Nowadays, the only reason to watch movies in theaters is to see spectacle. What’s the point of going to see small, domestic melodramas on the big screen? It is reserved for larger than life narratives, characters, settings–like theater for classical Greeks, who loved to see the high and mighty fall, or the arena for decadent Romans, who salivated at the smell of blood. James Cameron’s Avatar delivers one of the most magnificent cinematic spectacle since the parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956), or the otherworldliness of Star Wars (1977). The devil is in the details: the ecosystem of its alternate world is richly textured, the color palette pure eye-candy, the fantastic creatures rendered as expressively as Gollum. The blue-skinned Na’vi are an amalgam of postcolonial otherness–Native American Indians/Maasai warriors with panther-like visages. The avatars which allow humans to live vicariously like the Na’vi–in an organic form of The Matrix’s (1999) virtual reality–represent the final fantasy for the Western frontiersman, i.e., to experience the wilderness like the natives. Avatar, however, is not The Sheltering Sky (1990), or, for that matter, Another Sky (1954). Here, alterity is quickly reduced (more like bulldozed) to the same.

Na’vi: the Western’s “Other” all lumped together.

It seems that Cameron invested all his creative mojo in the CGI and left the story and character development to hacks. Oh, wait, he is the screenwriter! No wonder the plot is titanically derivative. The concept is basically rehashed from the eco-cartoon FernGully (1992) (I think they should sue!), but the tree sap here is thicker with Green and anti-war platitudes. Cardboard-box villains deliver unbelievably coarse lines such as “failure of diplomacy”, “we will fight terror with terror”, “some sort of shock-and-awe campaign”. Give me a break! Spare us the tedious liberal sanctimoniousness. If Cameron had an ear for satire the same lines could have actually been made to be funny, like in the ebullient celebration of fascism of Starship Troopers (1997).

With the perfection of motion-capture technology–which seems to be the (yawn) main point of the movie–perhaps Cameron can pick up a few story-telling tips from ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker (2008)) for his next scifi war flick.

FernGully = Pandora, Fairies = Na’vi, Crysta = Neytiri, Zak = Jake, Hexxus = Col. Quaritch. Hey, there’s even a bat!

Kafkaesque vermins: In Starship Troopers, there is a one world military-industrial government, and the aliens are not peaceful critters of the forest. They are repugnant bugs–in other words, totally “Other”. Does this mean we can completely eradicate them? Ummm… yeah!

Freedom of Information: “FOIA said…”

It was not incidental that the hacker (sounds more like a whistleblower) went by the user name FOIA. The most disturbing revelation that emerged from the CRU emails was the deliberate effort, notably by chief Phil Jones, to obstruct the disclosure of scientific information–to the extent of deleting data–that form the basis of their peer reviewed publications.

• If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR [intellectual property rights] to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them. (from email 1106338806.txt)
• The two MMs [McIntyre and McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. (from email 1107454306.txt)
• PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act ! (from email 1109021312.txt)
• Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4 [IPCC 4th Assessment Report]? Keith will do likewise. (from email 1212063122.txt)
• When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA [Climate Audit] was all about. (from email 1228330629.txt)

The story behind these emails is given context by Willis Eschenbach, an amateur scientist, who originally requested climate data from CRU under the Freedom of Information Act. He pieces together quotes from the leaked emails with relevant official correspondences portraying Jones’ determination to stonewall the release of information. Steve McIntyre, a retired Canadian businessman who runs the Climate Audit blog, has campaigned tenaciously for transparency of data, code, and statistical methods that produced the emblematic “hockey stick” temperature reconstructions widely disseminated by IPCC. Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, who co-authored the paper with McIntyre that raised questions about the “hockey stick” graph, has narrated their frustration with Mann and Nature regarding access to original data and methods. (Nature, in its recent editorial, clearly states which side of the Climategate issue they’re on. Would it still be possible to publish papers skeptical of the current “consensus” view in this journal?)

• Willis Eschenbach’s “Willis vs. The CRU: A History of (FOI) Evasion”
• Ross McKitrick’s “Our Dealings with Nature“
• Bishop Hill’s “Yamal Implosion” relates Steve McIntyre’s efforts to get hold of Keith Briffa’s data from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B regarding the Yamal data set used in temperature reconstructions.
• Bishop Hill’s “Caspar and the Jesus paper” relates how Caspar Amman (contributor to RealClimate) refused to provide data and code for a Climate Change paper that would be included in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in support of the reproducibility of Mann’s “hockey stick” graph.

A US Congressional hearing on the “hockey stick” graph, conducted by Edward Wegman, chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, noted in its report the resistance of Mann to divulge data and code that would allow the examination of his statistical procedures (bold emphasis mine).

