After watching an Inconvenient Truth and reading about the IPCC consensus, I assumed that global warming was an established reality.  But a little while ago I stumbled across a couple of curious blog comments by one Mencius Moldbug.  Mencius is a software engineer out in San Francisco.  After scoring in the dot com boom, he went on sabbatical in order to read, think, and write.  He studied the whole global warming debate and came away with some interesting findings.  Below I've tried to compile the long comment thread into one coherent post.  Mencius also writes a blog here.  Unfortunately, he has not blogged about global warming yet.  Since this is the single most compelling case for global warming skepticism that I have ever read, I wanted to re-post his comments in a place where everyone could read them.

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Mencius:

The set of people who support or oppose a proposition is quite unrelated to its validity. So, even, are their motivations.

I'm sure there are some businessmen and politicians who oppose the global warming hypothesis for venal reasons. I'm sure there are some who oppose it for sincere reasons. And I'm sure both categories also apply to the large number of businessmen and politicians who support it. I don't see how any information can be deduced from these incontrovertible facts.

Do you have a minute to follow a link? You might find this page interesting. It is rather free of context, but perhaps its tone might spark your curiosity.

Now, what is your first question on reading this? Is it, by any chance, "Is Steve McIntyre a scientist?"

You see, there are two possible definitions of the word here.

One is that a "scientist" is anyone who follows a certain process which, in the past, seems to have been very effective at producing reliable information. This process is called the "scientific method," and while it is certainly not infallible - nothing is - it seems pretty good at eradicating error. And it works for anyone, black or white, Gentile or Jew.

Another is that a "scientist" is someone who has been awarded a certain credential by a certain institution, which entitles him to occupy one of a small number of prestigious positions. In this sense, calling someone a "scientist" is like calling him a "duke." The word "duke," from the Latin dux, originally meant a leader of fighting men, a warlord. There are still dukes today, and there are still warlords, but the dukes are not warlords and the warlords are not dukes.

As it happens, McIntyre is a scientist (I would say) in the first sense of the word, but not in the second.

His background is actually in hard-rock mineral exploration, which is one of the shadiest industries in the world. As a mining consultant with a strong background in statistics, he essentially made his living investigating bad numbers, and he developed an excellent practical sense of the ways data can be fudged.

One day out of pure personal curiosity he decided to take a look at the use of statistics in paleoclimatology. Paleoclimatology is a field which tries to estimate temperature trends from the time before we had scientists running around with thermometers everywhere. It does so by measuring "temperature proxies" which naturally record temperature effects - tree rings, for example, As you can probably imagine, before the rise of global warming, this was a rather obscure discipline, but it has since risen to great global importance.

The first result McIntyre looked at was the famous "hockey stick" curve associated with several notable paleoclimatologists, notably Michael Mann. If you have ever seen a headline saying "200x is the warmest year in XXX years," you have probably experienced the "hockey stick." On the basis of this result, Mann (no relation to the Miami Vice director) had become a star in his field, was named one of Scientific American's top 100 young researchers, etc, etc.

What McIntyre found was that this work was based on a pattern of bad statistics that came very close to simply being fraud. Mann had chosen nonstandard statistical procedures which amplified a single sample, from a set of trees (bristlecone pines) well-known to respond directly to CO2 rather than temperature, into a pattern that looked like it covered the entire world. Moreover, Mann's FTP site had a directory called "CENSORED" on it in which the same calculation was repeated without the bristlecones, showing no "hockey stick" at all.

Scientific misconduct happens. Just because a physicist, like Jan Hendrik Schön, pulls some stunt, doesn't mean Einstein was wrong.

But Schön was rapidly drummed out of his profession. Events in the Mann scandal have gone very differently.

The entire field of paleoclimatology has stonewalled on the "hockey stick." Mann is still very much an honored member of the field. And this despite the fact that two external reports, a National Academy of Sciences panel, and an independent report prepared by Edward Wegman, one of the US's leading statisticians, confirmed all of McIntyre's results.

What was the consequence of all this in the press? Funny you should ask.

The NAS panel, which included many of Mann's colleagues, came up with a very nice dodge. They admitted that Mann's results were useless, but claimed that, since other studies - many using the same flawed methodologies - reported the same results, the entire concept was vindicated. You may have heard the phrase "fake, but accurate."

As a result, the release of this report was actually an occasion for a new wave of "Earth is Warmest in 2,000 Years" stories. You had to be very, very savvy to understand the actual content of the report, which included a large dose of spin.

Wegman's report contained no spin at all. However, it also happened to be commissioned (pro bono, with no payment at all, etc, etc) by Joe Barton of the House Energy Committee. Therefore, it received no press coverage at all - despite the fact that it exposed one of the major scientific frauds of the last century, one which was lavishly promoted by the press.

In fact, not even Republican news outlets - like Fox News or the Washington Times - would touch the Wegman report. Why would they? Why go through another round of being attacked as shills for the oil companies? What's in it for them? Because they are, of course, shills - but for the Republicans, not for the oil companies.

The problem is very simple. It has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats or whatever. McIntyre is a liberal. Wegman voted for Gore. He is not some kind of crazy AEI activist, he is the former chair of the NAS panel on statistics, who had never heard of any of this crap before Barton called him. Look at his CV - this is normal diligence for a statistician. Checking that people are using stats correctly is what a guy like Wegman does.

