The Age of Global Warming: A History (32 page)

21

Quis Custodiet?

New analyses of proxy data for the Northern Hemisphere indicate that the increase in temperature in the twentieth century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past one thousand years. It is also likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year.

IPCC – Third Assessment Report (2001)
[1]
 

Obfuscation, denial and a cover-up that blew spectacularly on the eve of the most important climate change negotiations since Kyoto – the events following publication of the Third Assessment Report are the most astonishing in the science of global warming. Leading scientists and science academies and societies had to decide: were they to be guardians of scientific orthodoxy or upholders of scientific standards? They could not be both.    

It took four decades for the scientific establishment to accept the truth about the bones known as Piltdown Man. During that time, hundreds of scientific papers were devoted to the concoction – nearly as many as to all legitimate specimens in the fossil record put together.
[2]
  

That episode is a corrective to what the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn described as the persistent tendency of scientists to make the history of science appear as a linear, cumulative growth of knowledge. Combined with the generally unhistorical air of science writing, the impression was created that ‘science has reached its present state by a series of individual discoveries and inventions that, when gathered together, constitute the modern body of technical knowledge’.
[3]

Kuhn’s 1962 classic
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
rejected this. ‘Cumulative acquisition of unanticipated novelties proves to be an almost non-existent exception to the rule of scientific development,’ Kuhn argued.
[4]
He proposed instead a succession of incompatible paradigms. Scientists develop specialised vocabulary and skills and a refinement of concepts increasingly removed from commonsense prototypes. Increased professionalisation, Kuhn thought, leads to ‘an immense restriction of the scientists’ vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change’.
[5]

An established paradigm gives scientists the rules and the tools so they can focus on solving problems, elucidating and extending the paradigm, and provides a textbook framework to initiate younger scientists into the field. Scientists were not particularly adept at the kind of thinking needed to analyse a problem from first principles. ‘Though many scientists talk easily and well about the particular individual hypotheses that underlie a concrete piece of current research, they are little better than laymen at characterising the established bases of their field, its legitimate problems and methods,’ Kuhn wrote.
[6]

The pre-revolutionary period before the breakdown of a paradigm is marked by ‘pronounced professional insecurity’ caused by the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should.
[7]
Kuhn recounts examples – the scandalous state of astronomy before Copernicus, Newton’s theory of light and colour, Lavoisier’s demolition of the phlogiston theory of combustion, Maxwell’s electro-magnetic theories replacing theories of ether in the nineteenth century, which in turn created a paradigm crisis and Einstein’s special theory of relativity in 1905.

As with a political revolution forcing a choice between two antagonistic views of politics outside the normal framework of politics, so the choice between competing paradigms in science proves to be a choice between ‘incompatible modes of community life’, which cannot be decided by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science.
[8]
With global warming, the link between science and politics is more than an analogy – global warming is a political idea as well as a scientific one. The science provides the feedstock for a political programme; in turn, politics funds and helps propagate the science. The relationship is so deeply symbiotic that the two cannot be separated.

The risks inherent in such a situation were raised by President Eisenhower in his Farewell Address. Together with the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower identified a ‘scientific-technological elite’ as purveyors of miracle cures capturing government policy in warning against the recurrent temptation of believing that ‘some spectacular and costly action’ might offer a ‘miraculous solution’ to all current difficulties.
[9]
Eisenhower was dismayed at the extent of government funding of scientific research. ‘A government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.’ The solitary inventor, ‘tinkering in his shop’, was overshadowed by task forces of scientists. ‘The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded,’ Eisenhower warned.
[10]

Perhaps it wouldn’t have surprised Eisenhower that the man who demonstrated that the Hockey Stick was wrong wasn’t a scientist employed by government or a tenured university academic. In fact, he wasn’t even a scientist, more the solitary tinkerer of Eisenhower’s imagining.

In 2003, Stephen McIntyre was a Canadian businessman involved in financing speculative mineral prospecting with time on his hands. A prize-winning mathematician from Toronto University, McIntyre’s interest in global warming had been aroused by the claim that 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium. 

How could they know? 

