U.K. Institute Of Physics Sort Of Retracts

Of all the nutty submissions placed before the U.K. Science and Technology Committee, this stem-winder from the U.K. Institute of Physics--which seemed to suggest, among other things, that there had been wrong-doing not only among the UEA's Climate Research Unit (CRU, headed by Phil Jones), but among the international scientists that swapped emails with the CRU team--was the most disturbing. It sounded like a prank, or perhaps the work of a small group within the IoP that had hijacked the organization to send out denialist literature under its name (remember the infiltration of the APS?).

At the moment, option number two looks most likely, for yesterday the IoP felt the need to issue a reinterpretation of their original statement:

The Institute's statement, which has been published both on the Institute's website and the Committee's, has been interpreted by some individuals to imply that it does not support the scientific evidence that the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is contributing to global warming.

That is not the case. The Institute's position on climate change is clear: the basic science is well enough understood to be sure that our climate is changing – and that we need to take action now to mitigate that change.

The U.K. Gaurdian has written about this sudden turnabout; the best bit from their story:

The institute statement says its submission was approved by its science board, a formal committee of experts that oversees its policy work.

The Guardian has been unable to find a member of the board that supports the submission. Two of the scientists listed as members said they had declined to comment on a draft submission prepared by the institute, because they were not climate experts and had not read the UEA emails. Others would not comment or did not respond to enquiries.

An institute spokesperson said the submission was "strongly supported" by three members of the board. "All members were invited to comment. Only a few did, all concerned approved [the submission] unanimously."

So, nobody can find the people that wrote the submission??? The bottom line--as reported by Stoat (that's Connelley)--seems to be that a small "Energy sub-group" within the IoP science group managed to slip this stuff passed the larger IoP leadership. You can read about their "sceptical" credentials at Stoat's place.

And it seems the reinterpretation has been inspired by a backlash from within the IoP membership that is, even now, being conveyed to IoP poobahs behind the scenes. But I would agree that it isn't really enough. The story of the IoP condemnation of CRU has gone international; the organization has been made fools of, and their new statement amounts to a bit of "we didn't really mean what we clearly said" arse covering. They should issue a complete and thorough retraction of their first statement, and an apology to everyone involved.

PS. One of the IOP's mysterious Energy sub-group members appears to be Peter Gill. His sceptics creds include supporting Nigel Lawson's efforts to address the IOP. Also, Feroze Duggan appears to have been a member of the group until at least 2008. Also, Dr John Roberts of University of Sheffield was recently a part of the sub-group, though perhaps not currently.

How The APS Was Infiltrated By Deniers!

John Mashey is so good on AGW issues that I don't know why he doesn't have a blog of his own. In any case, his hypothesis re how known nutjob Lord Monckton managed to embarrass the American Physical Society is worth giving a higher profile. I've taken material from my own comments section, and copped stuff from Deltoid, and added a few clarifying bits of my own:

In 2004, University of Hartford (UHA) (CT) Physics Professor Larry Gould likely heard talks that included Cristy & Lindzen, and became convinced that AGW was a hoax, etc. in 2004, he was the Chair of the APS' New England Section (NES).

Here is Larry Gould's website.

Lately, he's been co-editor of the APS-NES newsletter, and has been writing very strong anti-AGW editorial material, promoting Monckton, "Great Global Warming Swindle", Steve Milloy, etc.

[He] has been studying climate science for about 4 years, although as far as I can tell, has never published any such research in peer-reviewed journals. It looks like that interest dates from a APS-NES meeting in 2004 with Christy, Lindzen, Rock, and Weart.

[He] wrote an editorial in Fall APS-NES Newsletter, which could serve as a useful catalog of denialist writings, although references to peer-reviewed material are ... scarce...

About that same time, [he] appears to have signed on for the OISM Petition Project. At least, "Laurence Gould PhD" appears in the Connecticut list.

Then, this article pops up in APS' FPS, with Monckton claiming it was requested. One wonders who got the FPS to request it, since FPS is normally commentary written by physicists for the FPS membership. [I'd wondered from the beginning why on Earth they would seek Monckton to write an article. Right now, I doubt that they did: I'd speculate that Gould proposed it to them. Then, SPPI's Robert Ferguson was poised to blast it to the Web, including a logn quote from Gould.]