• Because of the lack of full documentation of their data and computer code, we have not been able to reproduce their research. (p. 4)
• The papers of Mann et al. in themselves are written in a confusing manner, making it difficult for the reader to discern the actual methodology and what uncertainty is actually associated with these reconstructions. Vague terms such as “moderate certainty” (Mann et al. 1999) give no guidance to the reader as to how such conclusions should be weighed. While the works do have supplementary websites, they rely heavily on the reader’s ability to piece together the work and methodology from raw data. This is especially unsettling when the findings of these works are said to have global impact, yet only a small population could truly understand them. Thus, it is no surprise that Mann et al. claim a misunderstanding of their work by McIntyre and McKitrick. (p. 26)
• The ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of temperature graphic dramatically illustrated the global warming issue and was adopted by the IPCC and many governments as the poster graphic. The graphics’ prominence together with the fact that it is based on incorrect use of PCA [Principal Component Analysis] puts Dr. Mann and his co-authors in a difficult face-saving position. We have been to Michael Mann’s University of Virginia website and downloaded the materials there. Unfortunately, we did not find adequate material to reproduce the MBH98 [graph] materials. (p. 28)

Peer Review By Social Networking

What emerges from the leaked emails in Eschenbach’s chronological account is a picture of a close-knit scientific community that feels it has come under siege. Indeed, McIntyre noted in his blog that in earlier dealings with Jones, he was surprised by the promptness of the response and the extra effort… put into the response (Climate Audit, A 2002 Request to CRU). Jones became more hostile when he realized what they were up to (i.e., checking his pronouncements), and famously wrote in 2005 to Warwick Hughes, a free lance earth scientist from Australia: Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. Even the Wegman Report remarked that Mann’s responses [to investigators' questions and requests for information] had something of a confrontational tone (p. 7).

Thus, what we hear in the leaked emails are shrill voices of the beleaguered like that of Stanford’s Stephen Schneider:

This continuing pattern of harassment, as Ben [Santer] rightly puts it in my opinion, in the name of due diligence is in my view an attempt to create a fishing expedition to find minor glitches or unexplained bits of code–which exist in nearly all our kinds of complex work–and then assert that the entire result is thus suspect. Our best way to deal with this issue of replication is to have multiple independent author teams, with their own codes and data sets, publishing independent work on the same topics–like has been done on the “hockey stick”. That is how credible scientific replication should proceed… PS Please do not copy or forward this email. (from email 1231257056.txt)

It must indeed be vexing for these experts–and beneath them–to have to answer to the members of the congregation who question their findings outside the formal scientific channels of peer review. This is reflected in the vicious tone at RealClimate, where it is not beneath the authors to personally attack such critics with insinuations of lack of expertise, academic pedigree, or institutional affiliations.

• A number of spurious criticisms regarding the Mann et al (1998) proxy-based temperature reconstruction have been made by two individuals McIntyre and McKitrick (McIntyre works in the mining industry, while McKitrick is an economist [i.e., not climatologists working in dendrochronology]). (in False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction)
• … Another journal which (quite oddly) also published the Soon et al study, “Energy and Environment”, is not actually a scientific journal at all but a social science journal. (in Peer Review: A Necessary But Not Sufficient Condition)
• Who should we believe? Al Gore with his “facts” and “peer reviewed science” or the practioners of “Blog Science“? Surely, the choice is clear…. So along comes Steve McIntyre, self-styled slayer of hockey sticks… (in Hey Ya! (mal))
• …Dr. Michael Mann. He has a Ph.D in Geology and Geophysics. He is no advocate, but an actual scientist with a proven track record. What is [Michael] Crichton? An author. A bit more informed than an ordinary person, maybe, but no scientist, that’s for sure! (a reader comment in Michael Crichton’s State of Confusion II: Return of the Science)

The subtle message in these insinuations is that the academic provenance of experts guarantee the reliability of their truth-statements. Their authority is reinforced by virtue of implied access to institutional influence, research funding, powerful observational tools, and journal publishing, i.e., the “legitimate” forms scientific discourse–all unavailable to the ordinary non-expert. None of this, however, deters Steve McIntyre, who applies mathematical rigor to his persnickety “auditing” of the numbers the experts put out. He has managed to frazzle not just a few goliaths in the field by his persistence to get to the bottom of things. He did it to verify for himself the case for action on climate change, to which he discoverd that, [at] the beginning [he] innocently assumed there would be due diligence for all this stuff… [so] often [his] mouth would drop, when [he] realized no one had really looked into it. (from Revenge of the Climate Laymen, Wall Street Journal)

The condescension towards McIntyre and his Climate Audit blog, and the in-over-his-head scoffing at his efforts to contest published results, only serves to demonstrate the insularity and parochialism (to borrow Camille Paglia’s favorite derision of academics at Yale) within the climate change advocates.

James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, has dismissed him as a “court jester.” Mr. Mann replied to an emailed query about Mr. McIntyre by decrying “every specious contrarian claim and innuendo against me, my colleagues, and the science of climate change itself.”

Others are more thick-skinned: “You mention his name in my community, people just smile. It’s a one-liner to get a laugh out of a group of climate scientists,” affirms Stanford University’s Stephen Schneider. (from Revenge of the Climate Laymen, Wall Street Journal)

His due diligence, however, resulted in a US Congressional review of the “hockey stick” graph, culminating in the Wegman Report. To me, what is actually revealing in that report is the statistical analysis of Michael Mann’s social network that indicates possible cross-contamination of influence in peer review.

Figure 5.3 of the Wegman Report (p. 41): The classic social network view of the Mann co-authors… Michael Mann [upper left] is his own group since he is a co-author with each of the other 42. [Blogger's note: CRU's Jones and Briffa are in the lower left (yellow).]

In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface…

It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. (p. 4)

Consensus or Silencing of Dissent?

