Dear Dr Curry,
I am afraid I disagree with most of the key conclusions and recommendations of your text.
Trust is not something that can be repainted, damaged or cleaned, whenever necessary. For rational people, their trust in others is a result of the evaluation of their experience with these others – with their honesty, passion for the truth, ability to resist corruption, will to sacrifice themselves for others, and so on.
The ClimateGate material contains objective information showing that it is unreasonable if not foolish to trust the people from the CRU and several other institutions. Because of pre-existing similarities between the CRU folks and other groups pushing the climate panic, including GISS, Met Office, Hadley etc., it is also reasonable to make a preliminary guess that the key people in most or all these institutions and others lack the scientific integrity – and sometimes basic human decency, too.
You may claim that it hasn’t been proven that other climate scientists have done similar things. And I would agree. In fact, it is likely that many of them have not. But it is pretty unlikely that it is just CRU that is a bad exception. The dishonest behavior is clearly a part of the system. It would be completely foolish to deny the evidence for this proposition that the “Gates” have given us. So as long as people – including yourself – are forming their expectations rationally, they should conclude that it is likely that this kind of behavior has been universal in the field of “climate change”.
I am totally puzzled by your assertions about a “monolithic climate denial machine”. Clearly, this term is meant to invoke negative emotions by 3/4 of its words (monolithic, denial, machine), and the remaining 1/4 (climate) arguably brings negative emotions, too. 😉 However, if you try to think what this term actually means, it means the same thing that there is a pretty much “consensus” among the sane people – I mean climate skeptics – about most of the key questions. It’s not perfect, but it’s analogous to the consensus among the “panic oriented” climate scientists.
If your alarmed colleagues were talking about the alarmists themselves, they would surely talk about the “consensus”. When they talk about the same characteristic of the skeptics, they talk about the “monoliths” and “machines”. This is clearly an irrational propaganda meant to distort the opinions of listeners who are not able or willing to think about these things independently and neutrally. It has worked for years. But don’t expect it will work too well after November 2009.
I find your statement that the people “trusted the 4th IPCC report” very bizarre, too. I have never trusted it and 99% of the people whose methods and knowledge about the topic I respect didn’t trust the IPCC process, either. The IPCC process has always been corrupt, unscientific, ideological, and most of us on WUWT – or at least those who have studied it for many years – have known it for years if not decades. The ClimateGate and other revelations just confirmed what was generally known to everyone who was not hiding his or her head in the sand. It’s great that many other people realized this fact, too. But they surely didn’t discover something that was completely new to everyone.
You overestimate the role of someone’s being unpaid or outside of the Academia etc. It really doesn’t matter. These are technical details. What matters is the method, scientific ethics, and the agreement of the statements with the empirical data. Ross McKitrick is arguably a part of the Academia, after all. And so are many others. And there are a few others who are doing a similar work and who are being paid by various pro-market organizations. They are often not as skillful as the “spontaneously” chosen auditors that do the technical (e.g. statistical) work, but they usually have compatible opinions about the broader picture, and their work is being followed by many people.
If you think that e.g. Marc Morano is still generally dismissed as an oil puppet or whatever by nearly everyone, you’re completely wrong. He actually has lots of visitors – ClimateDepot is a kind of DrudgeReport of the climate. The climate alarm industry has become a big animal and it does require a lot of work – and even some funding – to peacefully liberate the world from this monster. So far, this funding is an extremely good investment. Marc Morano does much more work in making the people aware about the climate issues than hundreds of people paid on the side of the “alarm”, so he surely deserves some salary.
You wrote: “The failure of the public and policy makers to understand the truth as presented by the IPCC is often blamed on…”
Well, there is a simple fact that can be blamed for the “failure of public (and less so, policy makers – they usually jumped on the bandwagon) to understand the truth as presented by the IPCC”. Who should be blamed for the failure? Simply the fact that the IPCC reports are not the truth. More precisely, there are lots of “small truths” and “approximate truths” that no one would care about and that wouldn’t make the climate science relevant for the policymaking (and most people didn’t bother to read them because they don’t matter). And then there are the “big and catchy” statements that bring all the funding to the IPCC and climate science.
But these big ones are not the truth. It’s that simple. Whatever example you choose, you will see that I am right. Melting glaciers for India China, sinking Netherlands, dying African agriculture, rainforests destroyed by the warmth, and so on, and so on – the regions mentioned in these scandals cover the whole world. Virtually all of the IPCC “big statements” are actually lies, and I am almost convinced that you must know that.
You may put a more human face, such as yours, instead of Michael Mann’s unhuman face as the face of the climate science. But you won’t rebuild the trust in the IPCC if your predetermined plan is to keep all these lies as parts of the IPCC conclusions. One simply can’t trust in the people who end up with conclusions such as “Himalayan glaciers are going to melt soon” because these things are not true. Whoever has followed these “Gates” more properly has not only learned that big mistakes (and misinformation) have been done, but he also learned the right answers which can be obtained from the accessible evidence and that are vastly different than the IPCC report says. Many people have been fooled by this organized misinformation process but I don’t think that there will be too many people who will be fooled twice.
Your plans for “dueling blogs” and “restoration of the trust” are apparently designed to keep the climate science important, and so on. But in that you case, you want to mask the main lesson of all these “Gates”, and the lesson is that if the data are evaluated and communicated honestly, it turns out that there is nothing too interesting happening about the climate, and the science is simply not that interesting. It is one of hundreds of scientific disciplines that are only important to an isolated ring of specialists. It should peacefully scale back from those $2 billion a year to those $200 million a year (in the U.S., to pick a major example) that we knew a decade ago. Anything else is just wrong – or unethical.
In some sense, I find your attitude similar to the 1989 fall-of-communism opinions of the Czechoslovak reformed communists from 1968. Your proposals really don’t solve the “essence” of the problems with the IPCC and the dominant form of the climate science as we’ve known it in the most recent decade. The lack of integrity and the things that destroyed the trust after November 2009 are the same thing that you want people to trust again. It simply can’t work. Climate science has to return where it belongs, among legitimate scientific disciplines without distortions and irrational hype, and when it does so, it will inevitably look similar to what it used to be 20 or more years ago. It will be much more modest, too. It *is* modest and all the propositions that the climate science is more than modest were based on fraud and its political motivation. You can’t preserve these things while solving the “confidence crisis”.
