CRUdGate - Why this can't be swept under the carpet

As others have commented, ad nauseam, the response from the proponents of AGW essentially boils down to the following main components:

• The mail (often there is only one, not several thousand threads of multiple mails and it's usually only mail, rather mail, code, data and commentary) was hacked and that's frightfully naughty. Aren't hackers nasty? Particularly when they are Russian.

This does not merit any response beyond laughter.

• The science is peer reviewed and it withstood that process.

Still an appeal to authority and, more importantly, dealt with damningly here.

• This is but one part of the literature, it's only a handful of bad apples and the structure is utterly unchanged even without it.

This is the main charge that our great friend George Monbiot lays out here and that must be tackled. That is what, with your permission, I shall make a hesitant attempt to start the process to do.

Firstly, we must understand how the whole thing hangs together, because the edifice of AGW is very definitely not just pure science, boffins in white coats in labs and so forth. It spans the whole gamut from real pure science, through the applied sciences and Engineering, passing through economics and finally ending up in the dark arts of Politics and Diplomacy. That's a lot to take in, so I have created a handy diagram that explains. Never let it be said that your polymathematic Pedant-General makes you do the hard work.

Let's start at the top, and bear with me.

• If the climate and recent changes are not unprecedented, then there's nothing to do. Let's go to the pub.


• If it is unprecedented, then we need to know why. If we don't know if it is unprecedented or if we don't know why, we need to stop here until we can find out.
• If it is unprecedented but it's not us, then we need to question seriously if there is anything that we can do about it and the answer to that is very very likely to be "no".


• If it is us, we then to move into economics. Will the damage outweigh the benefit?
  


• And even if the damage does outweigh the benefit, we still need to consider if the cost of stopping the climate change at source is less than the cost of adapting to the problem to minimise the damage.


• And even if the mitigation does cost less than adaptation, we need to ask if our only option for mitigation is to subborn all our freedom to a putative benevolent world government.

Only if you can answer "yes" all the way down that chain can you get to Copenhagen. One misstep and you are looking at adaptation, either because we shouldn’t do anything, or it’s the best thing to do or the alternative is so appallingly ghastly, depending on which route you took to get there.

It is also useful to plot where you and your friends sit on this decision tree:

• Whilst I wouldn't wish to claim to speak for our diabolical host, I suspect that he is in the box labelled, if not actually, "in the pub".


• Steve McIntyre et al are in the "Find Out" box.


• Interestingly, although the "Hockey Team" declare themselves to be at least on the "yes it is caused by man", they appear both to have been buggering about at the bottom in the politics and policy bits and yet the leak makes it clear that actually they are indeed right there in the "Find Out" box with the very chap they hate so much. They really don't actually know. They want to like to think they do, but they know that actually they don't.


• Next, we get down to the economics and again, we find that there is a disconnect between stated and actual positions. The blogfather Tim Worstall—whatever his private views—maintains a carefully studied neutrality on the science, erring always on the side of "let's grant that it is correct". But he then falls off the "critical path" at the economics. If it's not clear that the downside of GW (whether "A" or not) are worse than the upside, it's similarly not at all clear that we have to do something (or that what we are already doing is not already enough). More importantly, the worse the climate situation is, the greater the cost of mitigation and the more attractive it is to go for adaptation. This is the oddity with the Stern Report. If his numbers are correct, we're either doing enough for mitigation already or we shouldn't be doing it at all. As the shrieking gets louder, the costs of mitigation inevitably rise and the argument gets stronger AGAINST mitigation.


• Finally we get to the politics and the Bjorn Lomborg position. Even if it is all ghastly, there are many more important things to do with our resources. Millions really actually will die from preventable water-borne diseases, malnutrition and malaria and we really actually can do something about those. Buggering about with the climate, although it definitely will be expensive, is desperately uncertain both in terms of its effectiveness and the lives it will save. That's not a good trade off.

Simples.

Except of course it is and it isn't. If you do really accept the heavily-lauded consensus, then the decision tree changes quite a bit. Think about it in first aid terms. If it is the case that the climate is changing in an unprecedented manner and that change is driven predominantly by manmade CO₂ emissions, then we really shouldn't be muddling about with adapting to effects: we should address the cause and that inevitably means finding a way to reduce manmade CO₂ emissions. The problem with this is that everything becomes a bit too clearcut and the diagram now looks like this:

Because there is a skip from the straight science, straight to politics and policy, the science becomes absolutely essential.

As a result, no dissent can be tolerated because the wheels come off very quickly as soon as you have to make your way through the rest of the decision tree.

