The release of the CRU files and ensuing analysis is certainly thrilling. Brian Micklethwait writes about why this is a massive story.
Basically, the Global Warming debate has been a gigantic exercise in argument from authority. [...] If the entire argument for Green World Government balances on top of the public claims of a tiny few scientists, whose actual arguments are understood by hardly anybody, but if first emails and now other revelations show those scientists in a quite new and very bad light, not as selfless servants of truth and virtue, but as liars, cheats, frauds, manipulators and bullies, then that will most certainly change things, big time.
In two very huge ways. The pro Green World Government team will lose a lot of support from the baffled onlooker demographic and the anti Green World Government team (mine) will gain a lot of support from that same demographic.
Most of the defense seems to miss this point. Here is a quote of the day from a blog called The Way Things Break:
If you think that global warming rests on a few temperature data sets and models, you are very wrong. If you don’t understand this then you don’t know enough to have an opinion on the subject, and you most likely will be treated just like any other ineducable troll.
This is just an argument from authority. It’s interesting to look at the whole of the comment from which this was taken.
It seems anyone who thinks the “trick” email is damning doesn’t have much experience in the sciences (or computer programming, for that matter). It is a shortcut, a hack, a clever little item to make things a bit easier. It is not an attempt to deceive.
Again this misses the point. We are not fixating on the word “trick”, we are fixating on the word “hide”. From the email:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Now hide the decline just means to remove the problem of tree rings not being a very good proxy for temperature since about 1960. This is known as divergence, and it’s exactly the sort of thing people want to see discussed as openly as possible. Steve McIntyre has been trying to investigate tree ring proxies for a long time and people in CRU have been less than helpful to him. It would be wrong to focus on just this one email. Some good discussion along these lines is on Power Line. And from the warmists’ side, a reasonable sounding defense of using tree ring data in spite of the divergence can be found in the a comment on Island of Doubt. The argument goes that tree rings fit the thermometer data before 1960 and fit with other proxies before that.
But this starts to depend on statistical methods implemented in source code, and CRU’s software does not seem up to very good standards. If we could all reproduce their results and see exactly what they had done step for step, perhaps we wouldn’t be having this debate.
Back to that first Island of Doubt comment:
Here’s a thought. Assume the worst case scenario that all these emails are actually damning in the extreme. Assume that every bit of science in the emails is to be thrown out.
Do all that, and you still haven’t even come close to invalidating the science of global warming. That is how much other evidence there is out there.
I’m not so sure because all the tree ring data seems pretty key to showing that recent warming is unprecedented. If it’s not unprecedented, then natural variability is the most obvious hypothesis.
Grab a climate textbook and do some reading…it will help if you have some physics background too.
Well, it’s interesting that he should finish on the point because from what I know about the physics, CO2 makes very little difference to temperatures on its own. Feedbacks are needed and these feedbacks are not well understood. With the lack of warming in the last ten years we are left with the alleged “unprecedented” warming and therefore the tree ring proxies being key to the whole AGW case.