Climate Science Infallibility Syndrome

January 29th, 2009

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

When fighting political battles through science, scientists are at a distinct disadvantage. Unlike politicians and political advocates who can cherry pick and even change their arguments and justifications as they see fit (since that is what they are expected to), scientists’ claim to authority rests on the assertion that they have access to the truth. So they often enter political arenas explaining that their views are more true than their opponents, and thus on this basis their political agenda deserves to win out. The more strident the scientists appear in political debates the more compelling their grasp of truth appears to be. By contrast, changing one’s views or even acknowledging uncertainty, even if fundamental to how science progresses, is not an asset for scientists in the political arena.

But science can be fickle. The notion of what is true evolves in science, as new studies come in and new data, theories, and techniques are developed and advanced. Further, science rarely speaks with one voice, which also is quite normal and fundamental to how science actually works. The very process of science with all of its messiness and shades of gray does not lend it well to political battles, where issues are typically defined in black and white terms.

In the latest installment of the climate wars, a tempest in a teapot has blown up over a recent paper in Nature, which illustrates the perils of playing politics through science. In this case the political battle is over climate change and between the skeptics and their self-appointed enemies. The skeptics have in the past seized upon normal uncertainties and contradictory results in climate science to advance a political agenda. In response, their self-appointed enemies have asserted a sort of infallibility, claiming that such contradictions in the science have never actually existed. As might be expected in political battle, according to their self-appointed enemies, the skeptics have always been wrong about the science (politics) and their self-appointed enemies have always been right about the science (politics). The reason for this view is that any admission of uncertainties or contradictions in the science of climate change by the self-appointed enemies of the skeptics might give some aid and comfort to those nefarious skeptics with evil political agendas.

This long, boring, and detailed post tells the story of how the scientists at Real Climate over-reached in this political skirmish on the issue of cooling and then warming in Antarctica. But as is often said, it was not the overreach that was the problem as a mild corrective would have rendered it but a footnote. Instead it was the overreaction to the overreach that has damaged their credibility. Still as I write this, the battle continues to escalate. Let this story be a lesson in the perils of climate science infallibility syndrome.

The story begins with Steig et al. 2009, a paper just recently published that claims that Antarctica has warmed since 1957. Both Steig and co-author Drew Shindell have said in media interview that this warming is consistent with what one would expect from climate model projections. The paper has generated some controversy because it appears to contradict earlier claims by climate scientists that the cooling of Antarctica was consistent with what climate models have predicted. The controversy has been flamed by the fact that it appears that the same group of scientists – the authors of the blog Real Climate — are making the apparent contradictory claims at different points in time, as a matter of expedient intellectual gymnastics in the ongoing political war against the skeptics. This post explains the source of the confusion.

Let’s start at the beginning, or close enough. In 2002 Peter Doran, of the University of Illinois, and colleagues published a paper in Nature which suggested, according to Doran that “most of the [Antarctic] continent is cooling.” At the time, skeptics seized upon the results in cherry-pick fashion to suggest that a cooling Antarctica contradicted the theory of global warming due to greenhouse gases, a view that Doran certainly did not hold.

Flash forward to 2004, when Real Climate’s Gavin Schmidt and Eric Steig published a thoughtful and nuanced post on Real Climate explaining that what was going on in Antarctica was ambiguous and uncertain, citing the Doran article:

Long term temperature data from the Southern Hemisphere are hard to find, and by the time you get to the Antarctic continent, the data are extremely sparse. Nonetheless, some patterns do emerge from the limited data available. The Antarctic Peninsula, site of the now-defunct Larsen-B ice shelf, has warmed substantially. On the other hand, the few stations on the continent and in the interior appear to have cooled slightly (Doran et al, 2002; GISTEMP). At first glance this seems to contradict the idea of “global” warming, but one needs to be careful before jumping to this conclusion.

A rise in the global mean temperature does not imply universal warming. Dynamical effects (changes in the winds and ocean circulation) can have just as large an impact, locally as the radiative forcing from greenhouse gases. The temperature change in any particular region will in fact be a combination of radiation-related changes (through greenhouse gases, aerosols, ozone and the like) and dynamical effects. Since the winds tend to only move heat from one place to another, their impact will tend to cancel out in the global mean.

