[36] ibid., Ev 167–8.
[37] Graham Stringer interview with author, 21st June 2011.
[38] Simon Hoggart, ‘The sight of another scientist being skewered makes for painful viewing’ in the Guardian, 2nd March 2010.
[39] ibid.
[40] House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia Eighth Report of Session 2009–10, Volume II (2010), Q103, Ev 29.
[41] Hoggart, ‘The sight of another scientist being skewered makes for painful viewing’ in the Guardian, 2nd March 2010.
[42] Andrew Gimson, ‘On the trail of the lonesome pine’ in the Telegraph, 2nd March 2010.
[43] Quentin Letts, ‘Lord Lawson labelled them climate alarmists’ in the Daily Mail, 2nd March 2010.
[44] Stringer interview with author.
[45] House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia Eighth Report of Session 2009–10, Volume II (2010), Q136, Ev 32.
23
State of Denial
Q. So you are not prepared to comment on whether the events at CRU undermine the IPCC or not?
A. If we take Chapter Six ... This is the most robust peer review process that you will see in any area of science.
Professor Julia Slingo, Chief Scientist, the Met Office (1st March 2010)[1]
After the sketchwriters left, the MPs cross-questioned a trio of government scientists – Sir John Beddington, the government’s chief scientific adviser, the Met Office’s Julia Slingo and Bob Watson, who had moved from the White House, via the World Bank and chairing the IPCC, to Whitehall as Defra’s chief scientific adviser.
Before the hearing, Beddington had sent the committee a memorandum. ‘The integrity of British science is of the highest order,’ he wrote. Certainly the British government had a big exposure to climate change science. Of the nineteen countries that sent and paid the fifty-one lead authors of the four key chapters of the Fourth Assessment Report, the US and the UK provided eighteen, an analysis by David Holland shows. Together they provided half the review editors and one third of the authors of the summaries for policymakers. ‘[The] IPCC, which has a tiny budget, is dominated by the hugely funded climate research organizations of the USA and the UK,’ Holland concluded.[2]
Climategate heaved a large rock into this pond. Had it damaged the image of UK science, one MP asked?
‘No, I do not think UK science has been damaged,’ Beddington replied.[3]
Did the emails give him any cause for concern?
Yes. ‘I think some of the wording is unfortunate.’[4]
Had the events at the CRU undermined the IPCC? Slingo told MPs they should remember that the IPCC peer review process was ‘much greater than any other science ever receives’.[5]
Didn’t the Hockey Stick and the fact McIntyre had been in a tiny minority give her some cause for worry about peer review, Stringer asked?
‘Not at all, no,’ Slingo replied. ‘The controversy around the original methods of Mann et al has been fully addressed in the peer review literature and I think those issues are now largely resolved.’[6]
In some ways, Slingo’s answer was the most extraordinary of the day. True, the Wegman report had endorsed McIntyre’s critique of Mann’s handling of statistics and orally Gerald North had agreed with Wegman’s findings. So in that sense, Slingo was correct to have said the issue had been resolved. But the version furnished by the IPCC in the Fourth Assessment Report – the most robust peer review process in any area of science, Slingo claimed – was a falsification, being silent on Wegman, relying instead on a paper that hadn’t been published, requiring a retroactive change in IPCC rules, the published and peer-reviewed version of which contained verification statistics that corroborated McIntyre.
Scientists’ power in debates on global warming derives from their monopoly in the presentation of scientific matters. Underpinning the idea of global warming is that scientists should be trusted to represent the science in a balanced and objective way. At issue in this exchange was not scientific knowledge itself, but the process of documenting and agreeing it. Here, Britain’s most powerful climate scientist was presenting her interpretation of a process which scientist and non-scientist alike could see was so detached from reality as to be a fairy tale.
Watson downplayed the importance of the Hockey Stick. The Third Assessment Report’s hit single, ‘1998 – the hottest year of a thousand years’, had been superseded by the not-as-catchy ‘Model that heat’. ‘A lot was made of the Hockey Stick, but a much more important issue is what has happened in the last half-century,’ Watson told the committee.[7] The evidence for attributing cause and effect was derived from ‘theoretical modelling’ by trying to explain observed changes in the climate.[8]
The biggest question mark raised by Climategate was the evidence of intent to delete emails subject to a Freedom of Information request. What information did top climate scientists want to suppress, to the extent of breaking the law to do so? A cover-up had brought down President Nixon. Jones was luckier. By the time it had come to light, prosecution was time-barred.
