Category Archives: Climate science disinformation

Terence Corcoran whopper: Mann’s hockey stick “eliminated some of the data from 1960 forward … and then spliced on actual temperature data”

Posted on July 9, 2010 | 12 comments

Terence Corcoran may well have just unleashed the National Post’s biggest whopper yet about climate science – and that’s saying something.

Corcoran’s commentary on the recent Russell “climategate” email review lays one error-laden defamation on top of another, as he attempts to demonstrate that the report “provides plenty of evidence that climate science has been and remains an uncertain shambles”. Oh, and apparently the review “portrays climate science as a field filled with uncertainty, debate, lack of openness, data hoarding and ill-will.”

Along the way, Corcoran even manages to confuse a little known Phil Jones graphic with Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” millenial temperature reconstruction. This leads to the astonishing (and entirely wrong) accusation that the hockey stick creators “eliminated some of the data from 1960 forward … and then spliced on actual temperature data”. Yet neither the “hockey stick” graph (the real one) nor the associated Mann et al study are mentioned in the report at all!

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Muir Russell report on CRU: “Their rigour and honesty as scientists is not in doubt”

Posted on July 7, 2010 | 28 comments

The long-awaited Muir Russell report on various controversies concerning the work of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia was released today.

The report thoroughly examined various accusations of improper conduct, and in the main exonerated CRU scientists Phil Jones, Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn of wrongdoing in such areas as scientific research, peer review and the IPCC process, finding that “their rigour and honesty is not in doubt”. The report does criticize CRU, and indeed the University, for a lack of openness, particularly in the handling of freedom of information requests.

There is plenty to digest here, and the report will no doubt generate much commentary in the days to come. For now, though, I’ll present the report’s  summary of findings, along with pointers to previous Deep Climate discussion of some of the issues.

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Morano and Lindzen: Mann exoneration a “whitewash”

Posted on July 2, 2010 | 51 comments

Well, that didn’t take long.

Yesterday, I covered the exoneration of Michael Mann by the Penn State University “climategate” inqury. And I wondered (mostly rhetorically, I admit) whether this would give impetus to allegations of  “whitewash”.

Lo and behold, Marc Morano of Climate Depot has come through right on schedule, even comparing Mann to disgraced investment fraudster Bernie Madoff and calling Mann the “posterboy of the corrupt and disgraced climate science echo chamber” .  And, the denialosphere’s star scientist, MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen,  has weighed in right behind him, echoing Morano’s “whitewash” characterization.

Can the rest of the denialosphere be far behind? Oh, the sad  –  and presumably unintentional – irony of it all.

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Mann exonerated by PSU inquiry: “No substance to the allegation”

Posted on July 1, 2010 | 28 comments

The second and final phase of Penn State University’s investigation of   allegations of research misconduct against paleoclimatologist Michael Mann has just been completed. In a report issued today, the inquiry exonerated Mann of a remaining general charge of scientific misconduct, namely deviation from “accepted practices” within the academic community. Mann had previously been cleared of specific charges such as inappropriate manipulation of data and suppression or deletion of emails and other IPCC related material.

The final report concludes:

The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor, Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University. More specifically, the Investigatory Committee 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 for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.

The decision of the Investigatory Committee was unanimous.

I’ll look at some of the highlights, as well as some no doubt controversial passages concerning self-described climate science “auditor” Steve McIntyre and MIT climate “skeptic” Richard Lindzen. The latter, somewhat surprisingly, was interviewed by the investigating committee as part of investigation into normal practices for sharing data and computer code. But he apparently had other things he wanted to get off his chest.

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Revisiting TAR Figure 2-21, part 1: Another false claim from Steve McIntyre

Posted on June 29, 2010 | 72 comments

In the “climategate” din, one accusation is shouted perhaps louder and more often than any other: the so-called “trick” supposedly played by IPCC lead author Michael Mann to “hide the decline” in Keith Briffa’s Northern Hemipshere extra tree-ring proxy-based reconstruction, featured along with three others in a key chart in the 2001 WG1 Third Assessment Report (TAR).

According to self-appointed climate science auditor Steve McIntyre, Mann took it on himself to truncate Briffa’s data set and replaced the deleted data with instrumental temperature data, thus creating less of a drop at the end of the resulting smoothed chart. But a closer examination shows the evidence for instrumental “padding” is far from certain. And the difference engendered between different possible “padding” values is minimal in any case.

Even worse, the key element of McIntyre’s narrative, namely the claim that Mann himself truncated Briffa’s data set, is false. In fact, it turns out that the actual data set used by Mann (as sent by Tim Osborn on Keith Briffa’s behalf) contains values only up to 1960 – exactly as in the figure produced in TAR. So once again, we have another egregiously false accusation from Steve McIntyre, one that has been echoed by McIntyre acolytes and CruTape Letters authors Steven Mosher and Thomas Fuller.

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Mike Hulme sets Lawrence Solomon and Marc Morano straight

Posted on June 15, 2010 | 42 comments

The latest false scandal in climate science hit the blogosphere over the weekend. National Post columnist Lawrence Solomon [not to be confused with atmospheric chemist and IPCC WG1 chair Susan Solomon] wrote a column with the outlandish claim:

The UN’s IPCC misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider.

