Meanwhile, a recent review (partially funded by a group that denied climate-warming science) of more than a billion pieces of data – five times the amount previously examined by anybody else – by Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist who was skeptical about climate science, concluded that the consensus global warming conclusions, including the hockey stick model, are indeed supported by the evidence.

The problem is not suppression of the debate, but is instead superficial and uninformed coverage of the science by the press.

Carlo Ricciuti Hamilton, Ont.

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.
Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.
“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”
In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.

“We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures,” said the report by the U.S. Department of Commerce Inspector General late last week.

It was the latest of several U.S. and U.K. probes into accusations, based on leaked emails, that climate data had been manipulated or deleted to support the theory that global warming is caused by human activity.

The other investigations have also cleared the scientists of wrongdoing.

More than 1,000 emails were stolen from the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and posted on the internet in November 2009, just before the big international climate change summit in Copenhagen.

Among them were emails to and from scientists at NOAA, some of which discussed ways to stonewall skeptics of man-made climate change or freeze them out of peer-reviewed journals.

The Inspector General launched its review after a request from Senator James Inhofe in May 2010. Inhofe has publicly expressed scepticism of climate change science.

What climategate changed was the response that came after. For those disappointed by the results, climategate provided a focus for displaced recrimination—something to blame. Doubt about climate change has regularly been helped along by concerted campaigns, and the climategate looked like more of the same. After all, no fraud had been found—but look! The media was all over it! And Copenhagen failed! Conspiracy!

Then there were climate action’s fairweather friends. In general people don’t like to be associated with losers, and in Copenhagen the case for strong climate action spectacularly failed to get its preferred result. In this light, an increasing post-climategate tolerance for doubts about warming among the media and some politicians can be read, with just a little cynicism, as people making tactical use of climategate to distance themselves from an agenda they had once thought popular but which now looked increasingly lifeless.

And what of those who were happy Copenhagen had failed? For them, climategate was a more comforting reason for that failure than the real ones. Copenhagen did not fail because governments didn’t want action on the climate, or even because no one is willing to take any action. It failed because they all wanted other countries to take more and different actions than the other countries would agree to. For people who don’t want there ever to be action, though, it is obviously happier to think that the case had been undermined by some dodgy emails than to recognise than that it still stood—and indeed still stands—but had simply failed to compel action.

This reaction can be seen in its strongest form in American politics. For the Republican party, and for those voting for it, it is no longer necessary to argue about climate change. It has become acceptable to simply ignore it, professing some mixture of doubt, bafflement and apathy. Don’t we all know that the climate thing is over?

But though this looks like a reaction to climategate, and to flaws in the products and processes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, those factors are, again, the sizzle not the steak. At its heart this too is a response to Copenhagen, and the subsequent lack of momentum on climate action, and the administration’s inability to do anything about it. The case for action currently feels so weak that it can be held off with a flat palm of refusal-to-engage. Perceptions of climategate doubtless make that stance easier to hold. But they aren’t its underlying cause.

Thanks for responding to some of that. In particular, thanks for dealing with the more philosophical objections.

I will put up a few brief responses of my own, also.

The fact that they are using political methods and scare tactics, rather than scientific methods, shows that they are pushing a belief, not a fact.

We have excellent scientific reasons for believing that climate change is a problem that human beings are causing by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. There is a ‘consilience of evidence’ when it comes to the science of climate change: multiple, independent lines of evidence converging on a single coherent account. These forms of evidence are both observational (temperature records, ice core samples, etc) and theoretical (thermodynamics, atmospheric physics, etc). Together, these lines of evidence provide a conceptual and scientific backing to the theory of climate change caused by human greenhouse gas emissions that is simply absent for alternative theories, such as that there is no change or that the change is caused by something different.

Certainly, there is more than enough evidence to justify being worried and taking precautionary action.

It almost seems to be a religious belief, the way they are behaving. They are working to silence anyone who doesn’t believe them.

I don’t think people concerned about climate change are trying to inappropriately silence anybody. That being said, it is frustrating when they repeat discredited arguments over and over again, as is the case with your comment.