It is important to recognize that the widely-cited “Antarctic cooling” appears, from the limited data available, to be restricted only to the last two decades, and that averaged over the last 40 years, there has been a slight warming (e.g. Bertler et al. 2004. At present, it is not possible to say what the long term change over the entire last century or more has been. The lesson here is that changes observed over very short time intervals do not provide a reliable picture of how the climate is changing.

The issue apparently was still bothering Doran in April, 2006 when he had an op-ed in the New York Times bemoaning the fact that the “cooling Antarctica disproves global warming” argument was still being circulated, with his work often misrepresented at the center of the argument:

My research colleagues and I found that from 1986 to 2000, one small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had actually cooled. Our report also analyzed temperatures for the mainland in such a way as to remove the influence of the peninsula warming and found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent had cooled than had warmed. Our summary statement pointed out how the cooling trend posed challenges to models of Antarctic climate and ecosystem change.

Doran also noted, correctly in my view, that science does not always speak with one voice suggesting that representations of science would be wise to acknowledge uncertainties:

Another group of researchers who took a different approach found no clear cooling trend in Antarctica. We still stand by our results for the period we analyzed, but unbiased reporting would acknowledge differences of scientific opinion.

This last point is a lesson often ignored in political battles involving science. Upon publication of the op-ed Real Climate posted an approving comment, again emphasizing uncertainties and complexities:

As we discussed a while back (Antarctic cooling, global warming?), there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in Antarctica: the complexities of different forcings (ozone in particular), the importance of dynamical as well as radiative processes, and the difficulties of dealing with very inhomogeneous and insufficiently long data series. But like so many results in this field, it has become a politicized ‘talking point’, shorn of its context, that is mis-quoted and mis-used by many who should (and often do) know better.

Now forward to January, 2008, when Real Climate adopted a far less nuanced stance on the subject in a posting authored by Spencer Weart, which begins as follows:

Despite the recent announcement that the discharge from some Antarctic glaciers is accelerating, we often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder, and indeed the ice pack in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has actually been getting bigger. Doesn’t this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict… and have predicted for the past quarter century.

Now this is a rather strangely worded passage. Weart begins by observing that:

we often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder

This obviously could be a reference to the Doran et al. study and the public discussion and misrepresentation of it. Weart invokes Antarctica “getting colder.” But then Weart changes his tense:

Doesn’t this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict… and have predicted for the past quarter century.

Instead of Antarctica getting “colder” he now says that Antarctica is “cold.” A normal reading of this in English would suggest that he means the same thing with both words — because when he says “doesn’t this” in the previous sentence — “this” is obviously refering to “getting colder”. Had he in fact meant something different by changing tense to “cold” from “colder” then he would be misleading his readers by suggesting one thing but saying another. I assume that Weart was not trying to deceive.

Weart later repeats the strange use of tense when he says that observations are consistent with models:

In the twenty years since, computer models have improved by orders of magnitude, but they continue to show that Antarctica cannot be expected to warm up very significantly until long after the rest of the world’s climate is radically changed.

Bottom line: A cold Antarctica and Southern Ocean do not contradict our models of global warming. For a long time the models have predicted just that.

The strange construction did not go unnoticed by Real Climate readers. One commentor, Pete. asked for a clarification:

I simply don’t understand the title of this blog “We Knew That”. I just looked at the IPCC AR4WG1 Summary. On Page 15 it shows Projections of Surface Temperatures. 2020-2029 show the Antarctic Warming by up to +1.0C. 2090-2099 shows a Warming in the Antarctic of around +3.0C to +4.0C.

Nowhere in this latest projection map from the IPCC, which I assume are from model predictions, is any cooling shown?

At the time I even registered some confusion in a comment on that thread:

There are a vast number of behaviors of the climate system that are consistent with climate model predictions, along the lines of your conclusion: “A cold Antarctica and Southern Ocean do not contradict our models of global warming.”

I have asked many times and never received an answer here: What behavior of the climate system would contradict models of global warming? Specifically what behavior of what variables over what time scales? This should be a simple question to answer.