No. The problem is money and power and fraud, pure and simple.  Trillions of dollars are being reallocated on the basis of statistical work that would flunk a sophomore. And you're not interested? What kind of skeptical antennae do you have?

MBH99 is like a bad audit finding. When you find that Bear Stearns or Enron or Citicorp or whoever has fabricated some nonexistent asset on its books, you don't give it a slap on the wrist and tell it to cross the line out. You unleash the forensic guys. You don't find just one cockroach in a kitchen. And you don't tell the health inspector, "sorry, we'll kill it."

MBH99 is not an ancient, irrelevant result. It is the single most publicized piece of research in the history of IPCC climatology. It singlehandedly put Mann in Scientific American's list of America's 100 top young scientists. And it really is not a stretch to compare it to an ape jaw glued to a human skull. The thing reeks. It is data laundering of the worst kind.

Sure, the "hockey team" has "moved on." Despite the fact that the NAS panel chaired by North and the Wegman report, both of which concurred in all substantive opinions, both stated that further paleoclimate proxy studies should not use bristlecones or foxtails, we continue to see paleoclimate reconstructions full of them.

And when IPCC climatologists are actually willing to use phrases like "if you want to make cherry pies, you have to be willing to pick cherries" (d'Arrigo) to committees investigating their work, we really have no reason to believe that their results are generated from their data and not the other way around. Actually, we have considerable reason to believe the opposite. "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" (Phil Jones.)

The trouble is that the entire evidentiary case for AGW is nonreplicable and unfalsifiable. If you do not personally trust the researchers, you have no reason to trust the "science."

The first arm of the AGW case is paleoclimatology, which is trivially distorted by selection bias, ie, "good" results are published and not "bad" ones. The second is general circulation models or GCMs, which simulate the Earth's atmosphere. GCMs are the product of tuning - they are certainly not derived directly from the laws of physics. See Nir Shaviv on the fine art of fitting elephants.

Because of this episode I judge the IPCC "consensus" the way I might judge the collective views of, say, the IMF. As a bunch of very smart people who nonetheless have a very clear institutional agenda. If you insist on taking them at face value, perhaps I could interest you in an Argentine bond or two.

It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where there were these institutions, like "Science," or "The Church," or "The New York Times," which you could just trust. But such a world has never existed in the past. Why should it exist now?

The logic I've laid out is my motivation for treating the Scientific Consensus as epistemologically irrelevant to my own estimation of future climate trends. I believe I've described a social process that could produce the Consensus whether or not the AGW proposition is true.

If anything makes science Science, it's that the "scientific method" is a social process which, in the past, has shown a tendency to eradicate error from its own conclusions.

I believe McIntyre's work has shown quite conclusively that, at least in the field of paleoclimatology, this process is not now operating, at least not in the form that produced its reputation.

I also believe that, since the culture of climate modelers (such as James Hansen) does not appear to differ from that of paleoclimatologists, and since climate modelers have at least as much, if not more, of an opportunity to tune their models in the same way that paleoclimatologists tuned their statistics, I should treat the information generated by both with the same distrust.

Since AGW research consists (since it can only consist) of modeling and paleoclimatology (the former is much more important - the paleoclimate follies are very much a canary in the coal-mine kind of thing), I choose to ignore it.

For example, if climate modelers wanted me to change my decision on this, they would have to build a new climate model in a clean-room process, which (a) correctly simulated Earth's climate in the past and (b) was not made to do so after a very extensive process of tuning, with abundant opportunities for the introduction of unconscious bias.

To be more specific, the largest source of uncertainty in climate models (GCMs, general circulation models) is their handling of water. ("Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln...")

Water in the vapor phase is a greenhouse gas. Water in the solid phase, and aerosolized water in the liquid phase, reflect radiation back out into space and cool the earth.

The interaction between these phases, and the more common surface liquid phase (like WC Fields, I never touch the stuff) is chaotic, which essentially means unsimulatable.

All GCMs in operation today predict a powerful positive feedback effect from (clear) water vapor, which strikes me as a pretty convenient truth if ya know what I mean. As notorious climate-criminal Richard Lindzen points out, the increased temperature caused by CO2 can just as easily produce a negative feedback from increasing cloud cover.

I'll bet something like 1% of the people who read about global warming in the papers know that the effect is logarithmic. Doubling the CO2 concentration produces a global radiation increase that, in the absence of modeling, if you just run the numbers straight, would make Earth about 1C warmer. Double it again - same result.

In the last century, CO2 has gone from about 280ppm to about 380ppm. The level of positive feedback the GCMs need to assume in order to turn this into an epic human catastrophe is, obviously, quite nontrivial. In fact, with a little more tuning, the GCMs would probably be quite happy to turn us into Venus.

And if that result generated more funding for the people writing the GCM, that's probably exactly what it would print out. But there's a balance of credibility that has to be maintained. In fact, GCMs in testing apparently quite often turn the Earth into a snowball or a boiling planet. The fact that they work at all is a genuine accomplishment.

So what is my prediction of the weather in 2057? I have no idea, I am not a climatologist. But Nir Shaviv's view strikes me as pretty sensible.

Of course, Shaviv is just one guy. He's not a Consensus. I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you on that one, although again, if you are interested in the subject, Climate Audit is the place to be.