The bile at RealClimate, however, is not only reserved for the laymen. Scientists who hold contrarian views are held suspect to sinister (e.g., oil-industry-greased) motivations–an approach I find distasteful in a blog by scientists who purport to discuss the science of climate change in a rational and open forum. Why the need to smear your opponents if the science is indeed settled and the evidence is on your side?

• At first sight this may look like a scientific conference – especially to those who are not familiar with the activities of the Heartland Institute, a front group for the fossil fuel industry that is sponsoring the conference. (in What if you held a conference, and no (real) scientists came?)
• A casual reader would be led to infer that [Richard] Lindzen [of MIT] has received no industry money for his services. But that would be wrong. He has in fact received a pretty penny from industry. But this isn’t for research. Rather it is for his faithful advocacy of a fossil fuel industry-friendly point of view. (in Lindzen in Newsweek)
• …S. Fred Singer [emeritus at UVa] and his merry band of contrarian luminaries (financed by the notorious “Heartland Institute” we’ve commented on previously) served up a similarly dishonest ‘assessment’ of the science of climate change… (in Not the IPCC (“NIPCC”) Report)

To me, the most bizarre defense of accelerated global warming and its anthropogenic cause is the appeal to scientific “consensus”. The sky-is-falling scenario crystallized in the IPCC reports is sold to the public gift-wrapped in the dazzling reputations of its stellar experts and its oodles of evidence in peer reviewed publications. How can a puny member of the public not help but relinquish assent at such oracular certainty without feeling ashamed of being held preposterous, intellectually unsophisticated, or, worse, callous to the moral imperative to save the planet? “Consensus” has thus become the official party-line of climate change rabble rousers.

Richard Lindzen of MIT, one of the most outspoken global warming deniers in academia, who participated in the IPCC’s First Assessment Report, examined the nature of the “consensus” that congealed around human-induced global warming and used to push it as a forefront political agenda.

The notion of “scientific unanimity” is currently intimately tied to the Working Group I report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued in September 1990… Working Group I nominally deals with climate science. Approximately 150 scientists contributed to the report… Many governments have agreed to use that report as the authoritative basis for climate policy… Methodologically, the report is deeply committed to reliance on large models, and within the report models are largely verified by comparison with other models… [The] body of the report is extremely ambiguous, and the caveats are numerous… [but the] summary [for policy makers] largely ignores the uncertainty in the report and attempts to present the expectation of substantial warming as firmly based science. The summary was published as a separate document, and, it is safe to say that policymakers are unlikely to read anything further. On the basis of the summary, one frequently hears that “hundreds of the world’s greatest climate scientists from dozens of countries all agreed that.|.|.|.” It hardly matters what the agreement refers to, since whoever refers to the summary insists that it agrees with the most extreme scenarios (which, in all fairness, it does not). I should add that the climatology community, until the past few years, was quite small and heavily concentrated in the United States and Europe. (from Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus, CATO Institute, Vol.15, No. 2, Spring 1992)

Something in me resists the epistemological dogmatism and ethical puritanism that underlies the appeal to scientific consensus, and the scare tactics used to talk down to the public (e.g., Al Gore’s travelling slideshow) in order to arm-twist us into political action. Michael Crichton, author of popular science fiction, a non-expert in climatology (but who is a medical doctor), is skeptical about this (or any) scientific consensus.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

And furthermore, the consensus of scientists has frequently been wrong. As they were wrong when they believed, earlier in my lifetime, that the continents did not move. So we must remember the immortal words of Mark Twain, who said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” (from The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming)

Time Magazine cover stories on the global cooling alarm in the 1970’s.

Crichton’s remark reflects a pure vision of science that is untainted with politics. It has been demonstrated in the science of climate change that it is in fact not the case in practice. Jean-François Lyotard in the 1970’s described the messy relationship between science, politics, and economics.

The game of science becomes the game of the rich, in which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right. It is thus that an equation between wealth, efficiency and truth is established… Scientists, technicians and instruments are bought not to find truth, but to augment power. Since performativity increases the ability to produce proof, it also increases the ability to be right; the technical criterion cannot fail to influence the truth criterion. (from Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism)

With so much money funneled into modern scientific research, it is now, more than ever, necessary for the non-experts, i.e., the public, to be skeptical of pronouncements coming from scientists, especially if these prop up arguments used in coercive policy-making. We should keep the feet of these global warming scientists close to the fire.

“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps…”

So begins a seemingly benign comment at a global warming skeptic’s website (the Air Vent) that blew open the scandal about ethical misbehavior (others are calling criminal) within a group of leading scientists who supply critical data to the IPCC. The comment offered “a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents” that can be downloaded from an anonymous ftp server in Russia. The 61 MB mother lode, consisting of about 1000 emails and 3000 documents representing over a decade of correspondence between leading US and British climate change scientists (The Associated Press), was a skeptic’s wet dream. Leak of the damaging emails, hacked from the Climate Reasearch Unit at the University of East Anglia, seem to have been timed in order to undermine the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Breaking news of the email hacking at Russia Today. CRU at East Anglia has since admitted that the emails were genuine.