A claim by Mann’s co-author Malcolm Hughes caught McIntyre’s eye. Attempting to explain the ‘weaker correlation’ – in fact a negative correlation, with tree widths shrinking and temperatures rising after 1960 – Hughes said it meant past climate reconstructions were ‘better than we thought they were’. Apparently, Hughes said, ‘we underestimated the differences between the present century and past centuries’.
[11]
The breakdown of a correlation led climate scientists to increase their confidence in its reliability? ‘I could hardly believe that this sort of thing passed as science,’ McIntyre recalled seven years later.
[12]

He emailed Mann asking for data sets of the one hundred and twelve proxies used in his 1998 paper. Mann replied almost immediately. He’d forgotten the exact location and would ask a colleague to follow up.
[13]
It turned out the data had not been archived in a single location and the time taken to retrieve it suggested that no one had checked the data before the IPCC showcased the Hockey Stick in the Third Assessment Report.

McIntyre embarked on a painstaking forensic examination of the whole data set and compared it with the original data where he could. The data were full of errors – unjustified truncations, copying of values from one series to another, unjustified filling in of missing numbers, mis-copying of some series to a year earlier and use of obsolete data.
[14]
  

McIntyre teamed up with fellow Canadian Ross McKitrick, an environmental economist at the University of Guelph. Their first paper in September 2003 concluded that substantially improved quality control to Mann’s dataset yielded a temperature index in which the late twentieth century is ‘unexceptional compared to previous centuries’. The extent of the errors in Mann’s work meant that indexes computed from it were ‘unreliable and cannot be used for comparisons between current and past climates’.
[15]

The political world began to notice. The US Senate was debating the McCain-Liebermann cap-and-trade bill. McIntyre and McKitrick did a briefing on Capitol Hill.

Replication of the Hockey Stick still eluded McIntyre. He continued to press Mann for details of his computer code. ‘I am far too busy to be answering the same question over and over for you again,’ Mann replied in November 2003, ‘so this will be our final email exchange.’
[16]
Thwarted, McIntyre sifted through Mann’s website for clues. He found a fragment of computer code. From it, McIntyre unlocked the algorithm Mann used to standardise the various proxy data.

It became apparent to McIntyre and McKitrick that the algorithm systematically over-weighted hockey stick-shaped series, generating hockey stick results if any happened to be present. They performed a test by running statistically trendless ‘red noise’, simulating data from trees subject to random climate fluctuations. In ten thousand repetitions, McIntyre and McKitrick found that a conventional standardising algorithm almost never yielded a hockey stick shape as the pre-dominant pattern. Running the same data through Mann’s algorithm produced a pre-dominant hockey stick shape over ninety-nine per cent of the time.
[17]

They ran the data from his CENSORED folder. Without the Graybill series, there was no hockey stick. 

In January 2004, McIntyre and McKitrick submitted a paper to
Nature
, the journal that had published Mann’s 1998 paper. The draft was sent to Mann for comments. The process was underway. They were given two weeks to revise and resubmit in the light of reviewer comments.

Then in March, the journal’s editor Rosalind Cotter told them to cut the manuscript substantially.
[18]
A condensed version was submitted. Months passed. In August, Cotter emailed McIntyre to say she wouldn’t publish the piece. Evidently the paper was too hot for
Nature
– its mission ‘to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science’.
[19]
In the interim, it carried a
Corrigendum
to Mann’s 1998 paper. ‘None of these errors affect our previously published results,’ it erroneously claimed.
[20]

Blocked by
Nature
, McIntyre and McKitrick put the entire record of their submission, together with referee reports, on the web. A revised version was published by
Geophysical Research Letters
in February 2005. When Berkeley physicist Richard Muller read about Mann’s algorithm producing hockey sticks from red noise tests, it hit him like a bombshell. ‘Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artefact of poor mathematics,’ Muller wrote.
[21]
Bert Bolin was dismissive. ‘Their analysis is hardly more reliable than the one published by Mann
et al.
’
[22]
Bolin had picked up the wrong end of the stick. McIntyre had not claimed to have made an alternative temperature reconstruction to Mann’s, only that Mann’s reconstruction depended on unreliable data and statistical methods.

