Both the blogosphere and the mainstream media have been abuzz with commentary blaming global warming for Hurricane Sandy and the associated deaths and devastation. Bloomberg BusinessWeek epitomizes this brand of journalism. Its magazine cover proclaims the culpability of global warming as an obvious fact:

Part of the thinking here is simply that certain aspects of the storm (lowest barometric pressure for a winter cyclone in the Northeast) and its consequences (worst flooding of the New York City subway system) are “unprecedented,” so what more proof do we need that our fuelish ways have dangerously loaded the climate dice to produce ever more terrible extremes?

After all, argues Climate Progress blogger Brad Johnston, quoting hockey stick inventor Michael Mann, “climate change is present in every single meteorological event.” Here’s Mann’s explanation:

The fact remains that there is 4 percent more water vapor – and associated additional moist energy – available both to power individual storms and to produce intense rainfall from them. Climate change is present in every single meteorological event, in that these events are occurring within a baseline atmospheric environment that has shifted in favor of more intense weather events.

Well sure, climate is average weather over a period of time, so as climate changes, so does the weather. But that tautology tells us nothing about how much — or even how — global warming influences any particular event. Moreover, if “climate change is present in every single meteorological event,” then it is also present in ”good” weather (however defined) as well as “bad.”

Anthony Watts makes this criticism on his indispensable blog, noting that as carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have risen, the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the U.S. has declined.

The US Has Had 285 Hurricane Strikes Since 1850: ‘The U.S. has always been vulnerable to hurricanes. 86% of U.S. hurricane strikes occurred with CO2 below [NASA scientist James] Hansen’s safe level of 350 PPM.’

If there’s anything in this data at all, it looks like CO2 is preventing more US landfalling hurricanes.

Data Source: NOAA; Figure Source: Steve Goddard

Cato Institute climatologists Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger put the point this way:

Global warming has to affect “the weather” in the United States, or anywhere else. Big deal. Changing the radiative properties of the atmosphere — which is what increasing carbon dioxide does — must alter the character of weather events as well as the climate. But how much? In reality, the amount of weather related to natural variability dramatically exceeds what is “added on” by global warming. This is obvious from a look at the “Climate Extremes Index” from the National Climatic Data Center …

Source: National Climate Data Center (Note: The graph above differs slightly from the one presented in Pat and Chip’s column because it incorporates NCDC’s tropical cyclone indicator.)

Michaels and Knappenberger go on to observe:

While it is true that this index has risen from a low point around 1970, it is also clear that it merely returned to values observed in the early 20th century. Did greenhouse gases raise the extremes index in the early 20th century? Obviously not.

Hurricanes are certainly less common in New York than in Florida or Louisiana, but if Sandy’s invasion of the Big Apple is evidence of global warming, then global warming has menaced the Empire State for centuries, because hurricanes have hit New York since before the industrial revolution.

Wikipedia has a List of New York Hurricanes going back to the 17th century. The strongest was the New England Hurricane of 1938, a category 3 storm that killed upwards of 600 people.

As I read the Wiki list, the following number of hurricanes have affected New York: 6 before 1800; 23 from 1800 to 1899; 11 from 1900 to 1949; 15 from 1950 to 1974; 21 from 1975 to 1999; and 19 from 2000 to the present (including Sandy). Each storm in the Wiki list is footnoted, usually with a link to the source referenced.

Lest anyone see a greenhouse “fingerprint” in the larger number of hurricanes since 1975, 16 were “remants” of tropical storms. In contrast, only one “remnant” is identified for 1950-1974 and none is identified for 1900-1949. No doubt New York experienced many hurricane remnants that were not identified as such before the advent of weather satellites and hurricane hunter aircraft.

Okay, but what about Sandy’s record-breaking storm surge — is that evidence global warming added extra oomph to the storm’s destructive power?

Anthony Watts posts an illuminating commentary by David Middleton, who compares Sandy’s estimated maximum storm surge with other hurricane surges in southern New England based on Donnelly et al., 2001. Middleton writes:

Hurricane Sandy’s unprecedented storm surge was likely surpassed in the New England hurricanes of 1635 and 1638. From 1635 through 1954, New England was hit by at least five hurricanes producing greater than 3 m storm surges in New England. Analysis of sediment cores led to the conclusion “that at least seven hurricanes of intensity sufficient to produce storm surge capable of overtopping the barrier beach (>3 m) at Succotash Marsh have made landfall in southern New England in the past 700 yr.” All seven of those storms occurred prior to 1960.