Suggesting that it's not unprecedented is straight denial and even doubt has to be censored.

But what of George's Knights Carbonic? How can this small number of scientists with "clever mathematical techniques", or "fudge factors" according to taste, affect the whole scientific foundation layer.

Richard North suggests historical parallels, but his analysis does not pull back the curtain, "Wizard of Oz"-style, on the Knights Carbonic.

Permit me to try. Here's how the process works:

Temperatures, CO₂ levels, sun spot numbers et al are gathered currently using all the sophistication that we have today. We have the real measured data but only for a short (and geologically utterly insignificant) period.

Next, we try to see if we can find other things, with a longer history, that might be useful for telling us what those key measurements might have been if we had been there at the time with all our technology to measure them. We need proxies and we need to show that those proxies are a good match with the current data.

Once we have done that, we can then use the proxy data to fill back the history. At this stage, we can also say whether or not we believe the current data to be exceptional even without reading the entrails from the GCMs etc.

Now we can add some light seasoning of the real physics and chemistry that determine how things actually work, thermodynamics, mechanics, spectral absorption of different gasses and the lot.

Finally, we bake all the ingredients together in the models to try and tie all the inputs (CO₂ levels, solar activity, orbital wobbles etc) with the outputs (particularly temperature, but also climate generally, plus sea levels etc). In particular you are trying to identify how the each thing interacts with everything else, given all the control theory horrors of signal delays (introduced by thermal capacity of the oceans that delays temperature rises by the massive amount of energy required to do so) and feedback couplings (that the solvency of CO₂ in water changes with temperature, so the oceans absorb and release CO₂ in response to temperature).

But this is where the game is. If the temperature today is NOT unprecedented, in particular relative to the MWP, then we have a big fat data point that says the unprecedented current level of atmospheric CO₂ probably isn't tremendously relevant to climate. Or rather, there is some other input signal that is just as important that we are overlooking and therefore the impact of CO₂ will be being overstated.

This is not about whether we are warmer than we were 100 years ago. That is undeniable. 30 years ago, almost every Christmas in Scotland was white. Memories of sledging after Christmas lunch cannot be false consciousness. That stopped in about 1980 and has not happened since. The question is whether or not we are warmer than we were when they spoke Norse in Perth. That we are denied post-prandial sledging tells us nothing about that.

This is where CRUdGate is so important. Just look at where CRU and more generally Phil Jones and Michael Mann have - and have had - an influence on the process:

The Harry Read Me file shows just how badly knackered the HadCRUT temperature series really is. HADCRUT is one of a tiny number of recognised ("peer reviewed" even?) global temperature sources. All of them feed off each other and the people implicated in the emails are linked to some of the others. RealClimate's Gavin Schmidt, for example, is a protege of the team, is extensively mentioned in the audit trail of shame and works for NASA's GISS - one of the other of this tiny number of recognised ("peer reviewed" even?) global temperature sources.

So that's goosed the first box.

"Hide the Decline" reveals the fact that the second box doesn't work properly, especially for the tree-ring proxies. Since there is almost no-one of any stripe publishing in the field of paleodendroclimatology (sod the trillions of dollars to be squandered, I want that on a triple word score) who is not very deeply implicated in this leak, it is clear that the failings of this step have been censored.

There is then ample evidence of the attempt to wipe the MWP from the dendro data and we now know that MBH relied on just 12 trees in North America and, when that was challenged, just 1 tree—one lone tree—in Yamal, Siberia.

In any event, the whole paleo data thing is probably onto a hiding to nothing as we can't trust the two steps that got it there. So (I'm being a bit flippant here) any genuine proxy data (ice cores, lake sediments etc) is knackered because it's trying to be matched to goosed temperature data. That's not to say that there aren't pre-existing shenanigans there too though. So even if you haven't actually attempted to censor your failings (and the mails contain plenty of evidence that this has indeed been happening), your results are going to be goosed anyway.

By this stage, you don't have to touch the actual hard science because, since all your input data is garbage, your models are going to be garbage no matter how carefully you understand the basic physics.

Lastly and as a slight aside, why so little from the MSM? That one is easy. You need to have a decent analytical brain just to deal with the chain of events. You need to have a decent analytical brain, a mathematical/scientific mind and a good grasp of some very hard statistics to understand what is being done to massage the numbers and to see how significant it is to the chain of events.

Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown—in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand—that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.

I would find that hard to report too.