Thanks!

Real Climate chose not to respond to either my or Pete’s requests for clarification on this point.

Now to the Steig et al. article. In December, 2008 Nature Feedback mentioned the Steig et al analysis as presented at the AGU in a blog posting, writing:

New research presented at the AGU today suggests that the entire Antarctic continent may have warmed significantly over the past 50 years. The study, led by Eric Steig of the University of Washington in Seattle and soon to be published in Nature, calls into question existing lines of evidence that show the region has mostly cooled over the past half-century.

This teaser evoked a response on Weart’s Real Climate thread from a confused but attentive reader, Mark Smith, who copied the Nature link with a couple of question marks. Eric Steig responded to Mark as follows:

[Response: That paper is in press, and I’m not allowed to comment on it per agreement with Nature until it is published. The claim that our result “calls into question existing lines of evidence that show the region has mostly cooled over the past half-century” is wrong though. Wait until the paper is published and I’ll say more.–eric]

Subsequently, Nature Climate Feedback added a clarification, presumably in response to Steig’s statement that the article was wrong:

New research presented at the AGU today suggests that the entire Antarctic continent may have warmed significantly over the past 50 years. The study, led by Eric Steig of the University of Washington in Seattle and soon to be published in Nature, calls into question existing lines of evidence that show the region has mostly cooled over the past half-century. [Update: To be more specific here, incomplete records previously suggested that the interior was cooling].

Here is where the climate scientists first show some signs of mixed messaging.

If “existing lines of evidence” suggest that the region “has mostly cooled over the past half century” and those lines of evidence are “consistent with” model predictions, then a new study that “called into question” those “existing lines of evidence” would have to either be inconsistent with the model predictions or make somewhat a mockery of the notion of consistency with models.

Let’s take a moment for fact checking.

First, is it the case that “existing lines of evidence that show the region has mostly cooled over the past half-century”?

Answer: While it may not have been a view universally held (and Nature does not say that it was), the Doran et al. study certainly presents this viewpoint. As Doran said, which is cited above, “most of the [Antarctic] continent is cooling”.

Second, is it the case that such continent-wide cooling was represented as being “consistent with” what the climate models had predicted?

Answer: Yes and no. On the one hand, Doran stated (as cited above) that the cooling presented challenges to model predictions, “Our summary statement pointed out how the cooling trend posed challenges to models of Antarctic climate and ecosystem change.” On the other hand, Weart’s posting at Real Climate indicated no contradiction between models and observations of cooling, writing (as cited above):

we often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder, and indeed the ice pack in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has actually been getting bigger. Doesn’t this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict

It seems obvious that a cooling Antarctica can’t both pose challenges for models and also be exactly what they predict. Here at Prometheus Steig initially admitted not liking Weart’s formulation:

I have to admit I cringed when guest writer Weart wrote the article on RealClimate, which I didn’t get a chance to read first. I’m not sure what models he was talking about that said Antarctica should be cooling.

Steig later sought to clarify this admission:

All. I should clarify my point. When I said that “I cringed” I don’t mean that I thought there was anything wrong with Spencer’s article. I meant that I thought he wasn’t clear enough that he was referring to the models show a slower warming in Antarctica than e.g. in the Arctic, which was and remains the correct assessment of what the model show.

So Steig places himself in the uncomfortable position of viewing Weart’s article as “not clear enough” in saying what Steig thought should have been said and yet at the same time finding not “anything wrong” with it. Real Climate never attempted to address the basic lack of clarity or apparent contradictions in the Weart article until the Steig et al. paper came out, at which point they decided to take the stance that they had been repeating a single, consistent message all along, and this message was in fact consistent will all previous research.

Third, was Eric Steig correct when he claimed at Nature Climate Feedback that “The claim that our result “calls into question existing lines of evidence that show the region has mostly cooled over the past half-century” is wrong”?

Answer: Oddly, Eric appears to be misrepresenting his own paper here. Here is what Steig et al. write in Nature:

Here we show that significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported.

They further write:

Our reconstructions show more significant temperature change in Antarctica (Fig. 2), and a different pattern for that change than reported in some previous reconstructions 5, 7.