- Not understanding the laws of floating bodies

This is just silly. Everyone knows that when floating ice melts, it doesn’t raise sea levels. Sea levels rise when water warms and expands, and when icesheets on land melt. No serious scientist thinks otherwise.

- Not understanding that ice is not a hermetic seal to CO2

I don’t know what you’re getting at here. Which ice do you think scientists think is trapping CO2? CO2 bubbles are definitely trapped in ice core samples, used to construct records of past climates. There is also the matter of methane clathrates.

You need to be more specific before there can be any real response to this.

- Not taking into account that the commercially available thermometers in early America did not have the precision available today

If you don’t trust old thermometers, ignore them. We have lots of other sources of data on past temperatures. These include things like ice core samples, the distribution of pollen in lake sediments, and tree rings. By lining up a bunch of these indicators, we can construct fairly robust assessments of what the climate was like at different points.

- Not taking into account that airports are increasingly being paved

I think you are talking about the urban heat island effect here. It is real, but it doesn’t mean that climate change isn’t happening. Temperatures are rising globally, especially in the Arctic. That’s a well documented physical phenomenon, not an artifact that arose from the placement of weather stations.

- Not taking into account that the climate was at least this warm at the time of the Roman Empire

The Medieval Warm Period is another favourite of people who argue that we shouldn’t do anything about climate change. The regional climate in Europe may have been warmer then than during subsequent historical periods, but it was not an instance of global warming of the sort we are observing today.

To take a bigger picture view, we know that greenhouse gases prevent infrared radiation from escaping into space. That means energy is trapped in the planetary system. That means the system warms. The chemistry and physics are very straightforward, and the consequences are worrisome.

Affirming the consequent is not a fallacy in inductive logic. Inductive logic is verificationist – you make a hypothesis, and test for the results that you would expect. Every result you get which doesn’t falsify your data “affirms the consequent”. No particular piece of data proves you are correct, but if every piece of data fits your hypothesis, then the data fits your hypothesis. Of course this doesn’t prove your theory is true, but only in the sense that no theory can be proved to be true. Enough “affirming the consequent” proves any scientific theory to be true to a probability high enough to make serious decisions upon.

“- Argument to pity”

“Pity” is a term for a moral intuition associated with Christian parternalism. Everyone hates “Pity”, because pity takes agency away from subjects. But by calling a genuine moral intuition – which we might talk about more generally as “you feel bad that you’re causing bad stuff to happen”, by the name “pity”, you are just serving to ridicule and sidestep a serious moral problem: that there is a high probability that our everyday lifestyles will cause huge damage to other peoples’ lives. Realizing this isn’t fun, it doesn’t feel nice. So, it’s not surprising that you want to dismiss moral feelings as “pity”. Not surprising, but not particularly deserving of approbation either.

“- Not understanding the laws of floating bodies”

Do you really think there are scientists who don’t understand this?

“- Not understanding that ice is not a hermetic seal to CO2″

Hermetic seal? Is that another species going extinct? No, but seriously – if the ice all melts, that increases the amount of energy the arctic ocean will absorb. Which will warm the planet. Which may melt the tundra – which actually does need to be “hermetically sealed” in the frozen ground if we want the species to survive.

” Not taking into account that the commercially available thermometers in early America did not have the precision available today”

Are you sure individual readings are terribly important? What would happen to the climate data if you took 1 sig. figure off of every temperature reading (rounding up and down, of course), and then re-did the averages. Would the average temperatures change much? At all? Has anyone tried this?

“- Not taking into account that airports are increasingly being paved”

This has been busted. http://www.grist.org/article/warming-is-due-to-the-urba n-heat-island-effect

“- Not taking into account that the climate was at least this warm at the time of the Roman Empire”

I heard climate change caused the fall of the Roman Empire – http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/JustOneThing/story?id= 6428550&page=1

Their constant use of the argument of pity (“species might die”, or “islands could sink into the sea”) to demand changes shows their ignorance of valid arguments and scientific debate. They just want want they want.

