Climategate - What do you think?

[X5rolls]

Climategate – A real scandal in the scientific community or a story made up by people opposed to cap and trade taxes?

Background - Hackers got into confidential email systems at University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and uncovered inconvenient truths indicating suppression of evidence and manipulation of data by scientists trying to support their cause, global warming.

What do you think?

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Here is an blog excerpt from James Delingpole, a writer, journalist and broadcaster with some interesting insights.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/

Manipulation of evidence:
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) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

[amacman]

boffins ? buffoons more likely . this is what happens when you edumacate idiots who don`t see past the end of their own noses .
I believe we are just seeing normal climatic cycles and all the talk of a man made catastrophe is , for one reason , to make us all realise the current waste of resources needs to be dealt with .
an unfortunate spin on this is governments jump on the chance to impose taxes , trading co2 emmissions allowances ? WTF . get real people .

[wallyx5]

Originally Posted by amacman

boffins ? buffoons more likely . this is what happens when you edumacate idiots who don`t see past the end of their own noses .

That's great... the bottom line is it's BS to move forward with their political agenda.

[motordavid]

And, a take on it, from the NewYawkTimes Science section today.
The Bold sentences were added by yours truly. Worth the read, imo.
BR, TheOl'Weatherman



Findings
E-Mail Fracas Shows Peril of Trying to Spin Science






By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: November 30, 2009
If you have not delved into the thousands of e-mail messages and files hacked from the computers of British climate scientists, let me give you the closest thing to an executive summary. It is taken from a file slugged HARRY_READ_ME, which is the log of a computer expert’s long struggle to make sense of a database of historical temperatures. Here is Harry’s summary of the situation:



Aarrggghhh!

That cry, in various spellings, is a motif throughout the log as Harry tries to fight off despair. “OH [EXPLETIVE] THIS!” he writes after struggling to reconcile readings from weather stations around the world. “It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity. ...”

Harry, whoever he may be, comes off as the most sympathetic figure in the pilfered computer annals of East Anglia University, the British keeper of global temperature records. While Harry’s log shows him worrying about the integrity of the database, the climate scientists are e-mailing one another with strategies for blocking outsiders’ legal requests to see their data.

While Harry is puzzling over temperatures — “I have that familiar Twilight Zone sensation” — the scientists are confidently making proclamations to journalists, jetting to conferences and plotting revenge against those who question the dangers of global warming. When a journal publishes a skeptic’s paper, the scientists e-mail one another to ignore it. They focus instead on retaliation against the journal and the editor, a project that is breezily added to the agenda of their next meeting: “Another thing to discuss in Nice!”

As the scientists denigrate their critics in the e-mail messages, they seem oblivious to one of the greatest dangers in the climate-change debate: smug groupthink. These researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause.

Consider, for instance, the phrase that has been turned into a music video by gleeful climate skeptics: “hide the decline,” used in an e-mail message by Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit. He was discussing the preparation of a graph for the cover of a 1999 report from the World Meteorological Organization showing that temperatures in the past several decades were the highest of the past millennium.

Most of the graph was based on analyses of tree rings and other “proxy” records like ice cores and lake sediments. These indirect measurements indicated that temperatures declined in the middle of the millennium and then rose in the first half of the 20th century, which jibes with other records. But the tree-ring analyses don’t reveal a sharp warming in the late 20th century — in fact, they show a decline in temperatures, contradicting what has been directly measured with thermometers.

Because they considered that recent decline to be spurious, Dr. Jones and his colleagues removed it from part of the graph and used direct thermometer readings instead. In a statement last week, Dr. Jones said there was nothing nefarious in what they had done, because the problems with the tree-ring data had been openly identified earlier and were known to experts.

But the graph adorned the cover of a report intended for policy makers and journalists. The nonexperts wouldn’t have realized that the scariest part of that graph — the recent temperatures soaring far above anything in the previous millennium — was based on a completely different measurement from the earlier portion. It looked like one smooth, continuous line leading straight upward to certain doom.

The story behind that graph certainly didn’t show that global warming was a hoax or a fraud, as some skeptics proclaimed, but it did illustrate another of their arguments: that the evidence for global warming is not as unequivocal as many scientists claim. (Go to nytimes.com/tierneylab for details.)

In fact, one skeptic raised this very issue about tree-ring data in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,” immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:

“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.”

Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don’t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.

Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium.

It is not unreasonable to give outsiders a look at the historical readings and the adjustments made by experts like Harry. How exactly were the readings converted into what the English scientists describe as “quality controlled and homogenised” data?