The SPPI is The Science and Public Policy Institute, a well-known and venerable Denialist website. Robert Ferguson is its director. On July 15th--the day after Monckton's paper appears on the APS site*--the following appears on the SPPI site:

'Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chair (2004) of the New England Section of the American Physical Society (APS), has been studying climate-change science for four years. He said:

"I was impressed by an hour-long academic lecture which criticized claims about 'global warming' and explained the implications of the physics of radiative transfer for climate change. I was pleased that the audience responded to the informative presentation with a prolonged, standing ovation. That is what happened when, at the invitation of the President of our University, Christopher Monckton lectured here in Hartford this spring. I am delighted that Physics and Society, an APS journal, has published his detailed paper refining and reporting his important and revealing results.'

John writes:

From past watchings of SPPI, Ferguson tends to be "ready-to-go", so one would expect that Gould had seen this material before...

Finally, the Executive Committee of the APS Forum on Physics and Society appears to have issued a further statement repudiating the judgement of Jeffrey Marque, the editor who approved Monckton's paper:

'The executive committee of the Forum on Physics and Society, however, believes that the statement in the July 2008 edition of our newsletter, Physics and Society, that "There is considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution," exaggerates the number of scientists who disagree with the IPCC conclusion on anthropogenic CO2 and global warming. That statement does not represent the views of APS or the Executive Committee of the Forum on Physics and Society. The FPS Executive Committee strongly endorses the position of the APS Council that "Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate.'

...although the link back to the APS page where this quote originated doesn't work.

A neat piece of trickery, all told, which spawned a zillion stories about America's physicists changing their mind on Global Warming.

* A link to this paper was provided on the morning of July 14th on the Climatesceptics mailing list by Alister McFarquhar.

The Institute Of Physics Regrets...

The IOP wriggles a bit more, clarifying their original clarification. I've juxtaposed some of the March 2 vs. March 5 passages:

March 2:

The Institute’s statement, which has been published both on the Institute’s website and the Committee’s, has been interpreted by some individuals to imply that it does not support the scientific evidence that the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is contributing to global warming.

March 5:

We regret that our submission has been seized upon by some individuals to imply that IOP does not support the scientific evidence that the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is contributing to global warming.

March 2:

That is not the case. The Institute’s position on climate change is clear: the basic science is well enough understood to be sure that our climate is changing – and that we need to take action now to mitigate that change. More information about IOP’s views can be found on its website here.

March 5:

IOP’s position on global warming is clear: the basic science is well established and there is no doubt that climate change is happening and that we should be taking action to address it now.

This passage from March 2:

It reflected our belief that the open exchange of data, procedures and materials is fundamental to the scientific process. From the information already in the public domain it appears that these principles have been put at risk in the present case, and that this has undermined the trust that is placed in the scientific process.

...is replaced by something milder on March 5th:

The evidence to the Committee was focused however on the need to maintain the integrity, openness and unbiased nature of the scientific process. The key points it makes are ones to which we are deeply committed – ie that science should be communicated openly and reviewed in an unbiased way. However much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information, we believe the case for openness remains just as strong.

And a bit on procedures missing from the March 2 edition:

The preparation of the evidence followed the process we always use for agreeing documents of this kind. We asked the Energy Sub-Group of our Science Board to prepare the evidence, based on their analysis of the material which is already in the public domain. The evidence was then circulated around Science Board, which is a formal committee of the Institute with delegated authority from its trustees to oversee its policy work, and approved.

The actual submission, mind you (and I haven't gone through it thoroughly), does NOT seem to have changed. They are still calling for a broader inquiry to cover those researchers not associated with CRU but who might have conspired with them.

Latest IOP Retreat

It all began with a stem-winder of a statement from the U.K. Institute of Physics to the U.K. Science and Technology Committee in which they, among other things, suggested that the non-U.K. scientists who had been drawn into the CRUC Hack controversy should also be investigated by the Committee--in other words, that the committee should start an international witch hunt rather than just a national one. Well, this got the IOP into no end of trouble, especially after the role of climate changer denier Peter Gill in crafting the original statement came to light. On their main web-Page, the IOP issued not one but two "clarifications" of their first statement, in which they jettison some of the wilder charges in that statement while claiming to stand behind the basic principles contained within it. Until yesterday. Yesterday, moving the issue to the IOP blog, a third clarification was issued. This one doesn't add much to the other two, but does touch on process issues. In other words, how did the original piece of crap manage to sale through the process to see the light of day in the first place. Best bits:

In its statement, the Institute says that the evidence submitted to parliament followed “the process we always use for agreeing documents of this kind", noting that it submits 40 to 50 evidence statements to parliamentary inquiries per year. "We asked the energy sub-group of our Science Board to prepare the evidence, based on its analysis of material that is in the public domain following the hacking of the CRU e-mails last year," says the IOP. "The draft was circulated to the Science Board, which is a formal committee of the Institute with delegated authority from its trustees to oversee its policy work, and approved. However, we are already reviewing our consultation process for preparing policy submissions, and the comments we have received on this submission reinforce the need to make sure our procedures are as robust as possible."