The early 1600s were the depth of the Little Ice Age, the coldest century of the past two millennia and possibly the coldest century since the cooling event of 8,200 years ago.

Anthony also posts a commentary by Caleb Shaw, who argues that the 11.2-foot storm surge from the 1821 Norfolk-Long Island Hurricane would likely have surpassed Sandy’s 13.8-foot surge had the same non-meteorological factors been present:

The people of the time reported a tide 13 feet above the ordinary high tide, but the best studies put the peak tide at 11.2 feet. Sandy reached 13.88 feet. . . .Simple arithmetic suggests the 1821 storm’s high water was 2.68 feet lower than Sandy’s. However the interesting thing about the 1821 storm is that it came barreling through at dead low tide. Tides in New York vary roughly 6 feet between low and high tides.

Therefore, to be fair, it seems you should add six feet to the 1821 storm, if you want to compare that storm with Sandy’s surge at high tide. This would increase the 1821 high water to 17.2 feet.

On top of that, you have to factor in the influence of the full moon during Sandy. That adds an extra foot to the high tide. Add an extra foot to the 1821 score and you have 18.2 feet.

Sandy was a category 1 hurricane before making landfall in the Northeast, which means many landfalling hurricanes, including some previous storms striking New York, had much higher wind speeds. What made Sandy a “superstorm” was the hurricane’s merging with a strong winter storm. MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel calls Sandy a “hybrid” storm:

Hurricanes and winter storms are powered by completely different energy sources. The hurricane is powered by the evaporation of sea water. Winter storms are powered by horizontal temperature contrasts in the atmosphere. So hybrid storms are able to tap into both energy sources. That’s why they can be so powerful.

NASA scientist Roy Spencer provides a similar explanation:

It is basically the “perfect storm” scenario of the chance timing of a tropical cyclone merging with an extra-tropical winter-type storm. Without Hurricane Sandy off the coast, the strong trough over the eastern U.S. (caused by cold Canadian air plunging southward) would have still led to a nor’easter type storm forming somewhere along the east coast of the U.S. But since Hurricane Sandy just happens to be in the right place at the right time to merge with that cyclone, we are getting a “superstorm”.

This merger of systems makes the whole cyclone larger in geographical extent than it normally would be. And this is what will make the surface pressures so low at the center of the storm.

The immense area of the storm is also what enabled the winds to pile up huge masses of water into the big waves that pummeled the East Coast.

Is there a causal connection between global warming and the formation of hybrid storms? Not enough research has been done on this phenomenon to say one way or the other, Emanuel contends:

We don’t have very good theoretical or modeling guidance on how hybrid storms might be expected to change with climate. So this is a fancy way of saying my profession doesn’t know how hybrid storms will respond to climate [change]. I feel strongly about that. I think that anyone who says we do know that is not giving you a straight answer. We don’t know. Which is not to say that they are not going to be influenced by climate, it’s really to say honestly we don’t know. We haven’t studied them enough. It’s not because we can’t know, it is just that we don’t know.

But surely, the magnitude of the damage wrought by Sandy is evidence something is amiss with the global climate system, right? Actually, no, argues hurricane expert Roger Pielke, Jr. in a Wall Street Journal column.

In studying hurricanes, we can make rough comparisons over time by adjusting past losses to account for inflation and the growth of coastal communities. If Sandy causes $20 billion in damage (in 2012 dollars), it would rank as the 17th most damaging hurricane or tropical storm (out of 242) to hit the U.S. since 1900 — a significant event, but not close to the top 10. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 tops the list (according to estimates by the catastrophe-insurance provider ICAT), as it would cause $180 billion in damage if it were to strike today. Hurricane Katrina ranks fourth at $85 billion.

To put things into even starker perspective, consider that from August 1954 through August 1955, the East Coast saw three different storms make landfall — Carol, Hazel and Diane — that in 2012 each would have caused about twice as much damage as Sandy.

With respect to hurricane damages, the chief and as yet only discernible difference between recent and earlier decades is that ”There are more people and more wealth in harm’s way.” So there is an ‘anthropogenic’ component, but not the sort about which warmists complain. “Partly this [increase in damages] is due to local land-use policies, partly to incentives such as government-subsidized insurance, but mostly to the simple fact that people like being on the coast and near rivers,” Pielke, Jr. explains.

