UVA won't release university emails from climatologist Michael Mann

There does seem to be a double standard on all this.

Blogger Glenn Reynolds recently circulated a comment that highlights yet another glaring inconsistency among the establishment media.

Major organs of the press have been so eager to air the dirty laundry from Sarah Palin's emails — obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request — that they have turned to "crowdsourcing" to expedite the job. In other words, they're disseminating the material to the general readership so they can find the juicy bits faster.

Contrast that with the vitriol and scorn heaped on conservatives who have requested that the University of Virginia divulge emails written by climatologist Michael Mann when he was employed there. The very idea that anyone would request such private material is an atrocious assault on privacy and academic freedom, is the general view — at least inside liberal echo chambers.

True, Palin and Mann are differently situated. Although both are now private citizens and although all the emails in question were written on the government dime, he has never run for public office, while she has. But the differences are not nearly so great as the manner in which the two cases — or, for that matter, the earlier Climategate email controversy — have been treated. . . .

Krugman's continued inaccuracies: Whitewashing Climategate

Paul Krugman writes:

Back in 2009 climate skeptics got hold of more than a thousand e-mails between researchers at the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia. Nothing in the correspondence suggested any kind of scientific impropriety; at most, we learned — I know this will shock you — that scientists are human beings, who occasionally say snide things about people they dislike.

But that didn’t stop the usual suspects from proclaiming that they had uncovered “Climategate,” a scientific scandal that somehow invalidates the vast array of evidence for man-made climate change. And this fake scandal gives an indication of what the Wisconsin G.O.P. presumably hopes to do to Mr. Cronon.

After all, if you go through a large number of messages looking for lines that can be made to sound bad, you’re bound to find a few. In fact, it’s surprising how few such lines the critics managed to find in the “Climategate” trove: much of the smear has focused on just one e-mail, in which a researcher talks about using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a particular series. In context, it’s clear that he’s talking about making an effective graphical presentation, not about suppressing evidence. But the right wants a scandal, and won’t take no for an answer. . . .

Here is part of my discussion on the topic:

Take one of Mann's e-mail exchanges with Jones. In an e-mail entitled "IPCC & FOI" (referring to the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Freedom of Information Act) Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, wrote Dr. Mann: "Mike: Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re [the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report]? Keith will do likewise. . . . Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new e-mail address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

Mann acknowledges that he received the e-mail, but he claims that neither he nor anyone else actually deleted any e-mails to hide information from a Freedom of Information Act request on how the U.N.'s IPCC report was written. Yet, his response is quite damning as it seems that he goes along with Dr. Jones. Far from criticizing the request, Dr. Mann wrote back: "I'll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new e-mail is: generwahl@yahoo.com. talk to you later, Mike."

After the first week of revelations of academic fraud and intellectual wrongdoing, the University of East Anglia denied there was a problem. Professor Trevor Davies, the school's pro vice chancellor for research, issued a statement on Tuesday claiming: "The publication of a selection of the e-mails and data stolen from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has led to some questioning of the climate science research published by CRU and others. There is nothing in the stolen material which indicates that peer-reviewed publications by CRU, and others, on the nature of global warming and related climate change are not of the highest-quality of scientific investigation and interpretation."

The move to investigate the destruction of information requested under the Freedom of Information Act is a big change. In Britain, the destruction of such documents is a criminal offense and the e-mails indicate that Jones had been warned at least once against destroying such information.

On Monday, Mann tried to justify the damaging e-mails by telling the Penn State college newspaper: "Someone being constantly under attack could be what causes them to make a poor decision." On the one hand, he denies that anything improper happened, but he then seems to accept that improper actions did occur. Regarding pressure, possibly, Mann should ask what the academics, who Mann and others involved in Climate-gate tried to prevent them from publishing in academic journals, think about these events. The e-mails discussed above involve the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's controversial assessment report and raise additional questions about what subterfuge might have been involved in its production. . . .

So how were the predictions from the the climatic research unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia

Everyone might remember the ruckus over the leaked emails from the CRU at the University of East Anglia last year. Here is any interesting prediction that they made 10 years ago about snow in the UK.

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said. . . .

Now this year seems to not exactly fit into their predictions.