The Institute also says it "strongly rebuts" accusations of “being overly influenced by one ‘climate-change sceptic’ on the energy sub-group, and then of a lack of openness about the authorship of our evidence". It adds that "The individual in question had no significant influence on the preparation of the evidence. Responsibility for the evidence rests with our Science Board, whose members’ names are openly available on our website."

Now the weird thing is: I can't find the new "statement" quoted here on the main website, although its early and I may just be missing something. But it seems as though the IOP is trying to shuffle the whole controversy off the main-stage.

IOP Statement Authors Still Anonymous

So where we left this story was: the U.K.'s Institute of Physics wrote an extremely critical statement in regards to the University of East Anglia's handling of FOI requests from climate change sceptics, and submitted it to the U.K. Science and Technology Committee, who have been investigating various issues behind the CRU hack. Later they issued a "clarification" of the statement designed to make it sound a little less nutty. But when asked who the actual authors of the original piece were, the IOP clammed up, other than to say they were part of the IOP's energy sub-group...whose members they refused to identify!

As W. Connolley wrote, what had mostly likely happened was that the energy sub-group was "hijacked" by deniers, who then composed their statement and managed to steer it through the larger administrative structure of the IOP and land it on the desk of the committee.

And then it was was discovered by me (I think), here on this blog, that the identity of one of the sub-group's members was one Peter Gill, who had more than a sniff of denialism about him.

Cue the U.K. Gaurdian's David Adam: yeah, it turns out Peter Gill is a Warmocaust Collusionist and, yeah, he was "involved" in the preparation of the IOP document, but the IOP won't get more specific, and still won't say who the other sub-group members are. Their reasoning is, to put it mildly, bizarre:

The institute supplied a statement from an anonymous member of its science board, which said: "The institute should feel relaxed about the process by which it generated what is, anyway, a statement of the obvious." It added: "The points [the submission] makes are ones which we continue to support, that science should be practised openly and in an unbiased way. However much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information, we believe the case for openness remains just as strong."

...which is to say that the the IOP feels comfortable issuing anonymous demands for scientific openness.

More coverage here.

IOP Sees Errors Of Its Ways

If you remember, one of the sub-stories to come out the frenzy around the CRU email hack was a controversy over the Institute Of Physics' statement to the U.K. Science and Technology Committee in which they, among other things, suggested that the non-U.K. scientists who had been drawn into the CRU Hack controversy should be investigated by the Committee--that the committee should start an international witch hunt.

In other words, the IOP statement came across as a typical piece of denialist crap.

After the statement was issued, push-back ensued from enraged IOP members and the media, and the institute began to "clarify" its way out of the pickle it found itself in. What eventually became clear was that the Institute's statement had been hi-jacked by members of its energy sub-committee, who managed to steer their document through the IOP's larger administrative structure and land it (the statement) on the desk of U.K. Science and Technology. Now Peter Gill, one of the the members of the energy sub-committee, and a known denialist, has spoken out, and while I don't take his account at face-value, this part--a letter from the IOP to members of the Energy sub-committee--seems straight-forward enough:

Following the meeting of the Science Board on 17 June 2010, it is with regret that I announce that the Energy Sub-group is to be disbanded, immediately. This, as you can imagine, is a direct consequence of the Climategate affair.

So, some retroactive justice, at least.

For another account of an organization (the American Physical Society) infiltrated and made to look silly by deniers, try this.

On Why They Deny

A fascinating study by Myanna Lahsen, "Experiences of modernity in the greenhouse: A cultural analysis of a physicist ‘‘trio’’ supporting the backlash against global warming", on how several first generation climate change deniers (specifically the trio of Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and William Nierenberg, with nods towards Fred S. "alien base" Singer and a few others) gravitated from the center of the American scientific establishment to the Marshall Institute, Cato Institute, and the fringe.

