UK Government: Climate change scientists broke the law hiding data

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7004936.ece

by miked • 16 years ago

52 71 16 years ago

timesonline.co.uk

ErrantX6• 16 years ago

The only conclusion that I 've been able to draw from this mess is: climate science has been seriously compromised :(

I just cant decide who can be trusted as a source for accurate and unbiased information/opinion.

mseebach2• 16 years ago

Which is a conclusion with some pretty far-reaching consequences. Most environmental legislation in industrialized countries for the past decade, if not two, might have been based on flawed science.

Considering the egos of the people who would need to go out and say "when the facts change, I change my mind" to clean up this mess, it could take decades. We're hearing a lot about market failure these years, how's this for government failure?

anamax7• 16 years ago

> We're hearing a lot about market failure these years, how's this for government failure?

Govt failure isn't new.

Govt is systemic risk.

When US car companies decided that they didn't want to make the kind of vehicles that I wanted, Toyota was willing to do so.

When the US govt decides to do something dumb, I'm expected to pay for it. And when I point out that it's doing dumb things, I get yelled at by folks who think that I have some obligation to fix the govt that they broke.

Screw that.

vannevar3• 16 years ago

"The only conclusion that I 've been able to draw from this mess is: climate science has been seriously compromised"

Really? I'll give you a more plausible conclusion: that the scientists in question got tired of responding to repeated Freedom of Information requests from people whose only interest was to disseminate distortions of their findings.

lacrossegm5• 16 years ago

Exactly right. The fervent nature of global warming denial-ism drives people to go to great lengths to undermine the real science and delay action.

CWuestefeld• 16 years ago

requests from people whose only interest was to disseminate distortions

How do you know the intent of those asking for information? It seems to me that there are plenty of people here on HN that would just like to try their own hand at models. Who gets to decided when a request merits a response?

the scientists in question got tired of responding to repeated Freedom of Information requests

The one who pays the piper calls the tunes. If you're going to build your business (yes, research and universities are businesses) on public funding, then you've got to be prepared to have your customers -- the public -- ask about what you're doing. It seems to me that they ought to have at least an intern dedicated to maintaining a public web site where everything is made available. Then no annoyance to the researchers would occur.

bballant5• 16 years ago

Trust your instinct and don't lose site of the fact that these cases of bad science are few compared to the good.

My instinct tells me that we're destroying the planet. The effect of global warming is hard to see, but it's not hard to imagine given all of the other messes we've made.

beagle32• 16 years ago

How do you know that "these cases of bad science are few compared to the good"?

Seriously, whenever money or prestige is involved, the bad science has a much better chance.

kunley7• 16 years ago

Global warming is the new swine flu.

TheBranca187• 16 years ago

The article talks about climate change. You might want to learn the difference between climate change and global warming before you dismiss it with a one-liner.

kunley7• 16 years ago

Regardless of the verbal purity and political correctness the point from the OP is: someone was trying to force the conclusion than the climate is warming more than it is.

Isn't that clear?

sree_nair• 16 years ago

Can you elaborate on what the Difference is ?. And why you think this finding doesn't impact the climeate change findings?

lacrossegm5• 16 years ago

Every victory for AGW denial is a long term loss for all mankind.

mseebach2• 16 years ago

Yeah, screw the science, I know I'm right.

lacrossegm5• 16 years ago

Yeah, screw down-votes, I know right from wrong.

yannis5• 16 years ago

I am glad this is breaking out slowly but surely and the C02 saga will probably be the greatest scientific scandal of our time. I have been following the story for as far as I remember as I had an interest in Ice Ages. This article http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/zjmar07.pdf is very good at debunking some of the myths. You can play with a model online with this http://cs.clark.edu/~mac/physlets/GEBM/ebm.htm#tiptop and you can download a more sophisticated program http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/ from Goddard, or you can write your own Clojure one, like the one we had yesterday here at HN.

There is no doubt that an increase in CO2 will increase temperatures. However, this is only part of a model. C02 can get absorbed by the Oceans and other earth mechanisms and balance out. If you follow the Palaeoclimate literature (ice cores in Antartica) the rise in temperature gave a rise to C02 and not the other way round.

You can look how the famous hockey stick curve looks if plotted against historical times (it looks more like a series of hills).

Serious variations in temperature (on a global level) are caused mostly by sunspot activity. I am sure other HN posters can add 100's more argument to these.

However, as humans there is no doubt that we are destroying our environment. As such I am very much for better policies in this respect but certainly NOT for trading carbon credits and fattening fat cats further.

Retric2• 16 years ago

I am shocked by how many up votes this got. C02 can get absorbed by the Oceans and other earth mechanisms and balance out. The worldwide CO2 production is 4.53 metric tons per capita, that’s metric tons of a gas. http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=en_atm_co...

Calculate the increase in PPM of CO2 with the human production of CO2 and the numbers work out. It’s not like we can’t figure out how much CO2 we released in the last 10 years, and compare atmospheric concentrations of CO2 from 10 years ago. I could do these calculations for you, but work them out for yourself and you can see that yes humans do produce plenty of CO2 to alter the concentration in the atmosphere.

PS: Mass of gas in the atmosphere * concentration increase vs. Mass of gas produced.

yannis5• 16 years ago

Quote from University of Bristol research (http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2009/6649.html):

New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.