The upshot for policymakers? Since “even under the assumptions of the IPCC changes to energy policies wouldn’t have a discernible impact on future disasters for the better part of a century or more,” the “only strategies that will help us effectively prepare for future disasters are those that have succeeded in the past: strategic land use, structural protection, and effective forecasts, warnings and evacuations. That is the real lesson of Sandy.”

 New York Times environment blogger Andrew Revkin comes to a similar conclusion:

You can have this endless debate about, “Was this storm our fault?”  But the thing I’ve been trying to write on Dot Earth the last few days is that the impacts of this storm are 100 percent our fault. In other words, we make decisions every day as human beings about where to live, what kind of building codes, what kinds of subsidies for coastal insurance, and that’s where there’s no debate about the anthropogenic influence. The fact that the tunnels filled showed that we in New York City, New York State and this country didn’t make it a high priority to gird ourselves against a superstorm.

If you follow global warming news at all, you’ve probably seen the NASA satellite images (above) many times. The images show the extent of Greenland surface ice melt on July 8 (left) and July 12 (right). In just a few days, the area of the ice sheet with surface melting increased from about 40% to 97%, including Summit Station, Greenland’s highest and coldest spot.

NASA took a drubbing from Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger at World Climate Report (“Illiteracy at NASA“) for describing the ice melt as “unprecedented” in the title of the agency’s press release. The word literally means without precedent, and properly refers to events that are unique and never happened before. In reality, as one of NASA’s experts points out in the press release, over the past 10,000 years, such events have occurred about once every 150 years:

“Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data.

Equating ’rare yet periodic’ with ‘unprecedented’ is incorrect and misleading. “But apparently,” comment Michaels and Knappenberger, “when it comes to hyping anthropogenic global warming (or at least the inference thereto), redefining English words in order to garner more attention is a perfectly acceptable practice.” New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin also chided NASA for an “inaccurate headline” and the associated “hyperventilating coverage,” but for a different reason: NASA provided “fodder for those whose passion or job is largely aimed at spreading doubt about science pointing to consequential greenhouse-driven warming.”

Enough on the spin. Let’s examine the real issues: (1) Did anthropogenic global warming cause the extraordinary increase in surface melting between July 8 and July 12? (2) How worried should we be about Greenland’s potential impact on sea-level rise?

The answer to question (1) is that greenhouse warming does not appear to be the cause. Revkin links to a graph that shows similar melting events at Summit Station not only in 1889 but also in Medieval times, centuries before the advent of SUVs and coal-fired power plants.

NASA, moreover, ascribes the rapid expansion in surface ice melt to a high pressure blocking pattern, the same phenomenon that produced the recent heat wave and drought in the U.S. Midwest. NASA reports:

This extreme melt event coincided with an unusually strong ridge of warm air, or a heat dome, over Greenland. The ridge was one of a series that has dominated Greenland’s weather since the end of May. “Each successive ridge has been stronger than the previous one,” said [Thomas] Mote [a climatologist at the University of Georgia]. This latest heat dome started to move over Greenland on July 8, and then parked itself over the ice sheet about three days later.

There is no known link between such blocking patterns and global climate change. It’s also worth noting that the dramatic surface ice melt began to reverse around July 14th. Greenland did not shift into a new climate regime.

If such events start to occur more frequently than once every 80-250 years, a global warming link would be more credible. As Prof Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey told BBC News: “While this is very unusual, as always we cannot attribute any individual extreme event to climate change: We will have to wait and see if more such events occur in the next few years to understand its significance for both the climate and the health of the ice sheet.”

On to question (2): How much ice is Greenland shedding, and what are the implications for global sea-level rise? A study published in Science magazine in 2006 by Scott Luthcke of NASA and colleagues used satellite gravity measurements to estimate annual net ice loss in Greenland from 2003 to 2005. The researchers estimated that the ice sheet gained 55 gigatons per year from snowfall at higher elevations and lost 155 gigatons per year at lower elevations, yielding a net annual ice loss of 101 gigatons. That translates into an annual loss of 27 cubic miles of ice per year, or 2,700 cubic miles per century. Sounds huge — until you compare it to Greenland’s total ice mass. The Greenland Ice Sheet holds 706,000 cubic miles of ice. So at the 2003-2005 ice loss rate, Greenland will lose less than 4/10th of 1% of its ice mass in the 21st century. Apocalypse not.