Source: The Devil's Kitchen

Five myths about alcohol

No. 1 - We are drinking more than ever and 1 in 4 people are drinking at hazardous levels

This claim has been made regularly since May of this year, based on data from the Office of National Statistics. The Telegraph's report was entirely typical:

One in four drink too much, official figures show.

Ten million people in England – one in four adults – are putting their health at risk by drinking too much, official figures have shown.

'Too much' is more than 21 units a week for men and 14 units for women. The highly questionable nature of these 'daily limits' has been discussed by my gracious host before; he has also recently touched on the changing way in which these units are counted, all of which reinforce the myth that there is a mounting epidemic of binge-drinking.

Since 2007, the Office of National Statistics has assumed larger glasses are being used and stronger alcohol is being consumed. They now assume that a glass of wine contains 2 units, rather than 1, as it did before. With beer, what used be counted as 1 unit is now counted as 1.5, what used to be 1.5 units is now assumed to be 2 units and what used to be 2.3 units (a large can) is now counted as 3 units.

As you might expect, this has made a dramatic difference to the statistics. The graph below shows the percentage of men and women drinking more than their 21/14 unit weekly 'limit' under the old system*:

Nothing to see here, is there? A downward trend since 2000 is evident for both sexes.

But this is how the same statistics look using the new system:

Wa-hay! Booze Britain! Exactly the same data but very different results.

So which is the correct estimate? The ONS is, in my view, a basically honest institution and it seems fair to estimate 2 units are in the average glass of wine. It is less fair to assume stronger beer at a time when two of the biggest selling lagers - Stella and Becks - have introduced weaker brands.

But wherever the truth may lie, the fact remains that even if the ONS had changed its system 10 years ago, the overall trend would remain downwards.

That consumption has actually been falling recently - albeit slightly - is confirmed by figures for pure alcohol consumption. These show that per capita consumption peaked in 2004 and has since dropped off:

Litres of alcohol per person aged over 14 (PDF)

2002: 11.13

2003: 11.34

2004: 11.59

2005: 11.4

2006: 11.0

2007: 11.2

This data is significant because per capita consumption effectively measures the amount of ethanol consumed by a person, which is what the system of units is supposed to do. But while units have to be clumsily estimated, the per capita system measures what has actually been bought and therefore, one has to assume, been drunk.

According to the Institute of Alcohol Studies - no friends of the booze - total alcohol sales have fallen by 13% since 2001/02**. According to the ONS, the number of teetotallers has risen from 9.5% to 14% since 1992. And pubs are closing at the rate of 53 a week. And per capita consumption of pure alcohol currently stands at 11.2 litres, much less than Luxembourg (15.6 litres) and, indeed, less than 14 other European countries. That's your ‘Booze Britain’ for you.

*These figures are shown in table 2.5 of Statistics on Alcohol, England 2009

** Page 8 of Drinking in Great Britain (PDF)

No.2 - Alcohol is cheaper than it was 20 years ago

This forms the cornerstone of efforts to introduce a minimum price for alcoholic drinks by, amongst others, Fatboy Donaldson:

In his report, Sir Liam noted that over the preceding 20 years, the country’s disposable income had risen faster than alcohol taxation, and alcohol had become ever more affordable.

It is true that alcohol has become more affordable. Everything has become more affordable as a result of rising prosperity. Most people would consider this to be a good thing. But relative to other products alcohol has become less affordable.

When inflation is factored in, British households' disposable income increased from 100 to 208.8 between 1980 and 2008. In other words, people can afford to buy more than twice as much as they could in 1980.

In the same period the affordability of alcohol - thanks to above-inflation tax rises - has only risen from 100 to 175. To imply that alcohol is actually "cheaper" is disingenuous in the extreme.

In fact, as the Office of National Statistics concludes, it is plain wrong:

Between 1980 and 2008, the price of alcohol increased by 283.3%. After considering inflation (at 21.3%), alcohol prices increased by 19.3% over the period.

In real terms, as well as in monetary terms, alcohol is more expensive that it was 20 years ago.

No. 3 - There is a worsening epidemic of underage drinking

Here's The Telegraph again:

Teenage drinking epidemic 'causing misery'

Britain needs to wake up to the epidemic of binge-drinking among teenagers and the misery it is causing thousands of families, one of the country's most senior policemen has warned.

He criticised the drinks industry for targeting the young and exporting its "negative costs on to the streets, hospitals and into the criminal justice system".

But only last week the Trading Standards Institute reported:

A survey of 13,000 young people by the Trading Standards Institute found the number of teenagers who drank weekly fell from 50% in 2005 to 38% this year.