Coldest December since records began as temperatures plummet to minus 10C bringing travel chaos across Britain
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Last updated at 11:38 AM on 18th December 2010
-- Millions begin the big Christmas and New Year getaway early as the AA urged motorists to beware of the ‘worst driving conditions imaginable’
-- Quarter of train services disrupted, travel warning in Kent
-- Experts warn of a backlog of up to 4 million of parcels which could remain undelivered this Christmas
-- The NHS issues an urgent appeal for blood donors as concerns grow over shortages
-- Councils reveal plans to share grit amid fears the cold snap could last until January 14
-- Odds shortened even further on a ‘White Christmas’ in some parts of the country next Saturday
Swathes of Britain skidded to a halt today as the big freeze returned - grounding flights, closing rail links and leaving traffic at a standstill.
And tonight the nation was braced for another 10in of snow and yet more sub-zero temperatures - with no let-up in the bitterly cold weather for at least a month, forecasters have warned.
The Arctic conditions are set to last through the Christmas and New Year bank holidays and beyond and as temperatures plummeted to -10c (14f) the Met Office said this December was ‘almost certain’ to become the coldest since records began in 1910. . . .

An updated list of the errors in the IPCC Climate report

The Economist Magazine has a useful discussion here.

FOR everyone else it was the glaciers: for the Dutch it was the flooding. Last January errors in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hit the headlines. The chapter on Asia in the report by the IPCC’s second working group, charged with looking at the impact of climate change and adapting to it, mistakenly claimed that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. This contradicted some reasonably basic physics, had not been predicted by the glacier specialists in the first working group (which deals with the natural science of past and future climate change) and was unsupported by any evidence. There was a report from the 1990s which said something similar about all the world’s non-polar glaciers, but it gave the date as 2350. Then there was a crucial typo and some shoddy referencing. Nevertheless the IPCC’s chair, Rajendra Pachauri, had lashed out at people bringing the criticism up, accusing them of “voodoo science”. He then had to eat his words, and set up, with Ban Ki-moon, a panel to look into ways the IPCC might be improved. . . .

One should read their entire discussion.

National Science Foundation and State of Virginia looking into whether Michael Mann committed fraud

Fox News has this story.

A legal battle is heating up faster than the planet for embattled climatologist Michael Mann.

First word emerged that the inspector general for the National Science Foundation would look into the Penn State panel reviewing the climate scientist, who is currently director of the school's Earth System Science Center. Now the attorney general for his old employer the University of Virginia is planning an investigation, too.

According to a report in Charlottesville weekly The Hook, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has asked the University of Virginia to produce "a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research" conducted while Mann was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.

Should the AG uncover evidence of impropriety, the school could be commanded to return the funds, and pick up the cost of the AG's investigation.

The paper, tipped off by anonymous sources, has posted a PDF of Cuccinelli's formal request, a legal document called a civil investigative demand. In that letter, he demands production of information and documentary material relating to three papers Mann authored while at UVA, using a total of $484,875 of state grant money. . . .

Read the Attorney General's Letter

Read the Attorney General's Note to UVA Rector John Wynne

Obvious questions about the hockey stick graph

This guy doesn't question the underlying temperature measurements, just how different data sets were combined.

A key piece of evidence in climate change science was slammed as “exaggerated” on Wednesday by the UK’s leading statistician, in a vindication of claims that global warming sceptics have been making for years.

Professor David Hand, president of the Royal Statistical Society, said that a graph shaped like an ice hockey stick that has been used to represent the recent rise in global temperatures had been compiled using “inappropriate” methods.

“It used a particular statistical technique that exaggerated the effect [of recent warming],” he said.

The criticism came as part of a report published on Wednesday that found the scientists behind the “Climategate” e-mail scandal had behaved “honestly and fairly” and showed “no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice”.

The e-mails were hacked last autumn from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. They caused a storm, as they appeared to show scientists manipulating and concealing data.

Although Wednesday’s report – commissioned by UEA with advice from the Royal Society, the UK’s prestigious national science academy – exonerated the unit’s scientists, it criticised climate experts for failures in handling statistics.

“It is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians,” the report concluded.

The hockey stick graph was a key part of the scandal. In the e-mails, UEA’s Professor Phil Jones referred to a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures suggested by certain sources of data. A similar trick was used in the hockey stick graph.

