Earlier in the post you said of the global warming debate that you “haven’t taken the time to study it”. Later in the post you say that “If the issue is truly important enough, the experts will sort that out themselves”. But unless you want to do your own armchair climate science, which I think would be a real mistake, the practical questions become who we identify as the experts, and what process do we require for them to “sort it out”.

When it comes to specific technical questions, the experts that I identify are those who have spent years studying the relevant topic areas at recognized universities and research centers, have published peer-reviewed technical articles, and can point to specific scientific results. The narrow process that I support for “sorting it out” is the scientific method, requiring replicated research, peer-review, falsification testing of claims and so forth. The broader process that sits around this must include some NRC-like entity, as I described in my prior post, that has leading scientific experts from other fields to do another layer of review to minimize groupthink and self-dealing. This method, like all others, is imperfect and takes time to work, but is superior to any practical alternative, and has worked out pretty well for America and the Western world across many, many such questions for a long time.

[snip]

If we end up opposing many of the same policies, why, then, don’t I just quiet down? There are two ways to answer that.

The first is that we all have our jobs to do. The job of a writer is to do his best to write things that he believes to be correct. This has been my motivation (as far as it is possible to know my own mind) in writing what I have on the topic.

Via Vic Reppert, a couple weeks ago the AP put out a report on the hacked global warming e-mails. What it boils down to is this: the scientists weren’t committing fraud, but in spite of this they were getting accused of fraud, and in one case, a critic threatened to have a climate researcher arrested, and scientists were very unhappy about this. There was a quote from an AAAS big-wig who made a comment about “generous interpretations” (which I wish had been explained in more detail) but that was the only thing genuinely damaging in the long report. Otherwise, the AP report supports the conclusion that, in this whole “scandal,” there was a big lot of nothing.

Except… the writers of the linked article for some reason felt they had to make it sound really bad. The headline is “Science not faked, but not pretty”–a vague negative description that could be applied no matter the facts. They label as “One of the most disturbing elements” the fact that scientists didn’t want to share data with the people calling them frauds. If you read the report carefully, you can figure out that these descriptions shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but this is more than we can expect of the average reader. Why present it in such a misleading way? Because so many journalists think that “journalistic objectivity” requires making both sides look equally good, even when the facts don’t lend themselves to such an interpretation. Even when doing so requires saying things that would be deemed “editorializing” by any sane standard, like calling the behavior of harassed scientists “disturbing.” Is there any doubt that this approach to “objectivity” is idiotic?

In related news, Brian Leiter has highlighted a nice takedown of the NYT’s “objectivity” on torture.

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking…

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “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) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

Also, an interview with climate researcher Michael Mann, which discusses the misrepresentation of the “trick” quote, many similar misrepresentations, as well as this incident the issue of considering Climate Research a real journal (HT: Chris Mooney):

This comment was in response to a very specific incident regarding a paper by Soon and Baliunas published in the journal “Climate Research”.

An editor of the journal, with rather contrarian views on climate change, appeared to several of us to be gaming the system to let through papers that clearly did not meet the standards of quality for the journal. The chief editor (Hans von Storch), and half of the editorial board, resigned in protest of the publication of the paper, after the publisher refused to allow von Storch the opportunity to write an editorial about how the peer review process had failed in this instance…

Scientists all choose journals in which we publish and we all recommend to each other and our students which journals they should publish in.

People are free to publish wherever they can and are free to recommend some journals over others.

It’s disappointing to see people like Will Wilkinson writing stuff about the hacked e-mails that make it obvious they haven’t read what actual climate scientists are saying about the incident. Beyond that, I have only one comment: count this incident as a datapoint in support of legit academics not being publicly nice to crackpots. Such a posture just allows the crackpots to be shocked, just shocked, when it’s revealed that the legit academics were thinking not-nice thoughts about them in private.