Thomas Friedman has apparently been reading Ron Susskind lately, as he reveals in his latest op-ed at the NY Times, Going Cheney on Climate. Unfortunately for his readership, Friedman still hasn't grasped the basics of investigative journalism.
At first glance, the article appears to be on the right track.
Soon after Suskind’s book came out, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who then was at the University of Chicago, pointed out that Mr. Cheney seemed to be endorsing the same “precautionary principle” that also animated environmentalists. Sunstein wrote in his blog: “According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events — such as climate change. Indeed, another vice president — Al Gore — can be understood to be arguing for a precautionary principle for climate change (though he believes that the chance of disaster is well over 1 percent).”
Of course, Mr. Cheney would never accept that analogy. Indeed, many of the same people who defend Mr. Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine on nukes tell us not to worry at all about catastrophic global warming, where the odds are, in fact, a lot higher than 1 percent, if we stick to business as usual.
That makes a lot of sense. Why shouldn't we expect consistent policy responses from governmental officials with respect to analogous risks? Thankfully, Friedman does not that catastropic climate change has a higher probability of occurrence than Cheney's risk threshold. But, what about the probability of sub-catastrophic climate change and the tremendous economic upheaval that even minor increments in global temperatures will incur? Decades of global heat waves, intensified hurricanes and flooding, bleached coral reefs and invasive species will add significant amounts of strain to the global food supply. And, without significant emissions reductions, these hazards will probably transpire. And when I say probably, I mean thousands of times more likely to occur than Cheney emerging from a nuclear winter and startling at his own shadow. You can bank on it.
But Friedman's mustache leads us in a different direction...
That is unfortunate, because Cheney’s instinct is precisely the right framework with which to think about the climate issue — and this whole “climategate” controversy as well.
Err... OK?
“Climategate” was triggered on Nov. 17 when an unidentified person hacked into the e-mails and data files of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, one of the leading climate science centers in the world — and then posted them on the Internet. In a few instances, they revealed some leading climatologists seemingly massaging data to show more global warming and excluding contradictory research
Frankly, I found it very disappointing to read a leading climate scientist writing that he used a “trick” to “hide” a putative decline in temperatures or was keeping contradictory research from getting a proper hearing. Yes, the climate-denier community, funded by big oil, has published all sorts of bogus science for years — and the world never made a fuss. That, though, is no excuse for serious climatologists not adhering to the highest scientific standards at all times.
You found it very disappointing? That's great. I mean, I could understand if you were very disappointed when you discovered that Ahmed Chalabi was feeding you fabricated reports on Iraq. Didn't you learn your lesson... what was that, five years ago now? Did you even bother to do any investigative research to VERIFY this assertion? Couldn't you be bothered to contact Phil Jones orMichael Mann to put the lie to this non-story?
The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.
Let me simplify that for you, Mr Friedman: it is well-established that tree rings grown after the 1960s are not a good method for representing global temperatures. Phil Jones was NOT talking about hiding "a putative decline in temperatures". He was talking about swapping tree ring measurements with the known "real temps" of thermometer readings. If you still don't get it, try watching this excellent video clip:
Now, regarding the "keeping contradictory research from getting a proper hearing", I'm assuming Friedman is referring to the emails concerning the journal, Climate Research. Nature Magazine debunked this spin nearly a week ago.
A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists' conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming (S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003 and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003) and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.
Fortunately, Friedman's principle argument about the irrelevance of the CRU hack to the body of science is decent. He concludes with some perfectly valid points about insuring ourselves against climate risks and energy independence. I don't understand why we can't expect a minimal amount of fact-checking from pundits like Friedman. I find it very disappointing that the NY Times is still propagating right wing conspiracy theories.