The UEA scientists said that “trick” merely referred to a scientific technique – an explanation accepted by some sceptics, including Lord Lawson, former Tory chancellor. . . .

Weird attacks on my gun research, also Scienceblogs censoring responses

Defenders of climate researchers who have refused to release their data, are claiming that I delayed releasing the data used in my book, More Guns, Less Crime. There are multiple inaccuracies in the posting, but let's just deal with what the poster claims is his core point for this post.

Conservative economist John Lott's 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime concluded based on the results of his own statistical analysis that more permissive hand gun laws reduced crime rates in counties and states that had adopted such laws. In a feat of statistical one-upmanship, Lott had compiled the largest data set on gun laws and crime statistics in the field. Naturally, conservatives and gun rights advocates immediately argued that Lott's empirical research was definitive reason to repeal gun laws across the country, since the result would be a decrease in crime rates.
In response, contending experts ranging from sociologists to law professors argued that before any policy was adopted based on Lott's research, that they should be able to examine Lott's raw data and the decisions that he made in conducting his analysis. Lott further stoked the fires of the controversy by being slow to release his data--which made it appear as if he had something to hide . . .

They have yet to publish my comment on their post, so here is my response:

This piece makes inaccurate claims about my work. The data in my original paper with David Mustard was released even before the paper was published. Our paper was published in the January 1997 of the Journal of Legal Studies. We provided our data to critics such as Dan Black and Dan Nagin as well as Jens Ludwig in August 1996. In fact, the Brady Campaign put on a panel at the National Press Club on December 9, 1996 where I debated them on their analysis of our data.

The first edition of More Guns, Less Crime was published in 1998. All the data for all the regressions and all the tables and figures in the book was again released to others even prior to the book being published. Most of that research involved the same data from 1977 to 1992 that was in my original paper with Mustard, but the additional data in the book that extended to 1994 was also released.

Ironically, I had a computer crash in July 1997 where I lost the data that I had already provided to the critics to whom we had already provided the data. David Mustard and myself asked these individuals to get back a copy of our data, but they declined to do so. I know that David asked them several times. Because we realized that we had an obligation to make our data available to others, David and I spent more than several months putting the data together again. (David spent significantly more time than I did putting that data back together again.)

Since then the data used in More Guns, Less Crime has been provided to over 200 hundred people at universities around the world. Dozens of papers have been published using the data. The paper by Black and Nagin was published in the Journal of Legal Studies in January 1998 (which was four months BEFORE More Guns, Less Crime was published). Given the lead-time in refereeing and publications, it should be fairly obvious that they had submitted their paper a year earlier in late 1996. How could they have submitted their paper for publication in the Journal of Legal Studies before my paper with Mustard was published if we hadn't shared the data?

So your story is backwards. Our data was given out immediately. When the data was lost in a hard disk crash, our critics refused to give us a copy back of our own data. David and I redid the data a second time. It was not something that we had to do (especially given the many months of work involved), but it was the right thing to do. It would have been better if our critics had simply given us back a copy of our own data.

It is easy enough for you to check out when the Black and Nagin paper was published. Another critical paper was published by Jens Ludwig in May 1998 in the International Review of Law and Economics. An entire issue of the Journal of Law and Economics in 2001 published papers on gun control, most of those papers using the data in my book.

UPDATE: This post was eventually put up, but I had sent in a second post at the same time as the first one that never seems to have gotten approved. That second piece pointed to articles that I have written on climate researchers from the pro-manmade global warming side who have refused to provide their raw data even well after their research has been published.

In any case, the original post on scienceblog was changed so I made this response (we will see if it gets put up):

As to the claim about "they should be able to examine Lott's raw data and the decisions that he made in conducting his analysis" it is easy for people to evaluate that also. For example, if they look at the Black and Nagin paper, people will see that Black and Nagin replicate the research that Mustard and I had done and they were able to do that because I provided them with all the raw data as well as the "do" file that contained the regressions. There was nothing else there to provide them. They didn't replicate most of the empirical work in the original paper with Mustard, but that was their choice. If you think that there was something else, please indicate what it would be. A response to the Black and Nagin paper is available here.