Reference 5, not surprisingly, is Doran et al. 2002 from Nature, cited above. It is not clear to me how Nature’s reporting that Steig et al. calls into question earlier lines of evidence when Steig et al. themselves characterize their results as being a “different pattern” and an areal extent “different” than previous studies, citing Doran specifically.

In a post on the study at Real Climate (with a not so subtle political allusion in its title) Steig has this puzzling statement:

Our results do not contradict earlier studies suggesting that some regions of Antarctica have cooled. Why? Because those studies were based on shorter records (20-30 years, not 50 years) and because the cooling is limited to the East Antarctic.

This statement is puzzling in several respects. Forst, Doran et al. covers a period of 1966-2000, which is 35 years, which is not within the range of 20-30 cited by Steig. But the further point is, so what? If you look at Steig et al.s own data, it seems clear (see the top panel below, for East Antarctica, which is actually most of the continent) that Steig et al. indicate a warming from 1966 to 2000 anyway. So the length of record appears to be irrelevant. Antarctica cannot be both cooling and warming over this period. To remove all ambiguity, if Eric or colleagues with to present the subset of their data for 1966 to 2000, we’ll post it up here.

More importantly, Steig represents their results “do not contradict earlier studies” and yet in the text of his paper he writes that his results “show more significant temperature change” and “a different pattern for that change” than earlier studies. This suggests to me a contradiction. Bt I suppose there is plenty of room for semantics about what it means to “contradict” and to be “different than.” But the plain English usage suggests that the new study is different than earlier studies (and hence worth publishing as a cover story in Nature). And, I should point out that such contradictions are perfectly normal in science. They are inconvenient in politics., when political arguments have been framed in terms of scientific certainties

Bottom Line

This is not a high point for Real Climate, which advertises itself as giving the straight scoop on climate science. The reality is that the straight scoop is sometimes confusing and contradictory, and views can change over time. But in the battle with the skeptics – which is not a scientific but a political battle – there can be no room to give even an inch. Climate science, it seems, must be infallible. This infallibility syndrome leads to over reach and then, ultimately, a loss of credibility.

Here are the facts of this case:

1. Research in the early parts of this decade suggested that most of Antarctica was cooling, most notably, Doran et al. in Nature.

2. This was indeed puzzling for some scientists, especially in relation to what models predicted.

3. In early 2008, Real Climate went out on a limb with a poorly worded (at best) or misleading (at worst) post, explaining (or, if you’d like, implying) that cooling was consistent with what scientists have be expecting all along.

4. With Steig et al., new research suggests that earlier views of cooling and the patterns of temperature over Antarctica are to be interpreted, if not replaced, with new findings that are different than those that existed before – a process quite normal to science.

5. To preserve the appearance of infallibility a vocal group of climate scientists is now on the warpath, probably doing far more damage to their credibility than had they simply said, “Yeah, the new research is a bit different, and we probably overstepped in our commentary once.”

As I said at the outset, the scientists are playing politics on an uneven playing field.

23 Responses to “Climate Science Infallibility Syndrome”

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  1. lucia Says:

    When I read the two most recent RC posts on this subject, I did a “view source” and searched for the link to Weart’s poorly worded, misleading guest post at RC. I found no link. So, the strategy appears to be to write extremely lengthy posts and studiously avoid any discussion of Weart’s article.

    To a large extent, it is Weart’s post, and RC’s unwillingness to face up to it’s misleading nature that created this kerfuffle. The guys over at RC need to dig up their notes on how to communicate science to the public. With luck, they will find these rules:

    Rule 1: When faced with a difficult issue, do not respond by posting an article that mis-communicate the science.

    Rule 2: If you violate rule 1, and the post comes back to bite you, recognize it was your own fault you chose to violate rule 1. Promise yourself to remember rule 1.

    In my opinion, Weart’s article is one of several that mis-communicate science using various odd constructions resulting in an “Accurate but not true” article.

    The odd thing for RC is that on the one hand, scientists have a good deal of credibility with the public. Scientists deserve this credibility to the extent that they avoid writing “accurate but not true” articles. On the other hand, if a group of scientists starts to exhibit behaviors typical of politicians, their credibility will begin to approach that of politicians.