Earlier in the session, Stringer charged that the university was attempting to dodge allegations of malpractice, in particular by deleting emails. ‘It is hard to imagine a more clear-cut or cogent prima facie piece of evidence, is it not, and yet you have taken the opposite view?’ he challenged Acton.[9] ‘To my mind there is prima facie evidence,’ Acton replied. ‘Why else did I set up the Muir Russell independent review?’[10]
Russell, the former civil servant, took a different view. ‘The Prime Minister doesn’t want the truth, he wants something he can tell Parliament,’ Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby says.[11] ‘I wasn’t going to put the review into the position of making the sort of quasi-judicial prosecutorial investigative judgement,’ Russell told the committee in October 2010.[12] To have done so would be ‘alleging that there might have been an offence, and that really wasn’t the thing that my inquiry was set up to do … If we ducked or avoided, I plead guilty to that’, Russell added.[13]
Russell recognised that the tactic of the Fourth Assessment Report’s Chapter Six to distance the IPCC from the Hockey Stick without disowning it involved a degree of subterfuge. The second order draft of the Chapter cited Wahl and Ammann’s work to refute McIntyre and McKitrick. This provoked the US government reviewer: the reference to Wahl and Ammann should be deleted; it did not comply with Working Group I deadlines and substantial changes subsequently made to the paper, including the insertion of tables of statistical verification tests, showed Mann’s reconstruction had failed.[14] The comment elicited a tart response: ‘Rejected – the citation is allowed under current rules.’[15] Russell took the view that the ends justified the means. ‘We are trying to get to the big issue end point,’ he told MPs. ‘We are really just saying, be all this as it may, that the end point seems to us to be a sensible place.’[16]
Meanwhile the UEA had commissioned a second panel under Lord Oxburgh, an eminent geologist and prominent advocate of alternative energy. At the March hearing, Acton told the committee its purpose was to ‘reassess the science and make sure there is nothing wrong’.[17] In October, five months after he had submitted his report, Oxburgh told the committee that what Acton had told them was ‘inaccurate’.[18] Instead Oxburgh decided to focus on the honesty of the scientists and the integrity of the researchers, in doing so, taking care to tiptoe around the elephant in the room – the practice of deleting emails in response to Freedom of Information requests. Honesty was one thing, what about competence? Liberal Democrat Roger Williams pointed out that a scientist could be honest but incompetent and honest but misled. ‘That is a complicate
d question,’ Oxburgh replied.[19]
The five-page Oxburgh report, written in around three weeks, found no evidence of deliberate scientific malpractice.[20] Nor did it find anything to alter the overall results of the CRU’s instrumental temperature reconstruction.[21] But Stringer found the report ‘quietly devastating’.[22] It remarked on the ‘inappropriate statistical tools’ used by some other paleo-climatologist groups and their potential for producing misleading results, ‘presumably by accident rather than design’.[23] The potential for misleading results arising from selection bias was ‘very great’. It reiterated criticisms made in the 2006 Wegman report:
It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work because it is fundamentally statistical. Under such circumstances there must be an obligation on researchers to document the judgemental decisions they have made so that the work can in principle be replicated by others.[24]
The Oxburgh report described as ‘regrettable’ the practice of the IPCC to neglect to highlight the divergence issue (it had been the decision of CRU’s Briffa to underplay the divergence).[25] Muir Russell agreed, describing the truncation as ‘misleading’.[26]
By a three to one vote (Stringer being the dissenter), the House of Commons committee found no reason to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming.[27] However it criticised the withholding of data and codes, a practice it called problematic ‘because climate science is a matter of global importance and of public interest, and therefore the quality and transparency of the science should be irreproachable’.[28]
At a press conference, committee chair Phil Willis went further, calling it reprehensible. ‘That practice needs to change and needs to change quickly,’ he said.[29] As for Jones, there was no reason why he should not resume his post as CRU director: ‘He was certainly not co-operative with those seeking data, but that was true of all the climate scientists.’[30]
Some climate scientists spoke out against the committee’s emphasis on disclosure. Oxford University’s Myles Allen said climate scientists had used their professional judgement to distinguish between professional scientists and activists and members of the public. ‘The big implication in all this for science is that the [FOI Act] is taking away our liberty to use our own judgement to decide who we spend time responding to.’[31]
The committee argued that Jones had brought the FOI requests on himself by his failure to respond helpfully to data requests, which was bound to be viewed with suspicion.[32] Had all the available raw data been available online from an early stage, these kinds of unfortunate email exchanges would not have occurred, the committee concluded.[33] One of those was an email from Mann to a colleague at the CRU in 2003 – the subject: ‘Reconstruction errors’:
I’m providing these for your own personal use, since you’re a trusted colleague. So please don’t pass this along to others without checking w/ me first. This is the sort of ‘dirty laundry’ one doesn’t want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try to distort things...[34]
Jones had told the committee that the published emails represented one tenth of one per cent of his output, implying one million emails. ‘Further suspicion could have been allayed by releasing all the emails,’ the committee thought.[35]
After the general election, it fell to David Cameron’s Coalition government to respond to the committee’s report. The Climategate emails did not provide evidence to discredit evidence of global warming; the rigour and honesty of the scientists were not in doubt; the peer review process had not been subverted or the IPCC process misused.[36] Openness and transparency should be the presumption, but there were good reasons for not making data available immediately or, indeed, at all. Scientists might not be legally allowed to give out data; commercial rights should be respected; there might be ‘security considerations’.[37]
The Coalition’s arguments highlighted the contradictory nature of ‘state science’. The advance of scientific knowledge is based on destructive challenge. Because it is always possible to achieve agreement between a theory and observational evidence, Popper argued that the supreme rule for deciding on the subsidiary rules of empirical science was specifying that they do not protect any statement in science against falsification.[38] The general attitude of promoting a search for falsifying instances was, according to the American philosopher of science John Losee, the most important in the history of science, typified by the eighteenth-century astronomer William Herschel’s view that the scientist must assume the role of antagonist against his own theories, a theory’s worth being proved only by its ability to withstand such attacks.[39]
Barriers preventing such attacks are barriers to science. By carving out exemptions for the publication of data and code, the government was inviting scientists to find ways of subverting Popper’s supreme rule. If the government’s interest had been in genuine scientific knowledge, it would have stipulated that it would only fund research based on data and methods which are freely available. That such a course would have been unthinkable for a government fully signed up to global warming illustrates the incompatibility between the presentational constraints of state science and the epistemological requirements of the real thing.