As to the Mother Jones interview, I gave two interviews to someone who was obviously hostile (not all of our discussions were transcribed). I offered to go off the record to explain things in depth because I wanted to provide a detailed discussion without worrying that he would take some small part of what I was saying out of context and distort it. The point was to take the time to give him a detailed response, but he wasn't interested in doing that. When you do interviews with hostile individuals you learn very quickly that people can take things out of context and you give a different interview than in situations where you are sure that the entire transcript is going to be made available. It was my understanding that we were doing the first type of interview.

UPDATE: Of course, only one of my posts have been put up at the website that is criticizing me. I made two posts (they put up one) and they then rewrote their post. I respond, but they don't put it up either.

USA Today reporter doesn't report problems with NASA climate data

So why didn't the USA Today reporter think that this was worth mentioning in 2007?

NASA was able to put a man on the moon, but the space agency can't tell you what the temperature was when it did. By its own admission, NASA's temperature records are in even worse shape than the besmirched Climate-gate data.

E-mail messages obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) -- the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails -- and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center.

The e-mails from 2007 reveal that when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA's data "was more accurate" than other climate-change data sets, NASA's Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal no. He said "the National Climatic Data Center's procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate," admitting that some of his own procedures led to less accurate readings.

"My recommendation to you is to continue using NCDC's data for the U.S. means and [East Anglia] data for the global means," Ruedy told the reporter.

"NASA's temperature data is worse than the Climate-gate temperature data. According to NASA," wrote Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who uncovered the e-mails. Horner is skeptical of NCDC's data as well, stating plainly: "Three out of the four temperature data sets stink."

Global warming critics call this a crucial blow to advocates' arguments that minor flaws in the "Climate-gate" data are unimportant, since all the major data sets arrive at the same conclusion -- that the Earth is getting warmer. But there's a good reason for that, the skeptics say: They all use the same data.

"There is far too much overlap among the surface temperature data sets to assert with a straight face that they independently verify each other's results," says James M. Taylor, senior fellow of environment policy at The Heartland Institute. . . .

Climategate Investigation gets complicated

There appears to be a real conflict of interest for the person in charge of the climategate investigation. From the London Times:

A member of the House of Lords appointed to investigate the veracity of climate science has close links to businesses that stand to make billions of pounds from low-carbon technology.

Lord Oxburgh is to chair a scientific assessment panel that will examine the published science of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

The CRU has been accused of manipulating and suppressing data to overstate the dangers from climate change. Professor Phil Jones, its director, has stood down from his post while a separate inquiry, chaired by Sir Muir Russell, takes place into the leaking of e-mails sent by him and his colleagues.

Climate sceptics questioned whether Lord Oxburgh, chairman of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association and the wind energy company Falck Renewables, was truly independent because he led organisations that depended on climate change being seen as an urgent problem.

Andrew Montford, a climate-change sceptic who writes the widely-read Bishop Hill blog, said that Lord Oxburgh had a “direct financial interest in the outcome” of his inquiry.

Lord Oxburgh has said that he believes the need to tackle climate change will make capturing carbon from power plants “a worldwide industry of the same scale as the international oil industry today”.

The CCS Association has stated that carbon capture could become a “trillion dollar industry” by 2050, but this would happen only if governments made reducing emissions a top political priority. In an interview in 2007, Lord Oxburgh said that the threat from global warming was so severe that “it may be that we shall need . . . regulations which impose very severe penalties on people who emit more than specified amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere”.

The university appointed Lord Oxburgh, a geologist and former chairman of the Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, after consulting the Royal Society, of which he is a fellow.

Professor Trevor Davies, the university’s pro-vice-chancellor for research, said that the university had been aware of Lord Oxburgh’s business interests but believed that he would lead the panel of six scientists “in an utterly objective way”. The panel will meet in Norwich next month. . . .

Fallout from Climategate?

USA Today tries to make Michael Mann appear as sympathetic as possible, but the piece still lists out what environmentalists think have been the problems that they have faced since Climategate.

• Citing doubts raised by the "climategate" e-mails, state governments in Texas, Virginia and Alabama filed legal challenges last month to stop the federal government from regulating carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The challenges could force the Obama administration to modify or abandon its plans to regulate carbon emissions from factories and vehicles.