    There is probably some social dynamics lawexplaining that idea, and if there isn’t there should be! It needs a name.

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  3. solman Says:

    Roger,

    You appear to accept the content of Steig et al at face value, focusing your criticism entirely on the spin which has been applied to it and previous academic work.

    Given the highly politicized environment and the history of statistical cherry picking by co-author Michael Mann, should the deference that is normally given to work published by Nature be extended to this work?

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  5. C3H Editor Says:

    I’ve been reading here & there about the “debate” but your analysis informs the best. My own conclusion from this recent skirmish is that my gut has been right about RC – I just don’t trust what they say. They may win a battle or two, but they have lost the credibility war in my opinion.

    I was hoping your analysis would clear up one issue on this topic. The temperature data used in this study, is it real (actual) or “constructed” from models? For the layperson (public in general?) it was not clear if these were land-based, balloon, satellite or model produced temperatures that were being debated, in terms of cooling and warming.

    Thanks.

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  7. Sylvain Says:

    I think that what lead to the first statement was to oversell the certainty. Instead of acknowledging the high level of uncertainty in the result of Doran based on the scarcity of the data, RC dig themselves into a hole, by trying to reconcile an inconvenient result to their obvious preconceived conclusion. This lead to an unfounded statement that came back to bite them.

    Maybe it has something to do with that quote from James Hansen, posted by Anthony Watts:

    “The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”

    They sure try really to influence the nature of the data.

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  9. Chip Knappenberger Says:

    Re: 2,

    I definitely take Steig et al. at face value, it is just that the face value isn’t what all the hubbub is about. Aside from some reservations I have about the use of the image for the cover of Nature magazine that relate to the appropriateness of the information at the spatial scale depicted, I think it is a good attempt at furthering our understanding of how the temperature history of a sparsely instrumented region has evolved.

    The problem is not so much with the paper itself, but, as Roger discusses, how the paper was spun to the press by some of the authors. In my opinion, the lightning rod statement was made by Mike Mann to Seth Borenstein in his AP article:

    “Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming,” said study co-author Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. “Now we can say: no, it’s not true … It is not bucking the trend.”

    Mike knows that he is a lightning rod for many fervent skeptics and so his statement aimed directly at them in a widely disseminated AP article was an intentional huge stick in the eye and has resulted in this virtual melee which may or may not (since few minds are changed in this arena anymore) come back to bite them (as Roger suggests).

    Mike (and to some extent Eric) created a strawman, convinced the “contrarians” that it represented their beliefs, and then burned it down.

    What should have happened (and what I tried to consult a lot of people went the conflagration first ignited) was that the “contrarians” should have exposed the strawman as what it was—there were never any claims that Antarctica was cooling during a period than began in the late 1950s, the cooling (or, more appropriately, lack of warming) has taken place during the past 20 to 30 years—a result confirmed by Steig et al.! Instead, what happened was that most “contrarians” decided to attack the methodology and the history of its use (e.g., Manna and the “hockey stick”). This was simply ill-advised and inappropriate. Even Steve McIntyre, who knows more than any “contrarian” about the effectiveness of the procedure wrote at ClimateAudit:

    In fairness, this is a far more sensible application of infilling methods than paleoclimate. Here everything is at least a temperature of some kind. RegEM and PCA have a far better chance of yielding a sensible result in this sort of application than using Graybill bristlecone ring widths.

    Data in Antarctic is sparse. It’s odd that it wouldn’t have warmed up with the rest of the world. Readers shouldn’t drop standards of data rigor merely because they like Antarctic data that seems to go down. It’s quite reasonable to cross-examine the Antarctic data to see if a different interpretation of it is possible.

    So, the contrarians don’t even have the support of their champion in this line of attack.

    To my reading of the literature, the new Steig et al. results don’t depart radically from what is already known while advancing a bit our knowledge of how the large-scale temperature history of Antarctica has evolved over the past 50 years. I doubt they will be the last word, but I also doubt that anything earth shattering will come along. There are no big surprises that should have evoked the current frenzy.

    But, for the time being at least, RealClimate is patting itself on the back and the “contrarians” are licking their wounds.