Which backs up what they said in 2007:

Fewer teenagers are drinking regularly - partly because it is becoming harder for youngsters to get hold of alcohol, a Trading Standards survey suggests.

And this is supported by figures from the Office of National Statistics (May 2009):

One in five pupils (20%) [11-15 years] had drunk alcohol in the last seven days, a proportion which has declined from 26% in 2001.

Furthermore:

The proportion of pupils who have never drunk alcohol has risen since 2003, from 39% to 46% in 2007.

Underage drinking - at whatever level - is clearly an issue for parents and the police, and yet, Trading Standards exhibited the same attitude of buck-passing as the copper above:

Trading Standards North West, which carried out the poll, said it intended to write to the firms behind these drinks to "seek clarification of the plans for action to reduce their appeal to young people".

That's right. It's "the firms". Not the police, not the parents, not the shopkeepers and not - heaven forfend - Trading Standards. It's down to the manufacturers to stop people buying their products illegally.

No. 4 - Alcohol-related hospital admissions have risen by 69%

Responsible journalists usually follow this little nugget of information with an important proviso:

The number of people admitted to hospital in England with alcohol-related problems has risen by 69 per cent in five years, to 863,000 in 2007-08, although changes to data collection — which now include secondary diagnoses, such as alcohol-related injuries — have contributed to the surge in cases.

These "changes to data collection" do more than merely "contribute" to the "surge in cases" -they are the overwhelming explanation. The redefinition is sweeping and appears to include anybody who turns up in hospital with a trace of alcohol in their blood, as the ONS explains:

“These figures use a new methodology reflecting a substantial change in the way the impact of alcohol on hospital admissions is calculated. The new calculation includes a proportion of the admissions for reasons that are not always related to alcohol, but can be in some instances (such as accidental injury).”

This covers a multitude of sins. As a helpful commentator recently pointed out, alcohol can be linked to virtually any disease, usually very tenuously. Sure enough, the largest proportion of "alcohol-related" admissions involve people with geriatric diseases:

Overall, the number of alcohol-related admissions increased with age in 2007/08, rising from 49,300 admissions among 16 to 24 year olds to 195,300 admissions of people aged 75 and over.

Only a quarter of the 863,000 admissions are directly attributable to alcohol. Not that any of this was deemed worthy of mention by, for example, The Daily Mail:

Alcohol-related admissions to hospitals in England have soared by more than 50 per cent over the last five years, latest figures revealed last night.

Startling data from the Department of Health showed there were 863,257 drink-related admissions in 2007-08, up sharply from 569,418 in 2003-04 - the year Labour's reforms ushered in round-the-clock drinking.

No. 5 - Lager is cheaper than water

This doozy is a favourite of pretend charity Alcohol Concern and has been repeated many times, particularly by the The Daily Mail:

Drunk for £1: Anger as leading supermarkets sell lager for 22p a can

Supermarkets are selling beer at a cheaper price than water, fuelling concern over their role in Britain's binge-drinking crisis.

Despite repeated public health warnings, Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda now offer lager at just 22p a can - less per litre than their own brand-mineral water and cola, and cheap enough to allow someone to get drunk for just £1.

Let's ignore for a moment the obvious point that someone wanting to buy water is hardly likely to buy lager on an impulse instead. Let's even ignore the fact that water comes out of the tap for 0.02p per glass.

Instead, let's look at Tesco's own brand lager. Here it is.

It costs 91p for a 4-pack, or 5.2p per 100ml.

And here's Tesco's own brand mineral water.

It costs 13p, or 0.7p per 100ml.

So please can we put this one to bed now?

Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted something about the own-brand lager - it is piss-weak (2% ABV). Frankly, you might as well drink the water. 4 cans of this stuff equates to about a can and a half of Stella. Hardly enough to get "drunk for £1", although that didn't stop the Mail from printing a hilarious account of someone pretending to do just that.

Away from media hysteria and the medical lobby's hyperbole, the facts are plain: we are drinking less than we did 100 years ago, more than we did 50 years ago and less than we did 5 years ago. We are middle-weights in the European drinking league and the fact that we have a lot of knob-heads causing problems in our towns and cities at the weekend is because there a lot of knob-heads in the UK. The reasons for that is a whole other story, but it has nothing to do with advertising, happy hours or the price of lager.

It is doubtful that even the British Medical Association really believes that charging 50p a unit or banning Guiness adverts will make the slightest difference to rates of consumption, but that is not really the objective. The objective is to officially identify drinking as 'bad' in the same way that smoking is 'bad'. From that starting point, all else follows.

Source: The Devils Kitchen