• Senate Democrats including John Kerry of Massachusetts have set aside House legislation that would limit greenhouse gas emissions from factories and other businesses nationwide. They are pursuing a new bill that may instead focus on utility companies, Kerry says.

• After more than a decade of fruitless efforts to negotiate a binding global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions, culminating in last December's summit in Copenhagen, the USA may now pursue a more narrow strategy, State Department climate change envoy Todd Stern said last month. He said future talks might be limited to a smaller group of major polluters such as the USA and China — and leave out small countries that blocked a deal at Copenhagen, such as Sudan.

• The United Nations announced Wednesday that it would bring in an outside panel of scientists to help review an occasional study put together by a U.N. body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The study was regarded as the gold standard of climate science until several errors came to light this year.

Will Al Gore now admit that the science is far from settled?

In retrospect, [Michael] Mann says the movie contributed to a "premature elation" among some scientists that they had won the battle for public opinion on global warming. He also says his colleagues and policymakers were too eager to present certain scientific conclusions as "settled" — particularly with regard to possible consequences from climate change, which he says need further study. . . .

New Fox News piece: What Gore Missed When He Broke His Silence

My new piece starts this way:

Despite one Climate-gate revelation after another, Al Gore has been remarkably silent. Indeed, since the Copenhagen Climate Summit he hasn't said anything. That is until now. He broke his silence on Sunday in the New York Times with his 1,900+ word op-ed piece. Although some of the piece responds to recent scandals involving the "e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain" and the errors found in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, much of the response is filled with snide remarks about "climate deniers."

Gore concedes "at least two mistakes" in the UN’s IPCC 2007 report – the predictions about Himalayan glaciers melting and the percentage of the Netherlands that is below sea level -- but he avoids addressing the other serious problems. Take three of the claims that have been widely used to promote the need to quickly adopt an international climate treaty: . . .

IBD's take on Al Gore's op-ed is available here.

Phil Jones says that it was not "standard practice" to release data to other researchers

We have gone through a lot of different stories on why this data hasn't been provided. Now we find that since others weren't providing their data, Phil Jones didn't think that he had to provide his data.

But Phil Jones, of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, yesterday defended his decision not to release the data about temperatures from around the world, saying it was not "standard practice" to do so.

"I have obviously written some pretty awful emails," Prof Jones told British lawmakers in response to a question about a message he sent to a sceptic in which he refused to release data saying he believed it would be misused.

The admission from the scientist, who has stood aside as director of the climate centre while investigations take place, came at a parliamentary hearing in Britain into the scandal.

The leading research centre came under fire ahead of key climate talks in Copenhagen in December, after more than 1000 emails and 3000 other documents were hacked from the university's server and posted online.

Sceptics claimed they showed evidence scientists were manipulating climate data in a bid to exaggerate the case for manmade global warming as world leaders met to try to strike a new accord on climate change. . . .

This last point is simply not credible. Once you have the data put together for one person, the cost of getting it to someone else is essentially zero. Computers make it easy to provide data.

The academic also said the unit struggled after being hit by a "deluge" of requests for data last July, made under freedom-of-information legislation. . . .

Global warming predicts fewer hurricanes?

If you believe that temperatures will be rising, for whatever reason, it means fewer hurricanes. At least so says a new study published in Nature Geoscience:

the latest research, just published in Nature Geoscience, paints a very different picture.

It suggests that the rise in hurricane frequency since 1995 was just part of a natural cycle, and that several similar previous increases have been recorded, each followed by a decline.

Looking to the future, it also draws on computer modelling to predict that the most likely impact of global warming will be to decrease the frequency of tropical storms, by up to 34% by 2100.

It does, however, suggest that when tropical storms do occur they could get slightly stronger, with average windspeeds rising by 2-11% by 2100. A storm is termed a hurricane when wind speeds exceed 74mph, but most are much stronger. A category 4 or 5 hurricane such as Katrina generates speeds in excess of 150mph.

“We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said Chris Landsea, a lead scientist at the American government’s National Hurricane Center, who co-authored the report. . . .

More problems with the CRU Climate data

Dr. Roy W. Spencer has re-examined some of the University of East Anglia CRU climate data and found that even without making the heat island effect adjustment that Dr. Phil Jones claims that he has made with the data, Spencer's temperature trend is 20 percent below that claimed by Jones.