The short answer? After WWII, physicists, and in particular nuclear physicists associated the Manhattan project, assumed an elite position in both scientific and Washington policy making circles. However, as the decades passed this position was challenged by other scientists from other fields (among them environmental scientists). The participation of "the trio" in the "climate change backlash" can be seen as an effort to protect their elite status as well as to refocus U.S. Science policy on "basic science" (ie physics)--to take science policy "back to the 1950s", in other words.

My favorite passage (saying the same thing at greater length):

In the early 1970s, American environmental sociologists predicted that national efforts to solve widely perceived environmental problems would ‘‘run head-on into many traditional values and time-honored practices’’ (Dunlap et al., 1973). This paper confirms their prediction, revealing the role of associated struggles over meaning and values in US climate science and politics. In some respects Nierenberg, Seitz and Jastrow are representative of broader categories of which they are partly part. They share common characteristics with other physicists and with a particular subgroup of physicists and governmental advisors in particular, an older generation of elite physicists shaped by nuclear physicists. The Marshall Institute trio has lived through dramatic changes in popular attitudes towards science and the environment. Their engagement in US climate politics can be understood in part as a struggle to preserve their particular culturally and historically charged understandings of scientific and environmental reality, and an associated, particular normative order. The trio has found support for important dimensions of their worldviews and policy preferences within the backlash and among Congressional Republicans, but they must continuously contend with challenges to the privilege to which they had grown accustomed in science and government.

All sorts of interesting tid-bits along the way to this conclusion. For example, Lahsen confirms the "old fart" nature of the Denialist movement, and suggests that there will not be a second wave once this one has passed:

...the dissenting side has encountered difficulties in terms of attracting new Ph.D.s to their ranks. I base this statement on ten years of research involving monitoring of media articles and events on the climate issue as well as more than a hundred interviews among US scientists involved with the climate issue or knowledgeable about US climate science and politics. This research suggests that only few new actors have joined the ranks of the staunch scientific skeptics on the climate issue since it gained widespread attention in the late 1980s.

Lakatos Law: No New PHDs = A deteriorating research program.

Also, how I signed Seitz's Oregon Petition.

h/t Pielke Jr.

More On the Adventures Of The IOP

Ever since the once respected Institute of Physics issued its wild-eyed statement on the CRU Hack, its been trying to "clarify" its way out of the consequences (ie. shock and revulsion among its membership). What has become increasingly clear is that Denialists were able to hijack its Energy Group, and then its Energy sub-Group, and slip their statement out the door without proper oversight from the governing body. Some general background on that here and here. And it looks like Terri Jackson, one of the folks in question, is using her IOP connections to stake a place on the global warming denial rubber chicken circuit.


DC's piece is most interesting, as it presents strong evidence that knowledge of the IOP's statement was conveyed in advance (almost a month in advance, in fact) to climate change denier and swivel-eyed lunatic Christopher Monckton:

Monckton was touring Australia – perhaps still is – and during that tour he made some allusions to Climate Scientists being about to face criminal charges, and also to peak academic bodies having some very interesting submissions to make to the UK inquiry.
[...]

From what I’ve seen, Monckton, Plimer, Carter, etc are in frequent enough contact with each other and the organisations that circulate fud as their strategy, that I’m fairly confident Monckton knew ahead of time and was basically boasting

As DC notes:

Monckton’s tour began in early February, well before the parliamentary submission deadline of February 12. And the IOP submission wasn’t released to the general public until the end of that month, along with the other received submissions.

So, a thoroughly planned out and well-executed exercise in fud creation. Very much like the infiltration of the APS, which Monckton also had a hand in.

Mann Vs. Steyn: Steve McIntyre Weighs In

I've written fairly extensively on the topic of Michael Mann's defamation case against Mark Steyn. Earlier this month, having fired, or been fired by, his lawyers, Mark Steyn appealed to the Internet to help build a case for claiming that, when he described Michael Mann's work as "fraudulent", he was not accusing him of scientific misconduct.  

Canadian climate change denier Steve McIntyre has now stepped up to make that case.  It's not going to help.

As usual, reading through McI's writing at Climate Audit is a joyless experience.  There's veiled accusations, insinuations, quote-mining, tortured semantics ...the works.  It's a hard job to boil it down to some at-bottom essence.  I am going to focus on this post, mostly because it's been reproduced uncritically at The Volokh Conspiracy blog, a right-wing legal blog which the Washington Post has, for some reason, decided to carry, and where it may therefore be seen by a larger audience.  The end-point of McI's argument  is that Michael Mann was not exonerated by the many, many panels, boards, and etc. which investigated him.  Therefore Steyn's claim, that Mann's results were "fraudulent", can somehow be supported.  That's what I gather, at least, having read through his original piece and its regurgitation at the VC site twice now.