There is nothing else I can add to this story–the emails have already been put under microscopic scrutiny by ‘warmers’, ’skeptics’, and ‘deniers’ alike–except to provide a resource of links to the reader who wishes to get to the bottom of things. Is there a worldwide conspiracy? Probably not. BUT within this group of scientists, who are influential in policy-making, there is strong evidence of collusion to suppress critical information, ideological bias in the treatment of data, undermining of the peer review process, and condescension to the public.

First, the hacked email files can be accessed from the following sites:

• Searchable database at Opinion Times
• Searchable and tagged database at Climategate Document Database

Here are some of what have been discovered in the hacked emails from the blogosphere:

• [Some] of the most astonishing in updates below–emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. (Andrew Bolt, heraldsun.com.au)
• But perhaps the most damaging revelations… are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause. (James Delingpole, Telegraph.co.uk)
• To me, the main issue is the frontal attack on the heart of science, which is transparency… The recent release of the hacked emails from CRU has provided me with an amazing insight into the attempt by Steve McIntyre, myself, and others from CA [Climate Audit] and elsewhere to obtain the raw station data from Phil Jones at the CRU… (Willis Eschenbach, Willis vs. The CRU: A History of (FOI) Evasion)
• [A] compendium of programming code segments that show comments by the programmer that suggest places where data may be corrected, modified, adjusted, or busted. (Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That?)
• This scandal goes beyond scientific journals and into other media used to promote the global warming dogma. For example, RealClimate.org has been billed as an objective website at which global warming activists and skeptics can engage in an impartial debate. But in the CRU e-mails, the global warming establishment boasts that RealClimate is in their pocket. (Robert Tracinski, Real Clear Politics)

Who’s Who in the Hacked Emails

“Hockey Stick” graph prominently featured in the Third Assessment Report TAR of the IPCC in 2001, showing accelerated global warming in the 20th century, based on Michael Mann’s paper in Nature.

[The emails'] authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated. What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (from Christopher Booker, Telegraph.co.uk, bold emphasis mine)

• Phil Jones, Director, Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia: I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report… Kevin and I will keep them out somehow–even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! (from email 1089318616.txt)
• Kevin Trenberth, Head of the Climate Analysis Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research: The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. (from email 1255352257.txt)
• Michael Mann, Director of Earth System Science Center, PennState. Referred to by Phil Jones in an email: …just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. (from email 942777075.txt)
• Tom Wigley, Senior scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division, NCAR: If you think that [James] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU [American Geophysical Union] channels to get him ousted [i.e., from the editorial board of Geophysical Research Letters]. (from email 1106322460.txt)
• Gavin Schmidt, Climate modeler, NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Referred to by Michael Mann regarding RealClimate: I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC [RealClimate] in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through… (from email 1139923663.txt)

Okay people move along, nothing to see here, you little lookyloos

Here’s the attempt at damage control from RealClimate, to which key figures in the emails, Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann, regularly contribute:

1. Nothing shocking, just business as usual in science.

There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy… [instead], there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

2. Smug appeal to the authority of experts and the truth-value of their research products.

[It’s] important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

3. It’s really not as bad as it looks.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”… Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all.

Trick or Travesty?

It is true that these are random emails, and that they can be easily taken out of context, as one blogger pointed out with regards to Kevin Trenberth’s now oft-cited “travesty” quote: The context is now clear. Trenberth is talking about the travesty of the observation system and our inability to see where the heat is going from year to year. It is well known and public that there are problems in recent years with the global climate observation system (AllegationAudit). But even ardent climate change advocate George Monbiot admits to the extent of damage and seriousness of the allegations that he called for Phil Jones’ resignation and review of published data (bold emphasis mine):

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed. (from George Monbiot, guardian.co.uk)

Phil Jones’ “trick” of hiding the decline was cursorily dismissed by RealClimate as simply a clever, rather than covert, way of dealing with problematic data. Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit–a blog dedicated to checking reported climate change data–painstakingly pieces together the time line of the emails and the history of temperature reconstructions used by IPCC: Climate scientists have complained that this email has been taken “out of context”. In this case, I’m not sure that it’s in their interests that this email be placed in context because the context leads right back to a meeting of IPCC authors in Tanzania, raising serious questions about the role of IPCC itself in “hiding the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction (Climate Audit, IPCC and the “Trick”).

This “apparent” truncation of data had been spotted and discussed at Climate Audit as far back as 2005: Post-1960 values of the Briffa MXD series are deleted from the IPCC TAR multiproxy spaghetti graph. These values trend downward in the original citation (Briffa [2000], see Figure 5), where post-1960 values are shown. The effect of deleting the post-1960 values of the Briffa MXD series is to make the reconstructions more “similar”. The truncation is not documented in IPCC TAR. In most cases, people would ask: who at IPCC truncated this series? why did they do so? who approved the truncation? what process was involved in approving the truncation ? (Climate Audit, A Strange Truncation of the Briffa MXD Series, bold emphasis mine)

• 10 Dec 2009: IPCC and the “Trick”
• 26 Nov 2009: The Trick
• 20 Nov 2009: Mike’s Nature trick
• 11 May 2007: The Maestro is in da house
• 26 Jun 2007: IPCC and the Briffa Deletions
• 15 May 2007: Swindle and the IPCC TAR Spaghetti Graph
• 1 May 2005: A Strange Truncation of the Briffa MXD Series

Michael Mann’s emails make it clear why the truncation was done:

This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably [sic] concensus [sic] viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series. (from email 0938018124.txt)

Otherwise, the skeptics have an [sic] field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates. I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder! (from email 0938018124.txt)

Now they tell us that the divergence problem is well-known all along in the paleoclimatology community, but was arbitrarily left out in the IPCC report because it is not well understood and requires further research: Those authors [Briffa, et al.] have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens (RealClimate, The CRU Hack). In other words, they are confident enough in the overall picture based on other temperature reconstructions/instrumental measurements (doubt is not scientifically justified) that they are willing to remove the anomaly to make the story easily digestible by the public and to avoid confrontation with skeptics.