Pat Michaels reviews a more recent gravity measurement study (Wu. et al. 2010, published in NatureGeoscience) that estimates ice mass balances in both Greenland and Antarctica from 2002 to 2008. Similar to the Luthcke study, the Wu team finds that Greenland’s net ice loss is 104 gigatons per year. They also estimate that Antarctica is losing 87 gigatons per year. What does it mean for sea-level rise? Pat comments:

It takes about 37.4 gigatons of ice loss to raise the global sea level 0.1 millimeter—four hundredths of an inch. In other words, ice loss from Greenland is currently contributing just over one-fourth of a millimeter of sea level rise per year, or one one-hundreth of an inch.  Antarctica’s contribution is just under one-fourth of a millimeter per year.  So together, these two regions—which contain 99% of all the land ice on earth—are losing ice at a rate which leads to an annual sea level rise of one half of one millimeter per year. This is equivalent to a bit less than 2 hundredths of an inch per year.  If this continues for the next 90 years, the total sea level rise contributed by Greenland and Antarctica by the year 2100 will amount to less than 2 inches.

Couple this with maybe 6-8 inches from the fact that the ocean rises with increasing temperatures, and 2-3 inches from melting of other land-based ice, and you get a sum total of about one foot of additional rise by century’s end.

An additional foot of sea level rise is less than a third the amount (“more than a meter“) forecast by a group of alarmist scientists calling themselves the “Copenhagan Consensus.” It is small potatoes compared to the 18-20 feet of sea-level rise Al Gore warned us about in An Inconvenient Truth. An additional foot of sea level rise is about twice the amount the world has experienced since 1880. There were surely costs associated with sea-level rise in the 20th century, but as a factor affecting public health and welfare it was so trivial most people never noticed. Our wealthier, more mobile, and more technologically advanced children’s children’s children should be able to adapt to 12 inches of sea-level rise and do just fine.

Over at World Climate Report, the indefatigable Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger review a new study updating National Climate Data Center (NCDC) data on U.S. State climate extremes. I’ll cut right to the chase. The paper, “Evaluating Statewide Climate Extremes for the United States,” published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, finds that far more State-wide all-time-high temperature records were set in the 1930s than in recent decades.

From Pat and Chip’s review:

Despite the 24/7 caterwauling, only two new state records—South Carolina and Georgia—are currently under investigation. And, looking carefully at Shein et al. dataset, there appears to be a remarkable lack of all-time records in recent years. This is particularly striking given the increasing urbanization of the U.S. and the consequent “non climatic” warming that creeps into previously pristine records. . . .

Notice that the vast majority of the all-time records were set more than half a century ago and that there are exceedingly few records set within the past few decades. This is not the picture that you would expect if global warming from greenhouse gas emissions were the dominant forcing of the characteristics of our daily weather. Instead, natural variability is still holding a strong hand.

The chart below shows the number of State heat records and the year in which they were set. (When the same all-time high occurs in two or more years in the same State, each of those years gets a fraction of one point.)

“I’m not saying it is global warming, but it’s what global warming would look like. It’s consistent with the kind of weather climate scientists predict will become more frequent and severe as greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere increase.”

“It,” in the preceding, refers to the persistent heat wave affecting the Mid-Atlantic region and the derecho that uprooted trees, downed power lines, and deprived nearly a million households in the D.C. metro area of electricity and air conditioning. Warmists, or most of them, know they cannot actually link a particular weather event to global warming, but they’d like you to make the connection anyway.

This is standard rhetorical fare whenever extreme weather strikes somebody, somewhere on the planet. A commenter on Georgia Institute of Technology Prof. Judith Curry’s blog notes the resemblance to an old court-room trick:

Kind of like a lawyer asking a improper question and then withdrawing it, because all s/he really wanted was to put the idea in the jury’s mind.  

In her blog, Prof. Curry discusses an article by AP reporter Seth Borenstein titled, “This U.S. summer is ‘what global warming looks like’.” Mr. Borenstein interviewed 15 climate scientists in connection with the story, including Curry, yet did not include her responses to his questions in the article. How convenient! A few excerpts from their exchange:

SB: Can you characterize what’s going in the US in terms of a future/present under climate change? Is it fair to say this is what other scientists been talking about?

