We saw it first manifested in the twentieth century under the banner of Eugenics, a pseudoscience which is repudiated in part because of where it ultimately led. However, such abuse of science to serve a political agenda hasn't disappeared by any means. My first encounter with what amounts to questionable science came as a college senior, when I first encountered the body of "science" published in medical journals in pursuit of a scientific justification for gun control. Even many colleagues of those publishing their pseudo-studies objected to their work, publishing scathing critiques of their work. Yet those periodicals ignored the objections and continue to publish such garbage to this day; and their "studies" get cited as authoritative by the media and the legal profession.
I first became aware of the "science" of man-made global warming around 2000 as a result of some of the sensational claims being made at the time about the dire consequences for our planet if we didn't gut our economy and take ourselves back to a nineteenth century lifestyle. I began my own researches into the issue and came to the conclusion that the claims were overblown, to say the least, and predicated on flawed research, much of it in the mold of the same sort of "science" I encountered five years earlier. Don't get me wrong, The evidence for our planet warming since the mid to late nineteenth century is indisputable. The problem I have is with the claims as to the cause. I think the warming is part of a natural process repeated throughout history and beyond, not man made as many claim.
To make the case that modern global warming was both artificial and unprecedented, history had to be rewritten. Now I don't have a problem with rewriting history if it can be shown the current paradigm is inaccurate. That is simply part of refining the story of man's history. However, to revise history without a proper basis for doing so in pursuit of an agenda is fraudulent, and to do it in the name of science undermines scientific credibility, that''s why I get so bent out of shape with the bogus gun studies. I was reminded of this today by the following article:
University Turns Over Some of Climate Scientist's documents.
This story reports that some of the documents surrounding the research of Michael Mann and his "hockey stick" graph were turned over in response to an FOI request by a "conservative" think tank, the American Tradition Institute. That the university drug its feet and it took intervention by a judge to gain a partial release of the material is itself significant. For those who don't know what this is all about let me give a little background.
Back in the last part of the 1990s the IPCC was preparing what was billed to be a major release in its report on man made global warming, aka Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). The IPCC wanted to make the case that modern warming was not only caused by man, but historically unprecedented. There was, however, several little problems called the (WMP), a warm period from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries which anecdotal evidence from the time suggests was even warmer than today, and the Maunder Minimum, a cold period period from the 17th through the 19th centuries associated with a period of minimal sunspot activity from 1645 to 1715 by the same name. The last is commonly called "The Mini Ice Age. For the IPCCs case to be made it somehow had to be shown that global climate was relatively stable until modern times. A little known scientist, Michael Mann, stepped up to the plate and provided what is now famously called the "hockey Stick" Graph purportedly based on tee-ring proxies, showing the very sort of stable climate the IPCC demanded through more than a thousand years of history with an exponential rise in temperatures right at the end.
Problems began after the report was released when a retired mathmetician smelled a rat and decided to examine the data for himself. The mathematician noticed some irregularities, such as certain values normally reported in such works not being included in the paper cited by the IPCC report. When Dr. Mann refused to give him access to the data, something normally done when a colleague examining another's research requests it, the stench got worse. The mathematician, Stephen McIntyre would co-publish a paper with Dr. Ross McKitrich pointing out the flaws Mr. McIntyre could determine in Man's research in 2004. I won't point out most of the flaws in the methodology since I plan to highlight one particular decision on Mann's part which came to light later, as a result of Climate gate.
We've all heard the "hide the decline" comment which came as a result of the hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University East Anglia which is the headquarters of the climate science community. However, there is some confusion as to what went on. It seems that Michael Mann had a little problem with his data. Dr. Mann had based his proxy record on tree rings, a highly interpretive methodology fraught with flaws when it comes to determining annual temperatures since temperature is only one of many influences on annual tree growth. Dr' Mann's problem was that his reconstruction of annual temperatures didn't watch with observed annual temperature, especially after the 1960s. The reconstructed temperature went into decline instead of rising as they should. Consider this for a moment, his interpretation of the tree rings for the historical period didn't match the known temperatures for the period, calling his entire reconstruction of historical global temperatures into question.
Dr. Mann's solution for publication is now immortalized by his e-mail comment that he would have to "hide the decline." Instead of starting over, or admitting he was wrong, Dr. Mann decided to throw the unmatching data out and substitute it with the recorded temperatures. Thus the report and its graph would give a misleading impression as to the authority of Mann's historical reconstruction. Now I don't know about anybody else, but when I went through college and did my research classes I was told such conduct was higly unethical. Apparently I was misinformed. As the article I came across today states:
The release of the e-mail follows the release Monday of a report by the Inspector General of the National Science Foundation (NSF). It says Mann did not violate any codes of ethical research conduct in connection with the so-called Climategate e-mails, which unknown hackers copied from a server at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom in November 2009. The NSF investigation was the latest in a series of inquiries to find no evidence for allegations by critics, ATI among them, that Mann had falsified data or skewed calculations to exaggerate recent increases in global temperatures or humanity's role in causing them.
Excuse me, when did it become ethical to eliminate data which contradicts ones conclusions and substitute other data in which doesn't? By doing so didn't Dr. Mann in fact skew the data? I guess those who taught me how to conduct research were sadly misinformed if this is the current state of affairs in research science! What really gets to me is that this sort of attitude on the part of the "scientific establishment" undermines sciences credibility with the populace as folks aren't as stupid as the folks covering Dr.Mann's ass think they are.
Even worse, this sad state of affairs extends beyond the climate science community and academia in general. I've already mentioned the skewed gun control research given the impremise of prestigious medical journals. Michael Chrichton, who sounded the clarion call on the problems with climate science in his seminal book State Of Fear noted before that a similar attitude among historians when he wrote The 13th Warrior:
I mention this because the tendency to blend the boundaries of fact and fiction has become widespread in modern society. Fiction is now inserted seamlessly in everything from scholarly histories to television news. Of course, television is understood to be venal, its transgressions shrugged off by most of us. But the attitude of “post-modern” scholars represents a more fundamental challenge. Some in academic life now argue seriously there is no difference between fact and fiction, that all ways of reading text are arbitrary and personal, and that therefore pure fiction is as valid as hard research. At best, this attitude evades traditional scholarship; at worst, it is nasty and dangerous. But such academic views were not prevalent twenty years ago, when I sat down to write this novel in the guise of a scholarly monograph, and academic fashion may change again—particularly if scholars find themselves chasing down imaginary footnotes, as I have done. (Final word in 1992 edition)
Michael Chricton's words almost twenty years ago serve to warn us to the depths to which both science and academia have fallen. That is the crux of the problem, science is now, like history, being corrupted to serve a political agenda. Because of that we, as consumers of information, can't be sure we aren't being fed inaccurate information. This highlights the need for each and everyone of us to learn how to evaluate information for ourselves, we can no longer trust the "experts."