In January 2010, HRH the Prince of Wales visited the CRU. Its patron for nearly twenty years, the prince was briefed by Jones and discussed ‘the appalling treatment they had endured’.[40]
The CRU’s refusal to disclose data was raised during Acton’s second appearance before the Science and Technology Committee. He spoke of his keenness to become an exemplar on disclosure and freedom of information. ‘I want my university to be whiter than white on it,’ Acton averred.[41] Even as he was speaking, Acton’s university was engaged in a fourteen-month battle before the Information Commissioner to prevent Professor Jonathan Jones, a physics lecturer at Oxford University, being copied data the CRU had given Georgia Tech.
The Oxford Jones had first requested the data in July 2009. The university refused. In October an internal inquiry upheld the refusal. In December, Jones complained to the Information Commissioner which started its analysis of the case in March 2010. The UEA used every conceivable excuse – including mutually incompatible ones, such as the information was already in the public domain but disclosure might adversely affect Britain’s international relations.
On 23rd June 2011 the Information Commissioner ruled that UEA had been in breach of the Freedom of Information Act. Subject to appeal, the university was given thirty-five days to comply or face the prospect of being held in contempt of court.[42]
Meanwhile, the IPCC’s standing was dealt a further blow in January 2010 with media uproar about its claim, recycled from a WWF report that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 – centuries earlier than the most pessimistic forecasts. A second claim, that fifty-five per cent of the Netherlands lay below sea level (the correct figure being twenty-six per cent), led to a storm in the Dutch media. The Dutch legislature stated that the previously accepted reliability of the IPCC was now at issue and instructed the government to carry out a review.[43]
The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency published a report in July. It focused on the Working Group II report on impacts. Seven of the thirty-two conclusions in the summaries could not be traced to the main report.[44] It also found that the Working Group II summary focused only on potential negative impacts of climate change, rather than presenting policymakers with a complete picture.[45]
Such was the damage to the IPCC’s credibility that in March 2010 the UN secretary-general and chair of the IPCC asked the InterAcademy Council (IAC) to review IPCC procedures and management. The panel, chaired by an economist, Princeton’s Harold Shapiro, delivered a carefully worded report. Scientific debates always involve controversy, Shapiro wrote, describing climate science as ‘a collective learning process’.[46] In Shapiro’s judgement, whether the IPCC remained ‘a very valuabl
e resource’ was conditional on it highlighting ‘both what we believe we know and what we believe is still unknown’ – a fine-grained description of the epistemological issues at the heart of the debate on the science of global warming.[47]
The IAC also highlighted the problematic relationship between science and politics. Although scientists determined the summaries for policymakers, the final wording was negotiated with government representatives ‘for clarity of message and relevance to policy’.[48] At the same time, the panel warned that ‘straying into advocacy’ could only harm the IPCC’s credibility.[49] When chapter lead authors are sitting next to their government representatives, it could put the author in the position of either supporting a government position at odds with the working group report or opposing their government. ‘This may be most awkward when authors are also government employees,’ the panel suggested.[50]
The effect of dependence on government patronage for policy-driven research can be seen in Penn State’s investigation into allegations of misconduct by Michael Mann following the Climategate emails. The report exonerated Mann and showered him with praise. Since 1998, Mann had received research funding from two government agencies. In a description of Mann’s work and conduct on the Hockey Stick that the Atlantic’s Clive Crook said defied parody, both agencies had an
The Age of Global Warming: A History Page 38