JC:  As global average temperature increases, you can expect periodically there to be somewhere on the globe where weather patterns conspire to produce heat waves that are unusual relative to previous heat waves. However, there have been very few events say in the past 20 years or so that have been unprecedented say since 1900.

* * *

SB:  This seems to be only US? Is it fair to make a big deal, since this is small scale and variability and is only US? However in past years, especially in late 1990s and early 2000s, the US seemed to be less affected? So what should we make of it?

JC:  Right now, this is only the U.S. Recall, 2010 saw the big heat wave in Russia (whereas in the U.S. we had a relatively moderate summer, except for Texas). Note, the southern hemisphere (notably Australia and New Zealand) is having an unusually cold winter.

* * *

SB:  What about natural variability? Are other scientists just making too much of what is normal weather variability?

JC: We saw these kinds of heat waves in the 1930s, and those were definitely not caused by greenhouse gases. Weather variability changes on multidecadal time scales, associated with the large ocean oscillations. I don’t think that what we are seeing this summer is outside the range of natural variability for the past century. In terms of heat waves, particularly in cities, urbanization can also contribute to the warming (the so-called urban heat island effect).

Data on hurricanes also confirm Dr. Curry’s point. Al Gore and others opined that 2004-2005 marked a shift to a new climate regime of increasingly powerful and destructive hurricanes. Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University finds that global tropical cyclone frequency has declined slightly from 1970 to the present, while global tropical accumulated cyclone energy (a measure of hurricane strength) has declined significantly since 2006.

Global Tropical Cyclone Frequency

Global Tropical Cycle ACE

Meteorologist Anthony Watts notes that the drought afflicting the U.S. Southwest and Midwest today is much less severe than the drought of the 1930s, before greenhouse gas emissions could have had much effect on global climate:

The 1930s drought was itself less severe than some that occurred in pre-industrial times. Observes the National Climate Data Center:

Longer records show strong evidence for a drought [in the 16th century] that appears to have been more severe in some areas of central North America than anything we have experienced in the 20th century, including the 1930s drought. Tree-ring records from around North America document episodes of severe drought during the last half of the 16th century. Drought is reconstructed as far east as Jamestown, Virginia, where tree rings reflect several extended periods of drought that coincided with the disappearance of the Roanoke Colonists, and difficult times for the Jamestown colony. These droughts were extremely severe and lasted for three to six years, a long time for such severe drought conditions to persist in this region of North America. Coincident droughts, or the same droughts, are apparent in tree-ring records from Mexico to British Columbia, and from California to the East Coast …

The good news is that, whatever effect global warming may have on weather patterns, death and death rates related to extreme weather declined by 93% and 98%, respectively, since 1900.

Source: Indur Goklany, Global Death Toll from Extreme Weather Events Declining

As Goklany explains, these decreases in weather-related mortality are due in large part to the very fossil fuel-based economic activities — electric power generation, motorized transportation, and mechanized agriculture – that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

The policy implication is exactly the opposite of what the scientists who talk like lawyers want us to believe. In Goklany’s words:

Reducing these emissions through efforts to make fossil fuel energy scarcer and more expensive could, therefore, be counterproductive in humanity’s efforts to limit death and disease from not only such [extreme weather] events but also other, far more significant sources of adversity.

Anthony Watts’s indispensable Web site, Watts Up with That?, has a trove of hard-hitting commentaries on climate scientist Peter Gleick’s theft and publication of the Heartland Institute’s fund-raising documents and apparent forgery of a “confidential” climate strategy memo. Gleick earlier this week confessed to stealing the documents, but not to fabricating the strategy memo, although textual and other evidence point to him as the culprit.

Gleick, who described his conduct as a “serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics,” has resigned from his post as Chair of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Task Force on Scientific Integrity. He nonetheless tried to blame the victim, claiming “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”

Yep, it’s the small underfunded band of free market think tanks who are stifling the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the National Academy of Sciences and their numerous brethren overseas, the European Environment Agency, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the EPA, NRDC, Greenpeace, etc. etc. Heartland invited Gleick to attend a public event and debate climate change just days before he stole the documents. Gleick turned down the invitation. Yet Gleick has the chutzpah to plead ”frustration” at those trying to “prevent this debate.”