    You can read more of my thoughts in this topic at http://masterresource.org/?p=511

    -Chip Knappenberger

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  11. D White Says:

    Nice summary of a fairly humorous “kerfuffle”. I think a secondary characteristic of Climate Science Infallibility Syndrome (or CSIS) is that, if a scientist is infallible and believes they have demonstrated that infallibility, anyone who disagrees with them must be not just wrong, but foolish, evil, contrarian, a court jester, etc (ring any bells, Roger?). There is no middle ground when dealing with absolutes; the infallibles have to be dismissive of anyone who doesn’t unfailingly agree. After a while the attitude becomes outright arrogance. The fact that they feel compelled to defend every statement they’ve made does make for some enjoyable contortions, but hurts them in the end.

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  13. solman Says:

    #5: I’m not really asking who did and did not score points with this paper, and the subsequent reaction. Frankly, the very fact that so many people are trying to keep score is a discredit to the current unfortunate state of client science.

    What I am asking is whether or not papers on which the statistical analysis has been performed by Michael Mann can be taken at face value in light of some of his more recent (peer review approved) statistical manipulations (Mann et al 2008 for example).

    If Steve McIntyre says that the mathematics in this paper are more justifiable than the paleoclimate reconstructions, that is hardly a ringing endorsement of Steig et al’s statistical rigor.

    As far as I’m concerned, the very fact that this is being debated is a discredit to the current state of

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  15. Mark Bahner Says:

    Hi Roger,

    You write, “I assume that Weart was not trying to deceive.”

    I think that assumption is contradicted by evidence. If Spencer Weart wasn’t trying to deceive, Spencer Weart (Real Climate) would not have censored (not published) my comments and questions.

    Also, I note that Spencer Weart appeared briefly on Climate Audit (finishing with a taunt) but hasn’t answered my simple question to him there:

    “My question deals with your Real Climate post, where you wrote the following (I have taken the liberty to remove some words, so that my question will be more clear):

    ‘…we often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder, and indeed the ice pack in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has actually been getting bigger. Doesn’t this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict…and have predicted for the past quarter century.’

    “Don’t you think that paragraph conflates ‘getting colder’ (i.e., cooling) with ‘cold’?”

    Since he didn’t address (or even publish) my initial comments and questions, and hasn’t addressed this simple question, it seems to me the evidence is that knows he was conflating “getting colder” (“cooling”) with “cold,” and that the conflation was deliberate.

    I also note that Eric Steig hasn’t ever answered my question to him here at Prometheus, when he claimed there was “nothing to correct” in Spencer Weart’s piece.

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  17. lucia Says:

    solman

    If Steve McIntyre says that the mathematics in this paper are more justifiable than the paleoclimate reconstructions, that is hardly a ringing endorsement of Steig et al’s statistical rigor.

    That’s probably not fair to Steig’s work.

    Steve neither specifically endorses nor eviscerates any reconstruction until he has has a chance to look at the method. Steig’s paper has just come out. Under the circumstances, Steve hasn’t had much time to dig, so he could hardly give specific criticism or support.

    But, if I understand Steve, what he seems to be saying is that, on first glance, he’s not finding anything wrong.

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  19. Paul Biggs Says:

    The arguments on both sides are scientific, but ‘consensus’ is a political tool aimed at ensuring that one side wins by preventing proper scientific method and debate.

    We have good evidence that the West and East Antarctic have divergent climate histories over the past 14 million years – the East Antarctic ice sheet is stable at least in the central region, but the WAIS is unstable:

    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/320/5880/1152

    We have this PR for a 2008 GRL paper, which has a nice graphic showing regional Antarctic cooling:

    http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2008/antarctica.jsp

    “The authors compared recently constructed temperature data sets from Antarctica, based on data from ice cores and ground weather stations, to 20th century simulations from computer models used by scientists to simulate global climate. While the observed Antarctic temperatures rose by about 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 degrees Celsius) over the past century, the climate models simulated increases in Antarctic temperatures during the same period of 1.4 degrees F (0.75 degrees C).”