Seeing that a climate journal edited by Stephen Schneider was in the process of reviewing one of Mann’s papers, McIntyre contacted him. Invited to become one of Mann’s referees, McIntyre asked Schneider to obtain Mann’s supporting calculations and source code. Phil Jones emailed Schneider pleading with him not to. It would be setting ‘a VERY dangerous precedent’, Jones told Schneider.
[23]
‘In trying to be scrupulously fair, Steve, you’ve opened up a whole can of worms.’
[24]

Separately McIntyre had written to the National Science Foundation, which had financed Mann’s work. Although Schneider agreed that data should be made available, Schneider and the NSF drew the line at computer code. For both, it was ‘an intellectual property issue’, as Schneider put it.
[25]
‘The passing of time and evolving new knowledge about Earth’s climate will eventually tell the full story of changing climate,’ the director of the paleo-climate programme at the National Science Foundation, David Verado, emailed in 2003, which begs the question why the taxpayer was funding the research in the first place.
[26]

Asserting intellectual property rights was also popular with British climate scientists. In 2005, an Australian climatologist asked Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit for the underlying data used to compile its global temperature series. Jones refused. ‘We have twenty-five or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. There is IPR to consider.’
[27]
A British government minister blocked a Freedom of Information request on similar grounds: ‘Intellectual property rights must also be considered.’
[28]

Why? Are scientific data and methodologies like the recipe for Coca Cola?

Intellectual property is fundamentally different from physical property. As Alan Greenspan observed, someone’s use of an idea does not make that idea unavailable to others at the same time.
[29]
The sole economic function in establishing intellectual property rights is to provide temporary protection from commercial exploitation by third parties, so innovation can be rewarded and incentivised.

The effect of applying the concept of intellectual property rights in pure scientific research is to attack the roots of science. ‘Verification, or checking, or confirmation, is basic to every scientific enterprise, and also to every enterprise in daily life in which it is important to be sure that we are making no mistake,’ Bridgman wrote in 1959. ‘The meaning of truth is to be found in the operations by which truth is “verified.”’
[30]

Mann wasn’t budging. ‘These contrarians are pathetic, because there’s no scientific validity to their arguments whatsoever,’ he told an interviewer in the spring of 2005.
[31]
The controversy spilled over onto the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
, where Mann described it as a battle of ‘truth versus disinformation’.
[32]
German climate scientist Hans von Storch, who had also produced findings that suggested Mann had underestimated past temperature variability, told the paper he had come under pressure from colleagues. There was a tendency in climate science, von Storch said, to ‘use filters and make only comments that are politically correct’. A supporter of Mann claimed his critics were on ‘some kind of witch hunt’.
[33]

It was a meme that would spread rapidly from Mann’s partisans to the scientific establishment and then to politicians, turning a cover-up into a point of high principle. ‘Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in,’ Mann said.
[34]
With this statement, Mann had thrown down the gauntlet. It was picked up by Joe Barton, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce.   

Barton decided to launch an investigation. In June, he wrote to Mann, Bradley and Hughes for details of their work, financial support and asking Mann to provide the exact computer code used to generate his results.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
– Who watches the watchmen? 

Barton’s intervention unleashed a storm. It was as if the separation of church and state had been repealed. Fellow Republican Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Committee on Science, wrote to Barton, calling his investigation an illegitimate attempt to intimidate a prominent scientist. It would set a ‘truly chilling’ precedent. Scientific research must operate outside the political realm. ‘Your enquiry seeks to erase that line between science and politics,’ Boehlert wrote.
[35]

Democrat Henry Waxman, chair of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Environment from 1979 until 1995, wrote to Barton complaining of his ‘dubious investigation’, which looked like ‘a transparent effort to bully and harass climate change experts’ who had produced ‘highly regarded research’.
[36]

Scientists weighed in, too. Alan Leshner expressed the deep concern of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). That the Hockey Stick formed part of the basis of the IPCC’s conclusions was a reflection of it ‘passing muster’ in the IPCC peer review process, Leshner wrote.
[37]
Twenty scientists, including James Hansen and John Holdren (a past and future White House science adviser), also expressed their deep concern. At the same time, they began downgrading the importance of the Hockey Stick. It was not an essential element but merely ‘a useful
illustration
of our understanding’.
[38]