Anomalies are often ignored in science in favor of reasonable albeit provisional theory in order to make progress (Kuhn). What is unique in climate change science is that the production of theories no longer belongs exclusively to academic fairy land–it is directly political because it is deployed with coercive force for policy-making, and informs the call for a global re-engineering of societies and economies. “Hiding the decline” is thus no longer merely a move in an epistemological game, but a technical move to augment power. Hence, it is legitimate to demand answers to: who at IPCC truncated this series? why did they do so? who approved the truncation? what process was involved in approving the truncation?

I am excited about what’s going on in recent Philippine cinema. I have not been this excited about our cinema for the longest time. Let’s see… since Lino Brocka’s Kapit Sa Patalim (1983), Ishmael Bernal’s Himala (1982), Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Karnal (1983), Mike de Leon’s Sister Stella L. (1984), Peque Gallaga’s Unfaithful Wife (1986), and Chito Roño’s Itanong Mo Sa Buwan (1988). After the People’s Power Revolution of 1986, and with the passing of Lino Brocka in 1991, Philippine cinema went into a deep coma that lasted two decades. Movie-making did not slacken–next to Bollywood and Hong Kong, the Philippines has perhaps the most vibrant movie industry in Asia–but directors stopped being auteurs, and produced stylistically generic, unengaging work, from cheap horror/fantasy flicks to belabored melodramas, abandoning the visceral and transgressive qualities of their breakthrough films.

Filmmakers still routinely blame stringent censorship, but, like it or not, the Marcos dictatorship was good to Philippine cinema–whether due to the urgency of the times, or the patronage of its delusional First Lady. Lino Brocka’s most intense social-realist films (Insiang, Jaguar, Bona) were made during the height of Martial Law, while Mike de Leon’s Batch ‘81, an allegorical indictment of fascism, was released just after its lifting. De Leon, the last auteur of that generation left standing has also been unproductive (perhaps because he remains uncompromising), turning out his last feature, a black-comedy on Jose Rizal, in 2000. Bayaning Third World, however, remains the most sophisticated take on the national hero’s biography that came out of the nationalistic craze of the Philippine Centennial. (It is also pee-in-your-pants funny!)

Raymond Red made interesting historical films in the ’90s (Bayani, Sakay), but these stiff period pieces sink with their studied gravitas compared to Peque Gallaga’s earlier, more violent and voluptuous take on Philippine history (Oro, Plata, Mata, Virgin Forest). Red did give us, for the record, our first win at Cannes for his short Anino (2002). Among the last Filipino arthouse films I saw were Lav Diaz’s 5-hour bladder-challenge Batang Westside (2001) during its Cinemanila premier, and Ramona Diaz’s Imelda (2003) after its eponymous subject’s court injunctions were lifted. In the US, I essentially remained out of the loop, and nursed my nostalgia for the ’80s golden age by renting Cinefilipino DVDs at Netflix.

Then came Brillante Mendoza’s contentious win at Cannes as best director for Kinatay. Roger Ebert called it an “unbearable experience” that forces him “to apologize to Vincent Gallo for calling The Brown Bunny the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival”. I myself was skeptical, knowing most movies we send off to these film fests are about Manila’s seedy sex trade, corrupt cops, and abject poverty in the slums. The film is indeed about a junkie prostitute, tortured and butchered (kinatay) by cops on the take, and the tabloid title does promise sensational gore. Yes, these are Philippine realities, but these are not all of Philippine reality. When would we produce such masters as Iran’s Majid Majidi (Children of Heaven, Color of Paradise, Baran, The Willow Tree) who depicts the condition of his people so lovingly in stories told with such delicacy?

Other critics were not as ruthless, but nonetheless reserved in their praises:

This rich vision of so much gloom, dim suspension, no action, no spectacle, no drama is a beautiful thing, something out of an avant-garde film dedicated to textures, subtle shifts in color, and spatial uncertainty of a sunless world… [The] rest of the movie is given as a handheld dedication to space—there, a porno theater, here, a sinister, anonymous police van traveling great distances at night for the purpose of terrible things, and later a torture house. But it is a space of obscurity, of uncertainty in a morally certain situation, and so the space, covered and run over again and again by the roving camera, takes on an abstraction nearly outside the story itself.

(from Daniel Kasman, The Auteurs)

Kinatay… is infinitely darker [than Serbis] but an equally strong depiction of modern-day life in the former American colony that some are comparing to Gasper [sic] Noe’s Irreversible… Mendoza is no gore-hound. He’s more serious than Noe. This is a fiercely moral and horribly unforgettable denunciation of societal corruption.