The fact that they are using political methods and scare tactics, rather than scientific methods, shows that they are pushing a belief, not a fact.

It almost seems to be a religious belief, the way they are behaving. They are working to silence anyone who doesn’t believe them.

And I have counted many different instances of bad science:

- Affirming the consequent
- Argument to pity
- Not understanding the laws of floating bodies
- Not understanding that ice is not a hermetic seal to CO2
- Not taking into account that the commercially available thermometers in early America did not have the precision available today
- Not taking into account that airports are increasingly being paved
- Not taking into account that the climate was at least this warm at the time of the Roman Empire

A short piece for the general audience of RTR radio, Perth, Australia.

Remember “climategate”? The private correspondence among scientists stolen exactly a year ago, which some columnists pronounced to be the (approximately 132nd) “final nail in the coffin” of global warming. Remember the “errors” in the IPCC report that hit the media a short time later? “Amazongate”, “Himalayagate”, and so on? What has happened to “climategate”? What’s happened is this.

First, the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee exonerated the scientist at the centre of this tempest, Professor Phil Jones, finding that he has “no case to answer” and that his “reputation … remains intact.”

Then Lord Oxburgh, former chairman of Shell-UK, and his panel likewise exonerated the researchers, finding that their “work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation … are not valid.”

Another enquiry, chaired by Sir Muir Russell, found the scientists’ “rigour and honesty … are not in doubt”

And in the U.S., two enquiries by his university cleared Professor Michael Mann, who published the first famous “hockey stick” graph, of all allegations.

Finally, a few weeks ago the—conservative!—UK Government concluded that “… the information contained in the illegally-disclosed emails does not provide any evidence to discredit … anthropogenic climate change.”

Not one, not two, but six vindications. This comes as no surprise to anyone with passing familiarity of the distinction between private chat and public actions.

—

Retired Republican Rep. Warns Party: Ignore Climate at Your Own Risk

By Kate Sheppard
Fri Nov. 19, 2010 12:29 PM PST

Sherwood Boehlert, the former Republican House member from New York , penned an op-ed in the Washington Post today taking members of his party to task for denying climate change. Boehlert represented New York’s 24th District in Congress from 1983 until he retired in 2007, and is now a special adviser to the Project on Climate Science.

Like his fellow Republican Bob Inglis of South Carolina, Boehlert is baffled by the position of his colleague

—

Nature Did Not Read the Hacked Emails

Climategate. Exactly one year ago, on November 17, 2009, email messages and other computer files were illegally stolen from computers located at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). These emails and files were then leaked to the Internet in a blatant attempt to derail international climate talks at the COP-15 Copenhagen Climate Conference. Two crimes were committed that day: 1) Emails were stolen and 2) Scientists were wrongly put on trial in the press and the blogosphere.

These emails were spun by skeptics of man-made global warming as somehow proving that global warming is a hoax and that scientists were controlling what science gets published. Climategate was billed as the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic [manmade] global warming (AGW).

Cato scholars have been particularly energetic in promoting the Climategate scandal. Last year, private e-mails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, in England, were mysteriously leaked, and their exchanges appeared to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming is real. In the two weeks after the e-mails went public, one Cato scholar gave more than twenty media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal. But five independent inquiries have since exonerated the researchers, and nothing was found in their e-mails or data to discredit the scientific consensus on global warming.

Nevertheless, the controversy succeeded in spreading skepticism about climate change. Even though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently issued a report concluding that the evidence for global warming is unequivocal, more Americans are convinced than at any time since 1997 that scientists have exaggerated the seriousness of global warming. The Kochs promote this statistic on their company’s Web site but do not mention the role that their funding has played in fostering such doubt.

In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that so long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail. The key for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the science—a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage Foundation, which has argued that “scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming.” The brothers have given money to more obscure groups, too, such as the Independent Women’s Forum, which opposes the presentation of global warming as a scientific fact in American public schools. Until 2008, the group was run by Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. Mary Beth Jarvis, a vice-president of a Koch subsidiary, is on the group’s board.”

Via A Few Things Ill Considered