Among the key posts on Anthony’s site to check out: Joe Bast’s Skype interview with the Wall Street Journal; Dr. Willis Eschenbach’s Open Letter to Dr. Linda Gunderson, who succeeds Gleick as Chair of the AGU Scientific Integrity Task Force; and Megan McCardle’s column in The Atlantic reviewing among other things evidence fingering Gleick as the author of the fake strategy memo.

In his Skype interview with the Wall Street Journal, Joe Bast explains the similarity between Climategate and Fakegate:

We call it Fakegate after ‘faked document.’ We think that this event, very similar to Climategate, documented how desperate these scientists are. How they are willing to stoop to very low levels in order to advance their agenda. How they’re not really interested in debate at all, they’re interested in shutting down debate, shutting down institutions like the Heartland Institute that take a different point of view.

Noting that the Climategate scientists stonewalled Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to prevent independent researchers from checking their data and methods, Joe also explains why there is no inconsistency in applauding the release of the Climategate emails and condemning Gleick’s theft of the Heartland documents:

Now it’s been pointed out that maybe we’re hypocritical to complain that documents were stolen from us and yet we quoted from the documents that were taken from the scientists, the Climategate event. I think it’s very different. The Heartland Institute is a private organization, we’re not a public organization, and we’re not subject to FOIA requests. The documents that were taken from us don’t show any scheming, any kind of dishonest transactions, any attempt to suppress debate. Just the opposite, it’s an open plan that we write about all the time, put on our Web site, put it in newsletters, to our donors, all of that information was there. The purpose of stealing our documents was very specific. It was to expose our donors and to create a fraudulent narrative about why we do what we do. That’s very different from the Climategate situation.

For more on this topic, see my post yesterday on GlobalWarming.Org.

Willis Eschenbach’s Open Letter to Dr. Linda Gunderson urges the AGU’s new chair on scientific integrity not to trivialize or make excuses for Gleick’s misconduct lest the candid world conclude that the “rot” of “noble cause corruption” is so deep in the climate science community that it cannot be rooted out. A few pearls:

Next, let me put it to you straight. As Dr. Gleick’s demise for wire fraud is just the latest demonstration, far too many climate scientists have all the scientific integrity of a desperate grifter whose con is going badly wrong. Consider for example the response from Dr. Gleick’s supporters to his actions, who in many cases have lauded him as a “whistleblower”, and some of whom stop just short of proposing him for climate sainthood.

So my question for you is this: what are you planning to do about this abysmal state of affairs?

Make no mistake. If Peter Gleick walks away from this debacle free of expulsion, sanction, or censure from the AGU, without suffering any further penalties, your reputation and the reputation of the AGU will forever join his on the cutting room floor. People are already laughing at the spectacle of the chair of a task force on scientific integrity getting caught with his entire arm in the cookie jar. You have one, and only one, chance to stop the laughter.

Because if your Task Force doesn’t have the bal … the scientific integrity to take up the case of its late and unlamented commander as its very first order of business, my Spidey-sense says that it will be forever known as the “AGU Task Farce on Scientific Integrity”. You have a clear integrity case staring you in the face. If you only respond to Dr. Gleick’s reprehensible actions with vague platitudes about “the importance of …”, if the Task Force’s only contribution is mealy-mouthed mumblings about how “we deplore …” and “we are disappointed …”, I assure you that people will continue to point and laugh at that kind of spineless pretense of scientific integrity.

Folks are fed up with climate scientists who lie, cheat, and steal to attack their scientific opponents, and who then walk away without the slightest action being taken by other scientists. As long as there are no repercussions from the scientific community for the kind of things Dr. Gleick has done, mainstream climate scientists will continue to do them. Indeed, Dr. Gleick’s own actions were no doubt greatly encouraged by the fact that you noble scientists were so full of bul … of scientific integrity that you all let the Climategate un-indicted co-conspirators walk away scot-free, without even asking them the important questions, much less getting answers to those major issues.

You have the opportunity to actually take a principled stand here, Dr. Gundersen, and I cannot overemphasize the importance of you doing so. Dr. Gleick’s kind of unethical skullduggery in the name of science has ruined the reputation of the entire field of climate science. The rot of “noble cause corruption” is well advanced in the field, and it will not stop until people just like you quit looking the other way and pretending it doesn’t exist. I had hoped that some kind of repercussions for scientific malfeasance would be one of the outcomes of Climategate, but people just ignored that part. This one you can’t ignore.