(from Sukhdev Sandhu, Telegraph.co.uk)

The split opinion makes me want to see the film even more. Comparison with Noe’s Irreversible is not such a scarlet letter. I get that movie. Yes, there was shocking violence as the whirling camera probed into depths of human baseness, and, yes, it’s hard to sit through the rape scene, but as the film progressed/regressed, as the photography settled, became more fluid, the earlier repugnance was redeemed by a most tender revelation at the end/beginning. I don’t think I have the stomach to watch this film again, but I will not dismiss its solid ideas, and the directorial decisions (if not taste) in its execution.

I digress. Mendoza’s win, and the critical attention Kinatay elicited, turned out to be just the tip of an iceberg that has been building up since 2006. All at once, a bewildering constellation of new Filipino filmmakers, with a growing body of work–none of which I have seen–came to my attention: Aureus Solito (Pisay, Ang pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros), Adolfo Alix (Manila, Adela, Batanes, Tambolista, Donsol), Pepe Diokno (Engkwentro), G.B. Sampedro (Astig–Mga Batang Kalye), Ralston Jover (Bakal Boys), Sherad Anthony Sanchez (Imburnal), John Torres (Todo todo teros), Jim Libiran (Tribu), Khavn de la Cruz (Maynila sa mga pangil ng dilim), and Raya Martin (Manila, Independencia, Now Showing, Autohystoria, Maicling pelicula nañg ysañg Indio Nacional). And it does not stop there: the international film festival circuit has also been enamored with this “new wave” in Filipino cinema, with special focus on these new crop of mostly young filmmakers, and retrospectives of past master Lino Brocka. Even Joey Gosiengfiao was honored with a retrospective in Paris–as the Filipino John Waters–with the showing of his camp classic Temptation Island.

Today, the 49-year-old Mr. Mendoza is the brightest star in what French film director and scriptwriter Rebecca Zlotowski calls the “constellation” of Philippines art-house film. Following Mr. Mendoza is a diverse band of mostly younger directors, ranging in age from early 20s to early 50s, who often collaborate and have helped confirm their country’s status as a darling of the international festival circuit over the past few years… “Despite the youth of most of these directors, they are making very mature cerebral radical films,” says Ms. Zlotowski… “The common denominator of all these films is their attention to social problems such as homosexuality, adoption, delinquency and poverty and their documentary style.” The Filipino filmmakers, she adds, “are actually contributing to the ongoing breaking down of the distinction between documentary and fiction” that is occuring in movies globally.

(from Emma-Kate Symons, Wall Street Journal)

Filipinos are known not to shy away from reality. And the Filipino reality is relaxed, accommodating, laidback… The Filipino filmmakers are not afraid of breaking rules, they are not restricted by the fear of not finding funding or a showplace for their work; they are in the fortunate position of being given the opportunity to give free rein to their imagination. That perhaps is what makes their films so original…

(from Aruna Vasudev, The Asian Angle)

This renaissance of sorts in Philippine cinema has been attributed to the new digital technology which at least solved the technical hurdles of filmmaking. “[Digital] technology means anyone can shoot a film,” says Raymond Red, who downplays the “revolution in Philippine cinema” as just a “revolution about technology” (from France 24 News). I disagree. In science, enabling technologies usher in scientific revolutions as much as groundbreaking theories, e.g., the invention of scanning probe microscopes in the 1980s paved the way for the current boom in nanotechnology, which was actually first described by Feynman as far back as the 1960s. As the prolific output within the last few years shows–and confirmed at least by the positive response from the international festival crowds–there is talent, craft, and vision latent in Philippine cinema that has been somewhat loosened by the genie of digital technology.

I was particularly impressed after watching a video interview of Raya Martin at the IX Festival Internacional de Cine de Las Palmas. Martin, who is being compared to Canada’s Guy Maddin (e.g., The Heart of the World), was very articulate about his filming process and theory, and had a profound grasp of Philippine film history. How refreshing to witness a very cerebral Filipino filmmaker (since Mike de Leon), which is almost a contradiction in terms, given the hysterical melodramas repeatedly shoved at us as fodder.

Cinema Scope: Why make a silent film, now?

Raya Martin: I just told someone how I become really excited whenever I see actualities and silent films. I think a silent film is how I really see cinema. It’s an exact transportation of time and space, and that there’s something about the purity of images, to see just the images themselves, moving, and understanding that what you’re seeing was a real space in a real time. In this essence it could be an issue of novelty, I’m thinking. We’re in an age where everyone’s in retrospection, including my generation, maybe because there’s no “looking forward” anymore. The old is the new new. I did this film as a “kid” with a mix of natural and illogical motivations: a craving for magic that I get from silent films, curiosity for information, interest in learning…

(from Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope)

In his website, Khavn de la Cruz describes himself cockily as “a very outspoken, experimental film maker with an unstoppable desire to explore and cross boundaries. Considered as the father of Philippine digital filmmaking, he is the most productive film maker in the Philippines and probably also far beyond.” There may be truth to those words. His film Maynila sa mga pangil ng dilim quotes and deconstructs two Brocka masterpieces Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag and Orapronobis. In an ironic turn, the film stars Bembol Roco who also played the central characters in the referenced Brocka films: as Julio Madiaga, a helpless victim of social injustice, and as Major Kontra, a vicious vigilante killer.