Fundamental Flaws in IPCC Report

I have written on this before, but I think that they do a good job in summarizing the issue. I had also forgotten to mention the false claims regarding Africa.

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.

But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves. . . .

Jeff Sachs believes: "Climate sceptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain"

Here is someone on the other side of the Climategate debate. One can judge for themselves whether this actually deals with the substance of the critiques. Personally, I think this involves a lot of name calling.

Merchants of Doubt, a new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway set for release in mid-2010, will be an authoritative account of their misbehaviour. The authors show that the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.

Today's campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organisations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer. Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulphur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing "acid rain." Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.

Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980s, this same group took on the battle against climate change. . . .

Sachs pretty much loses all credibility here, because there are plenty of scientific studies that disagree with his claim here on secondhand smoke. Much of the debate here is over whether there is actually an externality since the store or restaurant owner has an incentive to give their customers what they want (see my book Freedomnomics).

whether it is companies that don't want to pay the extra costs of regulation, or free-market ideologues opposed to any government controls. . . .

We are now at 7 paragraphs, 410 words and we still don't have any specific responses to the objections.

The latest round of attacks involves two episodes. The first was the hacking of a climate-change research centre in England. The emails that were stolen suggested a lack of forthrightness in the presentation of some climate data. Whatever the details of this specific case, the studies in question represent a tiny fraction of the overwhelming scientific evidence that points to the reality and urgency of man-made climate change.

1) Not clear it was hacking versus a whistle blower.
2) As I have written in my own editorial pieces, there are problems with other data. Data not being made available to other scientists. Questions about whether there were biases in how it was collected.
3) Not much of a response.

The second issue was a blatant error concerning glaciers that appeared in a major IPCC report. Here it should be understood that the IPCC issues thousands of pages of text. There are, no doubt, errors in those pages. But errors in the midst of a vast and complex report by the IPCC point to the inevitability of human shortcomings, not to any fundamental flaws in climate science.

There were a lot of errors in the IPCC report.

The rest of Sachs' op-ed then goes back to personal attacks.

New Washington Times pieces

Another couple pieces of mine in the Washington Times:

More errors in temperature data: The global warming cult sees its superstitions shattered

One-gun-a-month limits hurt law-abiding citizens, not criminals

35% believe that human activity is causing global warming, 47% due to "planetary trends"

Rasmussen Reports has this new poll. The most interesting thing to me though is that the whole Climatagate controversy has had no detrimental effect of man-made global warming claims.

Questions continue to mount over the science behind years of studies that say humans are chiefly to blame for global warming. But reflecting a trend that has been going on for more than a year, just 35% of U.S. voters now believe global warming is caused primarily by human activity.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 47% think long-term planetary trends are mostly to blame, down three points from the previous survey in January. Eight percent say there is some other reason, and 10% aren't sure. . . .

'Climategate' Phil Jones interviewed by BBC

See the BBC interview here. BBC has a general discussion of the interview here.

This interview has some pretty amazing points. Jones has spent the better part of the past 25 years toiling to convince the world of CO2-forced 20th-century warming, but now admitting that the difference in warming rates for the periods 1860-1880, 1910-40 and 1975-2009 is statistically insignificant. Jones even acceded that there has been no statistically-significant global warming since 1995; that in fact, global temperatures have been trending to the downside since January of 2002, although he denied the statistical significance of the -0.12C per decade decline.

Jones is now conceding some interesting facts, particularly that this recent warming period might not be particularly unusual.

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented. . . .

The UK Daily Mail pointed to these three issues:

Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
There has been no global warming since 1995
Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

Piece at BigGovernment: The Real Climategate Scandal

My piece there starts this way:

The global warming scandal keeps getting worse. Revelations over the last few weeks show that many important assertions in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were based on misquotes and false claims from environmental groups, not on published academic research as originally claimed. This is on top of the recent mess regarding data, where the three most relied-on data series used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 assessment report still not been released. Other information indicates that data have been systematically biased to produce a rise in measured temperatures when actual temperatures were falling or flat.

Take some of the false claims in the 2007 IPCC report. . . .