    Clearly climate models over-estimate Antarctic warming by a factor of almost 4, according to Monaghan et al, but the paper confirms a warming West, and a cooling in the majority of the East Antarctic.

    So why is the Steig et al paper ‘better’ than the Monaghan et al study? I don’t think that it is. The two papers are contradictory to an extent, although they agree on the West Antarctic. They both add to the debate, but the Steig et al paper should not be considered to be definitive. Its significance has been greatly and inevitably hyped by the alarmist media.

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  21. Tamara Says:

    It seems to me that one important issue is being left out of this debate, i.e. why bother publishing this article at all? At best it is a reconstruction that confirms what was already known from existing data (as Chip Knappenberger stated above). Is this really headline news? This significance of this paper is in the spin and the timing, not the substance. We should all be disappointed that science continues to be abused in this matter. Steig may be a victim or a conspirator, in this instance. Innocent until proven guilty.

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  23. Roger Pielke, Jr. Says:

    Please, no ad hom arguments or unsupportable attributions of motive or accusations of fraud.

    This is not the place.

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  25. bverheggen Says:

    Paul,

    The so-called consensus grew in response to the growing body of evidence(see eg this presentation by Oreskes: http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/Presentations/Oreskes%20Presentation%20for%20Web.pdf). As such, the existence of a strong consensus is entirely relevant. Moreover, a consensus of risk amongst experts should not lightly be ignored.

    Bart

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  27. Paul Biggs Says:

    Oh Please! Don’t quote rabid anti-skeptic and ’science historian’ Oreskes at me, who only considers Abstracts with ‘global climate change’ in them. Most climate scientists don’t express a public opinion on man’s role in climate or the significance of the contribution of CO2 to that role. Furthermore, views are unlikely to be black and white – there are shades of grey. I repeat that consensus is a political term, not a scientific one. Careful examination of the 4000 contributors to IPCC AR4 distils down to about 60 people who explicitly support its claims:

    http://mclean.ch/climate/docs/IPCC_numbers.pdf

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  29. Steve McIntyre Says:

    Lots that I agree with in this post and comments.

    Lucia, the following isn’t correct:

    But, if I understand Steve, what he seems to be saying is that, on first glance, he’s not finding anything wrong.

    Not at all. At first glance, I have no opinion and I’m nowhere near having an opinion on this. I like to handle the data a bit before looking at the methods and I’m just starting this process.

    I don’t exclude the possibility that the methods are reasonable. However, the methods appear to be somewhat homemade and this always introduces an element of risk. I suggested to Steig that archive their code but he told me to suck eggs.

    Plus the monthly satellite data as used in the study isn’t available. I requested this from Steig; at first, he said that he would provide it; then he told me to suck eggs. I will, of course, pursue alternative avenues – the journal, FOI – to obtain the data. It’s a nuisance, but will provide some lively blog posts.

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  31. Hans Erren Says:

    It appears that the most essential part of the the publication is not available: data and method.
    One might as well claim that the moon is made of green cheese.

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  33. Steve McIntyre Says:

    Steig’s reaction at Climate Audit showed another dark side of the “infallibility syndrome” – accusing anyone who dates to query the methods as making “implied insinuation of fraud”. As Chip observed above, my opening observations on this study were very evenhanded, mostly putting readers on notice that they couldn’t reject the results on simplistic terms. Chip quoted some of my comments above:

    In fairness, this is a far more sensible application of infilling methods than paleoclimate. Here everything is at least a temperature of some kind. RegEM and PCA have a far better chance of yielding a sensible result in this sort of application than using Graybill bristlecone ring widths.

    Data in Antarctic is sparse. It’s odd that it wouldn’t have warmed up with the rest of the world. Readers shouldn’t drop standards of data rigor merely because they like Antarctic data that seems to go down. It’s quite reasonable to cross-examine the Antarctic data to see if a different interpretation of it is possible.

    Despite this and other evenhanded statements, Steig intervened at CA as follows: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4945#comment-322363

    I will not further respond to queries from Steve McIntyre by email, nor via this blog. I have always given you the benefit of the doubt, but your thinly-veiled accusations of scientific fraud (by association!) have crossed an important ethical line. Shame on you.