These examples signal a significant break with the past when cinema served as a mirror of social realities (under the Marcos regime) with the aim of inspiring people into political activism. There was no coy theorizing, reflexivity, technical playfulness, pastiche; the message was clear, and it was dead serious. Modern versus postmodern. Perhaps these are the signs of the times. Raymond Red hit the nail on the head by asking: now that anybody can make films, the next question to ask is “why [these young filmmakers] are making movies… [and] for whom are they making them”? These indie films still have a limited audience back home–partly due to draconian censorship, deficiency of commercial distribution, and, more importantly, lack of popular appeal. The last is the most crucial aspect; without an audience, there is no show. Once, while chatting up a video store clerk in Gainesville, we lamented the fact that Satyajit Ray–a staple of arthouse video stores–is said to be more well known internationally than in his native India, where people prefer the formulaic Bollywood genres. There’s nothing remotely opaque nor intimidating about Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali–it’s a poetic, emotionally affecting film–but there’s still no song and dance.

Lino Brocka was a great film director because he understood his audience. Even his canonical “auteur” films are accessible because of their directness and realism, and their emotional intensity. Art is not foregrounded, it is hidden in plain sight. Despite his acclaim with film festival audiences, he did not shrink at making popular melodramas at home. He always risked sentimentality. His love for the Filipinos–especially the poor and the victims of social injustice–always shines through his films. He once famously said: “I’m not interested in making the Great Filipino Cinema; I am interested in making the Great Filipino Audience.” If, as recent developments seem to show, Great Filipino Cinema has arrived, I hope the Great Filipino Audience is not far behind.

Sources and Related Links:

Filipinos at Film Festivals
• Cannes
• Los Angeles
• Paris
• Pusan
• Tokyo
• Venice
• Vienna

Cinemalaya
• The Asian Angle
• Hollywood Reporter
• Bankok Post

William Blake; left, The Ancient of Days (1794), right, Newton (1795).

… cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.
     ~from Jerusalem, William Blake

… a clear moral vision implies simplifications and, with them, acts of cruelty and injustice.
     ~from Killing Time, Paul Feyerabend

Got myself embroiled in a fierce debate in an egroup recently when a member cross-posted entries from another egroup about the progress of women’s inclusion in the sciences. What irked me the most about the weepy accounts were the usual feminist pieties about patriarchal oppression, and an elitist condescension towards the “typical” American as anti-intellectual and brutish, specifically with regards to the issue of teaching creationism in schools. I reprint below my side of the debate which escalated faster than a California wildfire. It got really nasty on the other side–despite my attempts at civility and humor to diffuse the tension–but I must admit that I myself can be extremely polemic and excoriating in my sarcasm.

I reprint my replies as is–constipated language and all, including my share of nastiness–with minimal editing, such as removing any references to persons. This is therefore a biased account of the debate with heaps of spur-of-the-moment madness.

Reply No. 1:

The observation below of America being anti-scientific and anti-intellectual goes against the fact that it is still leading in science and technology. Most Nobel winners in the sciences in the past 50 years are Americans, as opposed to Germans and British in the early 20th century. This would not have been possible had science and technology not permeated American society and its institutions. I would even go as far as to say that Protestantism has in fact something to do with this; the “protestant ethic” played a big role in the advance of American capitalism that also drove (and is driven by) science and technology.

Science is in fact the dominant discourse. Attempts by its practitioners to eradicate creationism by de-legitimizing it based on its own true/false criterion is really a form of epistemological dogmatism. There is an underlying conceit in the claim that the scientific criteria is the only legitimate form of knowledge. I can empathize how a creation account of origins can be more meaningful to people than some esoteric account of reality based on particle physics. The “meanings” these religious accounts generate can be more ethically powerful and productive in society than the dry, dispirited accounts of obsessive compulsive scientists.

As for women in science, the accounts below are out of date by 2-3 decades of affirmative action. Feminists need to stop undermining women by promoting this ideology of victimization. So where are the women in science? I know for a fact that chemistry is dominated by women in the Philippines. It must be a cultural thing, not necessarily “patriarchal oppression”. I contend that middle class women in the Philippines are more liberated than their American counterparts largely because of their maids and nannies. (Yet another form of oppression?)

Reply No. 2:

Tyranny of experts! Scientists, intellectuals, and academics do not constitute a privileged class over and above those who did not go to college or read a lot of books. Everyone has their function; when my toilet backs up, I call the plumber. Average Joe may not be a card carrying member of the ivory tower, but I would not dismiss him as stupid and brutish; besides, higher education is not a guarantee of enlightenment (e.g., James Watson).

The diaspora of scientists during and after WW2 is not fortuitous; they were escaping the brutal fascism in Europe. The high civilizations that produced Michaelangelo, Beethoven, and the Enlightenment, also produced the crematoriums of Auschwitz. American capitalism and democracy provided opportunities and freedom. Let us not quickly dismiss as anti-intellectual and “distrustful of science” the society that continues to welcome scientific talent fleeing repressive regimes and poverty.

The neat account of science as falsification of theory is a Popperian fantasy that is contradicted by history. The development of science is fraught with theoretical dogmatism, irrational procedures, overlooking of anomalies, and ad hoc adjustments of models. (C’mon let’s keep it honest!) New paradigms emerge, Kuhn observes, usually not from the process of falsification, but simply from the old guards dying out. Not that the new paradigm is “more rational” but only that it leads to more interesting research. The line between legitimate science and “pseudo”-science is therefore thin and may just be a matter of cultural practice.