Megan McCardle, reflecting on her career as a journalist, wonders what could possibly motivate a scientist of Gleick’s stature to jeopardize his career for such small potential gains:

The very, very best thing that one can say about this [Gleick's theft and publication of the Heartland documents] is that this would be an absolutely astonishing lapse of judgement for someone in their mid-twenties, and is truly flabbergasting coming from a research institute head in his mid-fifties.  Let’s walk through the thought process:

You receive an anonymous memo in the mail purporting to be the secret climate strategy of the Heartland Institute.  It is not printed on Heartland Institute letterhead, has no information identifying the supposed author or audience, contains weird locutions more typical of Heartland’s opponents than of climate skeptics, and appears to have been written in a somewhat slapdash fashion.  Do you:

A.  Throw it in the trash

B.  Reach out to like-minded friends to see how you might go about confirming its provenance

C.  Tell no one, but risk a wire-fraud conviction, the destruction of your career, and a serious PR blow to your movement by impersonating a Heartland board member in order to obtain confidential documents.

As a journalist, I am in fact the semi-frequent recipient of documents promising amazing scoops, and depending on the circumstances, my answer is always “A” or “B”, never “C”.

It’s a gross violation of journalistic ethics, though perhaps Gleick would argue that he’s not a journalist–and in truth, it’s hard to feel too sorry for Heartland, given how gleefully they embraced the ClimateGate leaks.  So leave ethics aside: wasn’t he worried that impersonating board members in order to obtain confidential material might be, I don’t know, illegal?  Forget about the morality of it: the risk is all out of proportion to the possible reward.

I suspect that Gleick’s “frustration” was actually just hatred — a notoriously bad counselor.

McCardle summarizes evidence indicating that Gleick forged the fake strategy memo, including:

The other thing one must note is that his story is a little puzzling.  We know two things about the memo:

1.  It must have been written by someone who had access to the information in the leaked documents, because it uses precise figures and frequent paraphrases.

2.  It was probably not written by anyone who had intimate familiarity with Heartland’s operations, because it made clear errors about the Koch donations–the amount, and the implied purpose.  It also hashed the figures for a sizable program, and may have made other errors that I haven’t identified.

Did someone else gain access to the documents, write up a fake memo, and then snail mail that memo to Dr. Gleick?  Why didn’t they just send him everything?

If an insider was the source of the memo, as some have speculated, why did it get basic facts wrong? (I have heard a few suggestions that this was an incredibly elaborate sting by Heartland.  If so, they deserve a prominent place in the supervillain Hall of Fame.)

Why did the initial email to the climate bloggers claim that Heartland was the source of all the documents, when he couldn’t possibly have known for sure that this was where the climate strategy memo came from?

Why was this mailed only to Gleick?  Others were mentioned in the memo, but none of them seem to have been contacted–I assume that after a week of feeding frenzy, anyone else who was mailed a copy would have said something by now.

How did his anonymous correspondent know that Gleick would go to heroic lengths to obtain confidential material which confirmed the contents, and then distribute the entire package to the climate blogs?

How did the anonymous correspondent get hold of the information in the memo?

If he didn’t write the memo, how did [Steven] Mosher [see my Update in yesterday's post] correctly identify his involvement?  A good portion of Mosher’s argument was based on the similarity in writing styles. Is this an amazing coincidence?  Was the author of the memo engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to destroy Gleick?

Finally, McCardle strikes a note similar to Eschenbach’s, warning scientists that lying in what they believe is a good cause is bound to discredit both them and their cause:

Gleick has done enormous damage to his cause and his own reputation, and it’s no good to say that people shouldn’t be focusing on it.  If his judgement is this bad, how is his judgement on matters of science?  For that matter, what about the judgement of all the others in the movement who apparently see nothing worth dwelling on in his actions?

When skeptics complain that global warming activists are apparently willing to go to any lengths–including lying–to advance their worldview, I’d say one of the movement’s top priorities should be not proving them right.  And if one rogue member of the community does something crazy that provides such proof, I’d say it is crucial that the other members of the community say “Oh, how horrible, this is so far beyond the pale that I cannot imagine how this ever could have happened!” and not, “Well, he’s apologized and I really think it’s pretty crude and opportunistic to make a fuss about something that’s so unimportant in the grand scheme of things.”