New York Times Catches the Clue Train
It has been a long and laborious process, but the New York Times is finally beginning to wake up to the real story behind Climategate, Glaciergate, Africagate, and the various -gates du jour arising from the serial exaggerations and multiple instances of sloppy sourcing contained in the Fourth Assessment Report (2007) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Walter Russell Mead, blogging at the web site affiliated with my day job, has been doing a fantastic job banging on the drum of why this story matters, and why the Gray Lady’s studied neglect of it has done the global warming cause substantially more harm than good.
This is why I approached Tom Friedman’s op-ed on climate change this morning with a sense of optimism. And despite its containing a host of gnomic prognostications (“some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.”), not to mention Friedman’s trademark “special sauce” rhetoric (“Avoid the term ‘global warming.’ I prefer the term ‘global weirding’…”), the op-ed did not disappoint:
climate experts can’t leave themselves vulnerable by citing non-peer-reviewed research or failing to respond to legitimate questions, some of which happened with both the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
This is an important admission, and a sign that the Pachauri-Gore strategy of sexing up the alarmists’ case has finally imploded on itself, and now even threatens to discredit legitimate science in the court of public opinion.
Friedman’s suggestions on how the scientific establishment should respond to its credibility crisis, on the other hand, are significantly less noteworthy. The first suggestion is that it should
convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.
Brilliant idea! And they could even write a thingy called an “Assessment Report” every so often. And we’ll call them the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and…wait. What’s that you say? Already been done. Oh, nevermind.
The second suggested task for this putative IPCC Reloaded is also unwise:
they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense.
Wrong, and doubly wrong. This would embroil the scientific community directly in a polarizing political debate, and if Climategate has taught us anything, it’s that scientists should confine themselves to scientific questions and leave questions about policy, principles, and values for the public and their representatives to decide. (Climate scientist Mike Hulme’s op-ed saying this, more or less, remains the best lesson that anyone has derived from this ongoing debacle.)
And besides, if we were to really follow the money, as Friedman suggests, we would find, first, that the most effective climate skeptics or “lukewarmers” to date (namely, the McIntyres, McKitricks, and Pielkes of the world) receive absolutely no interest-group money, and, second, that the alarmist camp is not without its own members who have deep conflicts of interest.
Will the pro-AGW crowd internalize these lessons? It’s hard to say, but there are some signs they are. Friedman ends his column by explaining that there are plenty of common-sense, bipartisan policy options we could begin right now to address not only climate change but energy security. And President Obama recently announced plans to restart construction of new nuclear power plants in the U.S. Both are steps in the right direction. The real test, however, will be whether these steps are followed up by more sustained measures, like a comprehensive energy policy in the political realm, and more honesty about uncertainty in the scientific realm.

