The Biggest Science Scandal Ever!

By necessity, climate change denial depends on steady sources of disinformation, and in this time of the 24 hour news cycle, there are many people more than willing to provide it.

From my commentary of this past January, Facts vs. Opinions:

“Some sources have been accused of providing substantiation that turns out to have been opinion pieces themselves. They are offering an argument for or against something that is not based on facts, but because they are citing a ‘source’ they appear to be providing verification.”

Examples of this occurred during recent airings on Fox News of the programs “Outnumbered” and “The Five”. On “Outnumbered”, panelist Lisa Kennedy asked the show’s guest: “What about the Telegraph report that shows the original data versus the published data? There was a great disparity because they lied about the actual data until someone went back to these weather stations in South America and Antarctica and thought, ‘Hmm, maybe something is amiss here?’ And they realized there is a scandalous discrepancy in what we have been sold!”

On “The Five”, Dana Perino said the White House is “actually kind of lucky that we don’t cover climate change as much as we should. Because yesterday, it was reported that the temperature readings have been fabricated and it’s all blowing up in their faces.”

They were both referring to a recent opinion piece by Christopher Booker in the Telegraph, a right-wing British newspaper. The headline was “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever”, with the subtitle “New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming”. It was not, as Kennedy claimed, a report.

In the piece, Booker wrote: “Two weeks ago …I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming. “This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.”

What Fox News failed to do was some simple fact checking. The source for their comments was an opinion piece, which itself was using a blog for a source. It doesn’t appear that they spent any time vetting Booker or Homewood. And it certainly doesn’t appear that Booker did any vetting either. So what was Homewood talking about, that Booker so willingly chose to advance in his opinion piece?

Brad Friedman, writing in Salon on February 19:

“Politifact- which is not always a reliable source for news itself- decided to take a look at Perino’s version of the claim. In this case, they got it right and declared Perino’s assertion as a ‘Pants-on-Fire Lie’.

“The ‘controversy’ comes from adjustments made to the stream of raw data from thousands of land- and sea-based weather stations around the globe in order to keep them consistent, so that an apples-to-apples comparison of temperatures can be made over time, even as the location of weather stations- and the technology used since the mid-1800s to measure those temperatures-changes.

“‘For instance,’ Politifact explains, ‘local officials might move a station from a valley to a nearby hilltop. They might change the time of day when they record their measurements from sunrise to sunset. They might change the kind of thermometer they use. In the ocean, the practice once was to haul up a bucket of water. Later, the standard practice was to measure the temperature from the engine’s intake valve.’

“‘Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) must then make adjustments to some of those raw temps ‘to account for the human factors that would skew the data regardless of what happened with actual temperatures.’

“‘The temperature records are based on weather station data. But people didn’t expect the data to be used for monitoring long-term climate change when they started collecting it,’ the University of York’s Dr. Kevin Cowtan explained in a video debunking the first misleading Telegraph article on this a few weeks ago. ‘It was for recording the weather, hence the name weather station. As a result they weren’t always very careful about changes to the instruments or their usage. When we change an instrument we have to recalibrate to ensure the new instrument gives the same readings as the old one. The original weather station operators didn’t always do this. So NOAA have to do a retrospective calibration by comparing nearby weather stations.’”

The Salon article continues:

“So, yes, Homewood has ‘busted’ NOAA scientists making adjustments to their raw data in a number of locations. The problem, however, is that when all such adjustments are examined, the changes actually lower global temperatures trends overall.

“The issue is perhaps best described in the Politifact piece by Zeke Hausfather, a data scientist with Berkley Earth, a group of researchers that have been funded in the past by the climate-denying Koch brothers (which is a point not noted by Politifact). Hausfather says the data cited by Homewood have been cherry-picked in order to seed doubt in climate change science…

“‘(They) look through all those thousands of stations, find a few that show big adjustments, and tell everyone that they are evidence of fraud,’ Hausfather said. ‘You will rarely see them pick out stations like Reno, Paris, London, Tokyo, or many others where the adjustments dramatically lower the warming trend.’

“Hausfather and his colleagues traced how the adjustment methods changed the temperature data differently around the world since 1850. In the United States, with about 5 percent of Earth’s land area, the official data file raised temperatures compared to the original readings. But the same methods lowered the data records in Africa, and for all land-based readings taken together, the adjustments basically made no change at all. With ocean temperature trends, the efforts to compensate for the human factor lower the numbers dramatically.

“‘The net effect of adjustments is to actually reduce the amount of global warming we’ve observed since 1880 by about 20 percent,’ Hausfather said. ‘Folks skeptical of temperature adjustments are welcome not to use them if they’d like, but you end up with more global warming, not less.’”

In a related matter, much has been recently been written about a scientist frequently quoted by climate change deniers, Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon. A cursory internet search will quickly reveal his role in the denial space. What is particularly revealing are his funding sources. Readers of my commentaries on climate change denial will recognize them. And Soon’s degree is in aerospace engineering- he is not a trained climate scientist. In my earlier commentary about climate change denial, I wrote about a Yale study that concluded that “because of their scientific backgrounds, [engineers] may have an inflated sense of their understanding about climate science, and thus draw incorrect conclusions that conform to their ideological biases.”

The problem, as always, is that the disinformation is put out there to a willing audience, and the inevitable fact checking and corrections may or may not also be heard by that same audience. And even when told that nearly 90% of climate science experts agree that climate change is caused by humans, one-half of Americans disagree.

In a Washington Post article by Terrence McCoy about Dr. Soon, Feb. 23:

“‘Ideological filters’ can explain this phenomenon, wrote academic Andrew J. Hoffman in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The debate over climate change isn’t a debate over the science, which was decided years ago. It’s a debate ‘over culture, world views and ideology,’ Hoffman argued. And the ‘innate desire to maintain a consistency in beliefs’ means that we ‘refute views or arguments that are contrary to those beliefs.’”

Bottom line: a climate change-denying blogger in the UK looks at adjustments to temperature readings at weather stations and wrongly concludes that the result showed increased temperatures. His blog becomes a “source” for another climate change denier, who in turn becomes a “source” for “news” purveyors and entertainers on the right. In actuality, the adjustments show an overall decrease, but that wouldn’t fit in with the disinformation agenda in place at Fox, and unfortunately heard by its audience.

D. Norman