My Take on Climategate

For the past couple of days I have not posted for two reasons.  First, I was in London and tried to sleep as late as I could before my meetings (still effectively getting up before 4 am).  Second, I was reading up on “Climategate."  In case you have been completely offline and have not even watched my favorite fake news source, The Daily Show, here is a one sentence summary: Several climate scientists committed the cardinal sin of tweaking data in an attempt to make a case stronger, thereby actually making it weaker, when – inevitably – the tweaking came to light.

It turns out that trying to understand whether there something meaningful here, as opposed to simply having a knee-jerk reaction based on one’s existing believes takes some time.  I encourage everyone who cares about this topic to really dig in.  At a minimum, I recommend reading the coverage on the RealClimate and ClimateAudit blogs (for two opposing view points), including the super extensive comment threads, such as this one with 699 comments!

If you don’t want to do this work but are interested in my conclusion, here it is: what the scientists did is annoying because it was entirely unnecessary.  The basic theory about how greenhouse gases affect the climate is summarized neatly here and it is still the most likely theory after you allow for the omitted and adjusted data.

I am not aware of a theory in which adding CO2 to the atmosphere would result in cooling.  Instead, the competing theories tend to be about either (a) human-made greenhouse gases causing very little warming and/or (b) other factors (e.g. solar activity) playing a vastly stronger role over the same time frame.  To have a scientific basis against a reduction of greenhouse gases, you have to conclude that the evidence sufficiently supports one of these alternatives to the point that the cost of doing something (that cost itself being subject to reasonable debate) outweighs the cost of doing nothing (or very little).

Now consider two graphs, neatly reproduced on ClimateAudit.  The first shows temperature using tree ring data and highlights the portion that was omitted, which shows a decline.  The second shows the first curve embedded in a comparison chart of several data series.  Even if you add the decline, you see that only one of five series considered shows a decline and that the most important curve – the one that measures temperatures directly points steeply upwards.  Now even if you reduce the slope of the measured temperature curve because it too has had some potentially questionable adjustments made to it, it still is incredibly hard to see how you can turn that into a firm support for (a) or (b) above.  And that is before you consider evidence such as the melting of the North Pole, the reduction in the Greenland ice sheets, and so on.

There are two things, however, that are quite disturbing about Climategate and that I intend to cover in future blog posts:  first, the widespread disregard for the scientific method and rational argument (sadly even among scientists) and second (and related), the potential for balkanization of dialog on the Internet.