McI's analysis of the Oxburgh Panel's report lean quite heavily on a few tossed-off comments made by statistician David Hand at a press-conference announcing the panel's findings.  These remarks were widely reported at the time.  McI quotes three or four press outlets, but I will reference just The Daily Telegraph, which seems to have reproduced them most extensively:

Professor David Hand said that the research – led by US scientist Michael Mann – would have shown less dramatic results if more reliable techniques had been used to analyse the data… But the reviewers found that the scientists could have used better statistical methods in analysing some of their data, although it was unlikely to have made much difference to their results.
That was not the case with some previous climate change reports, where “inappropriate methods” had exaggerated the global warming phenomenon. Prof Hand singled out a 1998 paper by Prof Mann of Pennsylvania State University, a constant target for climate change sceptics, as an example of this. He said the graph, that showed global temperature records going back 1,000 years, was exaggerated – although any reproduction using improved techniques is likely to also show a sharp rise in global warming. He agreed the graph would be more like a field hockey stick than the ice hockey blade it was originally compared to. “The particular technique they used exaggerated the size of the blade at the end of the hockey stick. Had they used an appropriate technique the size of the blade of the hockey stick would have been smaller,” he said. “The change in temperature is not as great over the 20th century compared to the past as suggested by the Mann paper.”

So, to begin with, let's assume that David Hand is strictly speaking correct here.  Mann's research team could have used more appropriate statistical techniques, and these would have given less "exaggerated" results.  Although the results obtained were not greatly exaggerated, because as Hand notes better techniques would also have shown "a sharp rise in global warming".  The work might have been done more carefully, in other words, but the fact it wasn't doesn't matter much.

This a long, long way from an accusation of scientific misconduct.  And remember, previous judges have already concluded that in this particular setting Steyn's use of "fraudulent" = "scientific misconduct. There is no colloquial sense of the term where it means something less serious.  So how this is suppose to help Steyn's case is a little bit mysterious.

But, of course, it's pretty clear that Hand has got his facts bungled.  Mann's team was interested in a paleoclimatic reconstruction--in an attempt to determine temperature changes before the instrumental record.  This work took the 20th century instrumental record, which shows rapid increases in temperature,  as a given, and did nothing to transform it in either an exaggerated or any other manner.  Therefore Hand's criticism seems to have little merit.

And it is significant that shortly after the Panel published its findings, it added the following addendum to them:

Addendum to report, 19 April 2010

For the avoidance of misunderstanding in the light of various press stories, it is important to be clear that the neither the panel report nor the press briefing intended to imply that any research group in the field of climate change had been deliberately misleading in any of their analyses or intentionally exaggerated their findings. Rather, the aim was to draw attention to the complexity of statistics in this field, and the need to use the best possible methods. 

As I argued at the time, this sounds pretty close to a grovelling apology.  Oddly enough, McI and the folks at the VC blog interpret it differently:

Note that this statement doesn’t actually offer an opinion on whether the (criticized) findings were “deliberately misleading” or “intentionally exaggerated,” merely stating that their comments were not intended to imply this accusation.

This strikes me as semantic noodling, but if we are going to engage in such things, note that the addendum references not just Mann's team but "any research group in the field of climate change".  So if it is refusing to offer an opinion of Mann's work, it is also refusing to offer one on the work of the CRU scientists who were the subject of its investigation in the first place.  And such a stance would be ridiculous given the reason for the panel's existence.

Finally, McI seems to be claiming that, since the panel was not investigating Mann directly, it cannot "exonerate" him.  Indeed, the Oxburgh Panel had other concerns, and if I remember events correctly, it was only when a small group of deniers within the  U.K. Institute of Physics hijacked a sub-committee and used it to spread the accusations of misconduct more broadly, that Mann and his team were dragged into this mess.  But insofar as the panel touched on Mann's work, it cleared him of wrong-doing.  Other investigations, more directly focused, cleared him in a more decisive fashion.  And it's more than a little silly that McI would lean on a non-existent colloquial sense of "fraudulent" while insisting on a legalistic reading of "exonerate".