Charges of  a “phony UN IPCC consensus” are already reverberating on contrarian blogs around the world, thanks to the quick efforts of climate science disinformation specialist Marc Morano.

But now Mike Hulme, a professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia, has set the record straight. His “correcting and clarifying” statement is unambiguous in its disavowal of Solomon’s and Morano’s misinterpretation:

I did not say the ‘IPCC misleads’ anyone – it is claims that are made by other commentators, such as the caricatured claim I offer in the paper, that have the potential to mislead.

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Michaels and Knappenberger’s World Climate Report: “No warming whatsoever over the past decade”

Posted on June 6, 2010 | 88 comments

The most recent twist on the “global warming has stopped” meme is the citation of highly respected researchers in support of that incorrect, yet somehow persistent proposition. Once again, the charge is being led by leading climate contrarian Patrick Michaels, ably assisted by Paul “Chip” Knappenberger.

Earlier this year, Michaels’ World Climate Report cited two papers (Easterling and Wehner, 2009 and Solomon et al 2010) as demonstration of mainstream acknowledgment that there has been “no warming whatsoever over the past decade”.

But a closer examination shows that Solomon et al  were actually citing the earlier Easterling and Wehner, a paper itself deeply critical of skeptic “cherrypicking” of short-term trend start points. Even worse, discussion of these two papers at World Climate Report contains some of the most egregious examples of quote mining and distortions of others’ work I have ever seen.

To be sure, Solomon et al do acknowledge that warming in the 2000s has been less than projected by the IPCC model ensemble and shows flattening relative to the previous decade (hardly controversial propositions). But their analysis of smoothed observations and decadal model projections implicitly rejects the contrarian obsession with short-term trends, and points the way towards a more compelling characterization and comparative analysis of model projections and observations.

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How to be a climate science auditor, part 2: The forgotten climategate emails

Posted on May 14, 2010 | 64 comments

In this installment, I’ll look at another technique in the climate auditor’s toolbox, namely selective quotation. Once again, our example case study will involve accusations by Steve McIntyre concerning the use of paleoclimatologist Keith Briffa’s tree-ring based reconstruction in a key figure from the IPCC Third Assessment Report.

Arguing from a cherrypicked selection of quotes from the “Climategate” emails, McIntyre has claimed that IPCC authors Chris Folland and Michael Mann pressured Briffa to submit a reconstruction that would not “dilute the message” by showing “inconsistency” with multi-proxy reconstructions from Mann and Briffa’s CRU colleague Phil Jones. Briffa “hastily re-calculated his reconstruction”, sending one with a supposedly larger post-1960 decline before. According to McIntyre, Mann resolved this new “conundrum” and simply “chopped off the inconvenient portion of the Briffa tree-ring data”.

But a review of the emails – including some that have never been quoted before – clearly contradicts McIntyre’s version of events:

  • Jones and Briffa were concerned that Mann had an outdated version of the Briffa reconstruction, and both urged the adoption of the newer “low frequency” one, more appropriate for comparison with other multi-century reconstructions.
  • Far from pressuring Briffa to change his reconstruction right away, Mann questioned whether an immediate change was required, or even possible, and counselled waiting for the next revision.
  • CRU colleague Tim Osborn advised Mann that he and Briffa “usually stopped” the “low frequency” reconstruction in 1960, and went one better in his later “resend” to Mann, by explicitly removing the post-1960 data.

I’ll also show how McIntyre has changed his narrative along the way , in an effort to prove that the true “context” of the famous “trick” to “hide the decline” is somehow an indictment of the IPCC. (Speaking of which, be sure to take the poll at the end about McIntyre’s next move). But first, once again, here is the cause of all the fuss, namely Figure 2-21 from Chapter 2 of the IPCC Third Assessment Report – Working Group I: The Scientific Basis (2001).

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How to be a climate auditor, part 1: Pretty pictures

Posted on May 11, 2010 | 68 comments

Do you have what it takes to be a climate auditor? Try the following fun test and find out. And at the same time, you can’t help but learn something about the fine art of argumentation from charts as practiced by the master himself, Steve McIntyre, and refined in his most devoted media outlet, the U.K. based Mail on Sunday.

Here is the chart that is held to epitomize the “trick” to “hide the decline”: figure 2-21 from the IPCC ‘s Third Assessment Report, showing key temperature reconstructions.

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National Post’s Lawrence Solomon touts global cooling, part 2: Meandering towards Maunder

Posted on May 9, 2010 | 12 comments

Few columnists writing about climate science are as brazen in their open contempt for the truth as Lawrence Solomon, as I showed in my analysis of  Solomon’s recent musings about Arctic sea ice.

But the second half of that article, Solomon outdoes even his own dismal record, as he takes on a New Scientist article describing new research that posits a link between declining solar activity and colder Northern European winters over the coming decades. That research is held by Solomon to be evidence that “Earth could be in for a period of global cooling”.  Yet a cursory examination of the New Scientist article and the research paper it is based on, shows clearly that the phenomenon is a strictly regional and seasonal one, with little import for hemispheric or global temperature trends.

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