It is not my intention to trivialize the struggles of the women’s movement–the fight for equal opportunity–only to point out the hysterical witch-hunt for “patriarchal oppression” in every nook and cranny of society’s power structures. If women truly want equal standing they should not demand special protections, grievance committees, PC speech codes, which, I agree with my feminist idol (and lesbian) Camille Paglia, is reactionary and paternalistic.

Reply No. 3:

What is my agenda? Nothing less than displacing the privileged status of science as a form of knowledge based on positivist claims of “objectivity”, especially if this positivism is deployed to gawk at, belittle, coerce alternative or “illegitimate” forms of knowledge. I do not lose sleep if somewhere creationism or intelligent design is taught in a science class, because I trust that people everywhere KNOW what is good for them and their children. They do not need experts and “intellectual elites” to tell them THAT, and there is no need to deride them as “anti-intellectuals”.

Kuhn was not apologizing for the “shortcomings of science” he was describing its state of affairs. A paradigm shift is not merely accelerated progress but a profound break that requires a suspension of belief in what you know to be rational, even factual; a new paradigm is adopted not because the old guard were eventually swayed to accept the new one, but simply because they died out. This resistance to conversion is due to the incommensurability of paradigms–the terms are different, the methods are different, even what are considered to be “facts” are different.

If anything, Kuhn depicts scientists as CONSERVATIVES, and scientific progress only made possible by their disciplinary commitment to theory. This is why it’s incompatible with the heroic account of scientific progress, and with Popper’s idealist fantasy of scientists constantly undermining themselves and their theories by refutation. There is no “objective” meta-method of refutation that is free from contamination by the new paradigm; in other words, refutation is a priori from a biased perspective. Feyerabend even goes as far as to say that anything goes in science, there is no method, there is change but no “progress” (oops, sounds like Obama?).

Yes, I do like Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism (hello!) because it is destabilizing–it knocks off science from its privileged status above “illegitimate” (heretical?) knowledges. He also has a sense of humor. Creationism and intelligent design has every right to fight for its place in scientific discourse, and the public has every right to say it does not give a s**t about our pet theories. It is quite sobering to consider these, as Ernst Mach did, as simply convenient fictions (rather than “inconvenient truths”?).

Reply No. 4:

Puzzle-solving is an activity of normal science, i.e., within the field of view of a paradigm. It happens under conditions of lexical stability, and does not deal with complications of revolutionary change. Within the paradigm there is strong commitment to shared beliefs, values, metaphysics, and, may I add, delusions. Practitioners thus use the “set criteria” to assess what constitutes acceptable knowledge within the paradigm.

Underneath, science also appeals to extra-scientific knowledge, i.e., what it deems as “irrational”, e.g., the speculative unity of knowledge. (There is no rational basis, for example, for simplicity in theories; it is an aesthetic preference.) Lyotard calls this the recurrence of the narrative in the scientific. These undermine its claims to pure “objectivity” and its privileged status over what it deems as “irrational” and “illegitimate”.

Kuhn is actually not radical enough for me. I actually prefer Feyerabend because he is funny, and he does not mystify science.

Reply No. 5:

Anything goes! No non-negotiables. I don’t have a problem with heterogeneous practices at all, and of the neck of science put under the boot of the public. I think it becomes more human by saving it from the obsessiveness of puzzle-solving which often becomes an end in itself. I do not wish to assume the heroic role of “protector” of the integrity of science, as I don’t believe in an antiseptic, monolithic, totalitarian vision of “Science” that needs to be preserved. It’s more interesting to have messy and porous borders. Misconceptions go away if there are no preconceptions–ossified, enshrined ideas that feed fundamentalism. Yes, I accuse big “Science” of the very thing it levels against religious fundamentalists, and that scientists can be as coercive because of their disciplinary commitment to theory. (Bellarmine may actually have been acting more rationally than Galileo.)

Anomalies are regularly overlooked (or worse ignored) because of this commitment and the need to make progress in puzzle-solving. How can Newton’s account of force-at-a-distance which was unexplained be “more rational” than Ptolemy’s crystalline spheres? I’m not suggesting a return to Ptolemaic cosmology, only that what are problematic in new paradigms may not have been at all in supplanted ones. They are only absurd from a post-mortem perspective, and only within a small group of specialists who think about those things, and who have delusions about the import of their theories.

Incidentally [after I was accused of reading only Wikipedia], there is also nothing wrong with Wikipedia; I like it precisely because it is unofficial, error-prone, and vulnerable–a good sign of democratic procedures–and it’s free!

Epilogue:

What a bag of hot air! Debates expose hysterics and hard liners in all of us, especially if we are argued into a corner; we tend to freeze into extreme positions, as evidenced above. I do love the rhetorical energy, though, that is released by the urgency of argumentation. I got this from my father, a polemic to the core, who in his youth often got in trouble by argumentation, even afterward, when he became a Christian and a Sunday School teacher.

Sources and Related Links (Including Wikipedia!):

• Thomas Kuhn at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Paul Feyerabend at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Karl Popper at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• William Blake at Wikipedia