    I had made no such “thinly-veiled accusations” and asked for information on where I had allegedly made such claims. No answer. The matter perplexed me. Perhaps Roger’s idea of “infallibility complex” is the explanation. If they are “infallible”, then an error can only occur through fraud. Thus the mere hint of the possibility of error is a “thinly-veiled accusations of scientific fraud”.

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  35. Mark Bahner Says:

    “As such, the existence of a strong consensus is entirely relevant. Moreover, a consensus of risk amongst experts should not lightly be ignored.”

    The IPCC has published no consensus of the overall risk related to climate change.

    As was pointed out by Kevin Trenberth on the Nature blog (“Climate Feedback”) the IPCC has never made any predictions of the amount of future climate change:

    http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2007/06/predictions_of_climate.html

    If the IPCC hasn’t ever made any predictions about the amount of future climate change, they can’t have reached any consensus on the amount of risk, since the amount of risk related to climate change is obviously dependent on the amount of climate change.

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  37. Mark Bahner Says:

    Steve McIntyre writes, “Perhaps Roger’s idea of ‘infallibility complex’ is the explanation. If they are “infallible”, then an error can only occur through fraud. Thus the mere hint of the possibility of error is a ‘thinly-veiled accusations of scientific fraud’.”

    I thought Eric Steig’s whole response to Roger’s review and questions was bizarre.

    To start with, Steig wrote, “I have to admit I cringed when guest writer Weart wrote the article on RealClimate, which I didn’t get a chance to read first. I’m not sure what models he was talking about that said Antarctica should be cooling.”

    But then he changed his position, and insisted, “All. I should clarify my point. When I said that ‘I cringed’ I don’t mean that I thought there was anything wrong with Spencer’s article. I meant that I thought he wasn’t clear enough that he was referring to the models show a slower warming in Antarctica than e.g. in the Arctic, which was and remains the correct assessment of what the model show.”

    So he initially seemed to be pretty clearly stating that his interpretation of Spencer Weart’s post was that Weart was saying that there were at least some models that were predicting that “Antartica should be cooling.”

    But then he dropped even the idea that Weart’s post implied that at least some models said that Antarctica should be cooling.

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  39. Marginalized Action Dinosaur » The perils of climate science infallibility syndrome. Says:

    [...] http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/climate-science-infallibility-syndrome-4915#more-4915 [...]

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  41. solman Says:

    My original comment in this thread was a genuine one. I wanted to know whether or not the review process at Nature is sufficiently stringent that those papers which are published by Nature can be relied upon – even if one of the authors (Michael Mann in this case) appears to have a history of questionable conduct.

    I did NOT expect serious data integrity issues to be uncovered by the merry band at Climate Audit after just a few days of analysis.

    Steig et al is essentially a statistical paper, applying new methodology to existing data in an attempt to provide a more coherent picture of recent antarctic climate change.

    When such a paper is published in Nature, don’t I have the right to expect that the authors have a sufficient understanding of the underlying data sources that any obvious errors have been fixed or corrected?

    How can climate science move forward if even papers in the most prestigious journals must be subjected to additional external analysis before they can be relied upon.

    Of course errors are going to occur in the course of science. I am not complaining about a single error. My complaint is that there has been a long series of errors, all of which seem to be in the same direction (towards promoting the IPCC consensus), and that there has been no corrective action by the scientific community.

    To answer my original question: After this latest incident I think it is entirely unreasonable to take climate science papers published in Nature at face value without first subjecting them to additional analysis. That is a very sad state of affairs indeed.

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  43. The Pope Should Learn A Thing Or Two From Certain Climate Scientists « The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE Says:

    [...] Who could have ever imagined, the white-robed guy in Rome somehow admitting fallibility, whilst there still is nothing, nothing, nothing at all that will ever under any circumstance contradict contemporary consensual [...]

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  45. Man Based Global Warming.... - Page 89 - PriusChat Forums Says:

    [...] One of the more reasonable voices I’ve encountered exploring this area is that of Roger Pielke: Prometheus Blog Archive Climate Science Infallibility Syndrome And he basically accepts AGW, so his views shouldn’t be discredited on the basis of being a [...]