Trying to prevent skeptics from seeing the raw data was always a questionable strategy, scientifically. Now it looks like dubious public relations, too.

In response to the furor over the climate e-mail messages, there will be more attention than ever paid to those British temperature records, and any inconsistencies or gaps will seem more suspicious simply because the researchers were so determined not to reveal them. Skeptical bloggers are already dissecting Harry’s work. As they relentlessly pore over other data, the British scientists will feel Harry’s pain:
Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/sc...ef=todayspaper

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Bump....

Pennsylvania State University announced it was launching an investigation into the academic conduct of Michael Mann, director of the school's Earth System Science Center.

Also, it was announced that Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, would step aside while his university conducts an investigation.

There should be a call for an immediate Senate investigation and Mr. Mann, Jones and others should be called to testify before a committee under oath. Universities and organizations involved (this is dozens of groups) should be immediately instructed NOT to destroy any information/data.

Millions in taxpayers $$ have been granted to institutions tangled up in Climategate. Oh, and the expensive (read much higher taxes) Cap and Trade legislation being proposed is just ahead.

Mr. Mann and Jones....

Were you involved in hiding the data about the decline in temperatures?

What did you know and when did you know this?

Why was there a plan to hide data about the decline of temperatures?

It's going to be an interesting lead up to Copenhagen.

The Chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri (shares Nobel Peace Prize with Al professor and internet inventor Gore) has gone on record saying.

"In the near future, car use will have to be 'curbed', hotels and restaurants will stop serving ice water, and guests will have their energy use monitored. Heavy taxes will also have to discourage people from flying and force them to take the train."

[amacman]

say , if I decide not to drive my X5 for a day how much can I sell the unused emissions for .
if I hold on to my farts how much can I claim for not pumping methane into the atmosphere and can I buy some emissions when the price is low so as to relieve the pressure .
I could even strap a vacuum cleaner to my butt to capture my farts , maybe even run my X5 on the methane or would the government still charge me fuel duty and vat on my own farts ? .

[Dannyell]

Originally Posted by amacman

say , if I decide not to drive my X5 for a day how much can I sell the unused emissions for .
if I hold on to my farts how much can I claim for not pumping methane into the atmosphere and can I buy some emissions when the price is low so as to relieve the pressure .
I could even strap a vacuum cleaner to my butt to capture my farts , maybe even run my X5 on the methane or would the government still charge me fuel duty and vat on my own farts ? .

Your plan is quite not silent but still deadly

[X5rolls]

Bump –

Is NASA part of the Climategate cover-up?

Apparently NASA has refused for 2 years to produce information under the US Freedom of Information Act that shows how it shaped its climate data and explain why they had to correct its data dating as far back as the 1930’s. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed over 2 years ago for the information and says, “I assume that what is there is highly damaging, these guys are quire clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this.”

Meanwhile the White House stonewalls or at least has its head in the sand

The White House has dismissed the British e-mails as irrelevant. “Several thousand scientists have come to the conclusion that climate change is happening. I don’t think that’s anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore,” press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters this week.

Finally, the Copenhagen conference and the ruling body use the disputed data to….

Hash out the framework of a “Kyoto II treaty to fight global warming.

What does that mean?

Copenhagen conferees aim to create an international regulatory body empowered to inspect American energy users and assure their strict adherence to any and all promises made to address climate change. This group will say whether the US has met its greenhouse gas emissions targets, transferred the proper amount of American taxpayer dollars to countries in the developing world and delivered its leading edge green technology to those same countries – without compensation for the patent holders (as reported by Steven Groves, a Fellow at the Heritage Foundation)

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Bump...


Gore abruptly cancels personal appearance at Copenhagen

CEO of Berlingske Media (the Danish group coordinating the Gore event) said that “great annoyance” was a factor in the cancellation and “we have had a clear cut agreement… we do not yet know the detailed reasons for the cancellation.”

Maybe Al wants to avoid questions about Climategate?

Authors of the infamous Climategate emails speak up

Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, Michael Oppenheimer and Joseph Romm are set to address Climategate in a call today.

“The stolen e-mails reveal nothing that changes our extensive understanding of climate science.”

This arguably gives science a black eye at best and at worst makes future science claims and findings across the globe potentially open criticism that it was also politically biased.

[amacman]

Global warming is a danger , all agreed so why don`t they all get along and find solutions .
or is it all a panic reaction to new found knowledge by simple minds .