperatures over the last decade we have plenty of actual thermometer readings to show temperatures in recent years. What they were trying to hide was the discrepancy between actual temperature readings and the temperatures suggested by tree ring data. They have relied on tree ring data to show that the earth was cooler in the past. If the tree ring data is not reliable (as the discrepancy in recent years would suggest), then maybe the earth was actually hotter in the past than these researchers would have us believe and perhaps the hot temperatures of recent years do not represent unprecedented global warming but just natural variation in climate. Sounds reasonable (unless there's some other very solid evidence that the trees really are linked to temperature as the model says, and just nobody talks about it because everyone who knows thinks everyone else is too stupid to bother with). Now let’s see if the media can report the result in a way that is not itself misleading. It's the media, their "core competency" is writing to attract eyeballs for advertisers. I'd take that to mean they'll be (accidentally, even) misleading by default, and since they don't know more than the rest of us they won't know to correct for that.

jacoblyles 16y ago
As far as I can gleen, this line of thinking is considered completely unreasonable by right-thinking people. As for explaining why this is so, I will need to leave that in the hands of one of those right-thinking people.

alextingle 16y ago

It's 2010, and there are still people pushing this tired old "climate change is all a made up conspiracy" crap?? I despair.

ax0n 16y ago
I'm more disappointed that it's 2010 and people are still talking about Climategate on HN.
- sesqu 16y ago
  You're disappointed that someone posted a followup article to something that received a lot of attention? On the contrary, that's exactly what I like to see (although perhaps not this particular spin). Followups may not be as interesting as the original debacles, but they are more informative.
fondue 16y ago
No, they're pushing, "there's no conclusive proof that climate change is driven primarily by human activity." There are plenty of papers written on climate change and lots of evidence for it ... Ice Age evidence, glacier growth and receding, etc,...

pierrefar 16y ago

These guys definitely have a political agenda to push, so take their conclusions with a healthy dose of salt. The Wikipedia entry has more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation

hugh3 16y ago
These guys definitely have a political agenda to push, so take their conclusions with a healthy dose of salt. Good advice. Could be usefully applied to just about everything ever written on the subject of global warming, unfortunately. (...except this comment. I am untainted.)
- jcdreads 16y ago
  That there are badly motivated liars near a debate is not a reason to assume that everyone is lying or badly motivated. Some random scientist is very (not completely, but very) unlikely to care much about the political implications of his results when analyzing his data. A liberal politician looking to build his green credentials is likely to care a lot; as is a conservative Heritage foundation type. But you know, sometimes science comes down on one side or the other. Science has shown pretty conclusively that nicotine is addictive; has suggested pretty strongly that humans affect the atmosphere in ways that affect how heat moves through water and air; and has shown pretty strongly that seeing lots of violence can be bad for children. Politicians from tobacco-growing regions, polticians from regions that produce fossil fuels, and politicians opposing limits on what should appear on television all therefore have the facts more or less not on their side; and unfortunately this usually leads to mendacity (of the sort the Heritage Foundation is displaying here) rather than any reconsideration of previously held beliefs.
- william-newman 16y ago
  Good advice would be "so be particularly careful to check whether their arguments are logically sound and properly documented;" the original advice to skip past the quality of arguments and data to "so take their conclusions with a healthy grain of salt" is bad advice. The ad hominem fallacy isn't just unsound in principle, it tends to be pretty useless in practice. It can look reasonable at the time if there's enough groupthink, but would anyone like to nominate some cases where with two or more generations of hindsight we can agree that ad hominem arguments were a better guide to truth than simply addressing the technical arguments? And it can be wrong no matter how impressively much circumstantial evidence suggests that there could easily be a political motive: see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest .

gjm11 16y ago

The linked article is dishonest. It does quote the investigation report correctly, but then expands on what it allegedly means in a way that is entirely inconsistent with what the explanatory text in the report (which they don't quote) says. So, after the text they quote ending "... the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading", the investigation report says: We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain -- ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text. So the complaint is not that there's anything wrong with the results, but that they should have said more about the procedure by which they were obtained. The Heritage Foundation, on the other hand, says: What they were trying to hide was the discrepancy between actual temperature readings and the temperatures suggested by tree ring data. They have relied on tree ring data to show that the earth was cooler in the past. If the tree ring data is not reliable (as the discrepancy in recent years would suggest), then maybe the earth was actually hotter in the past than these researchers would have us believe -- and perhaps the hot temperatures of recent years do not represent unprecedented global warming but just natural variation in climate. So the Heritage Foundation's complaint is that the tree-ring reconstructions might be just plain wrong, and that the CRU's material obscures that and therefore suggests more confidence in AGW than is justified by the data. Note first of all that none of that is supported by the material from the investigation report. Secondly, it happens that the investigation report does comment on the issue of whether recent divergence between tree-ring data and temperature shows what the Heritage Foundation suggest it shows. Here's what the report says: 21. We do not find that the way that data derived from tree rings is described and presented in IPCC AR4 and shown in its Figure 6.10 is misleading. In particular, on the question of the composition of temperature reconstructions, we found no evidence of exclusion of other published temperature reconstructions that would show a very different picture. The general discussion of sources of uncertainty in the text is extensive, including reference to divergence. In this respect it represented a significant advance on the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR.) 22. On the allegation that the phenomenon of "divergence" may not have been properly taken into account when expressing the uncertainty associated with reconstructions, we are satisfied that it is not hidden and that the subject is openly and extensively discussed in the literature, including CRU papers. In other words: when you look at the bit of the investigation report that's concerned with the exact issue the Heritage Foundation is complaining about here, it turns out that they think that complaint is invalid. But of course that doesn't fit the Heritage Foundation's agenda, so instead they quote a different portion of the report and pretend it says what they want it to say.