This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.

No-one is denying that concentrations are rising, the Modelling of these processes is being questioned. Also I don't doubt the need for well thought action. In the 70's-80's similar lobbies killed nuclear energy which is one of the cleanest means of generating energy. Since hydrocarbons will one day run out, we should be spending more money towards this. Granted a portion can be generated with solar and wind, but solar or wind on its own cannot provide the current or projected needs.

gjm115• 16 years ago

> or you can write your own Clojure one, like the one we had yesterday here at HN.

The Clojure one we had yesterday that

1. looked only at data during the "hockey-stick handle" period;

2. found, in his very first graph, a steady increase in temperatures over that period whose magnitude (>2 degrees C) was greater than that in the usual "hockey-stick" graph (~ 0.7 degrees C);

3. plotted a bunch more graphs in ways that would inevitably make changes of ~0.7 degrees invisible (look at the last one -- range from -20 to 80 degrees on the y-axis);

3. claimed to have shown by all this that the hockey-stick is not real?

That one?

> CO2 can get absorbed by the Oceans and other earth mechanisms and balance out.

Perhaps it can, but since it's possible to measure CO2 levels and they are in fact increasing that's not actually happening.

yannis5• 16 years ago

Just have a look at fig 4 at the paper I quoted above http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/zjmar07.pdf You will see the 'hills' I mentioned above.

I am not actually suggesting inaction I support any measures that will lower human impact on the planet, however, I am supporting good science and policies that do not have the word TAX in them.

gjm115• 16 years ago

(Evidently I am unable to count to 4. Sorry about that.)

nradov• 16 years ago

While some CO2 will be absorbed by the oceans, that has consequences for ocean life by lowering the pH.

viggity• 16 years ago

I don't know how much I buy the "the oceans are getting more acidic" line. The oceans are 3 orders of magnitude larger than the atmosphere, and CO2 makes up 380 parts per MILLION in atmosphere.

oceans: 1.384 × 10^21 kg http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/AvijeetDut.shtml

atmosphere: 5 x 10^18 kg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth

xenonite2• 16 years ago

Global warming != Climate change

1.) Global warming increases average temperatures.

2.) Climate change might turn the weather to extremes, which implies greater temperature _variance_ locally.

Now the pattern I see is: people are trying to focus on 1.), disprove it, then (falsly) claim that 2.) would also be wrong!

This is not the case. 1.) does NOT relate to 2.) in any way!

The climate change IS happening, this does not change by disproving 1.)

TheBranca187• 16 years ago

Better than I could state it myself. Funny how this comment is ignored even though I tried to make this distinction in another comment :)

jerf• 16 years ago

The problem is that nobody care whether the "climate is changing". Change is the only constant. The question is whether it is bad and whether we can do something about it. Neither has been very well established in my mind. If in fact our CO2 contribution's effect is far smaller than the IPCC and environmentalists claim, then natural variation is the dominant factor and even completely giving up industrialization entirely next year may not have a very large effect. This means that it is a lot harder to affect the climate than we have been telling ourselves. And climate changes have been happening continuously for billions of years, so it's not at all obvious that they are a priori bad for anything other than human agriculture. (Which is itself bad, but something we can deal with, and broadly speaking is our problem rather than the ecosystem's problem.)

If environmentalists think they can turn on a dime after thirty years of "anthropogenic global warming -> disaster", they are in for a well-deserved beating in the court of general opinion. Falling back to "The climate is changing" is basically an admission that we have no clue, and more than that, where we thought human effects dominated it, it doesn't seem to. You can't just turn around and apply panic over AGW to panic over "climate change"; it is neither rational nor human-irrational.

If you want to panic over something environmental, how about overfishing, plastic pollution in the pacific, fertilizer runoff, or something else that isn't "debatable" but actually, factually exists? In addition to the fact that it's a bad idea to try to "salvage" climate change as an issue, it isn't even necessary. There are real problems. Unless you personally are driven by using environmentalism as an excuse to destroy democracy and transfer wealth to the poor, if you are really driven by concern for the environment, you don't need to "win" this issue. Trying to build your political case on a lie can only be actively harmful in the long run.

jessriedel2• 16 years ago

So there is allegedly climate change due to carbon dioxide without increasing global temperatures? I've never heard this. What is the mechanism, and what is the evidence?

xenonite2• 16 years ago

I was asked to source my statements, as I did not do so before.

The IPCC Third Report concludes that climate change might either be caused of a changing mean temperature, a changing variance, or both. What the real cause for climate change is, needs to be carefully assessed. This supports my statement that climate change is not necessarily caused by increasing mean temperatures.

http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc%5Ftar/?src=/clim...

ubulgaria• 16 years ago

At this point we don't need climate science -- we just need to observe the ice at poles and the dead coral reefs.

anamax7• 16 years ago

> we just need to observe the ice at poles

It's currently increasing at both.... The polar bear populations are increasing too.

> the dead coral reefs

Runoff from deforestation is killing most of them.

There's some effect from increased disolved CO2, but it goes both ways. (Some creatures/plants benefit, others have problems, and still others don't seem to care.)

bballant5• 16 years ago

Ice is and polar bear populations are increasing? I have only read evidence to the contrary. Please provide a citation so I don't think you just made this up.

UK Government: Climate change scientists broke the law hiding data

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