In my previous post on Climategate
I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump
surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take
that back.
The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their
willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is
surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is
overpowering. And, as Christopher Booker argues,
this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] process. It
is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David Henderson called the environmental policy milieu [subscription required]. It goes to the core of that process.
One theme, in addition to those already mentioned about the suppression
of dissent, the suppression of data and methods, and the suppression of
the unvarnished truth, comes through especially strongly: plain
statistical incompetence. This is something that Henderson's study
raised, and it was also emphasised in the Wegman report on the Hockey Stick, and in other independent studies of the Hockey Stick controversy.
Of course it is also an ongoing issue in Steve McIntyre's campaign to
get hold of data and methods. Nonetheless I had given it insufficient
weight. Climate scientists lean very heavily on statistical methods,
but they are not necessarily statisticians. Some of the correspondents
in these emails appear to be out of their depth. This would explain
their anxiety about having statisticians, rather than their
climate-science buddies, crawl over their work.
I'm also surprised by the IPCC's response. Amid the self-justification, I had hoped for a word of apology, or even of censure. (George Monbiot called for Phil Jones to resign, for crying out loud.) At any rate I had expected no more than ordinary evasion. The declaration from Rajendra Pachauri
that the emails confirm all is as it should be is stunning. Science at
its best. Science as it should be. Good lord. This is pure George
Orwell. And these guys call the other side "deniers".
While I'm listing surprises, let me note how disappointed I was by The
Economist's coverage of all this. "Leaked emails do not show climate
scientists at their best," it observes. No indeed. I should say I
worked at the magazine for years, admire it as much as ever, and rely
on the science coverage especially. But I was baffled by its reaction
to the scandal. "Little wonder that the scientists are looking tribal
and jumpy, and that sceptics have leapt so eagerly on such tiny scraps
as proof of a conspiracy," its report concludes. Tiny scraps? I detest
anti-scientific thinking as much as The Economist does. I admire
expertise, and scientific expertise especially; like any intelligent
citizen I am willing to defer to it. But that puts a great obligation
on science. The people whose instinct is to respect and admire science
should be the ones most disturbed by these revelations. The scientists
have let them down, and made the anti-science crowd look wise. That is
outrageous.
Megan McArdle adopts a world-weary tone
similar to The Economist's: this is how science is done in the real
world. If I were a scientist, I would resent that. She has criticised
the emails and the IPCC response to them, then says she still believes
the consensus view on climate change. Well, that was my position at the
end of last week, and I suppose it still is. But how do I defend it?
There is far more of a problem here for the consensus view than Megan
and ordinarily reliable commentators like The Economist acknowledge. I
am not a climate scientist. In the end I have to trust the experts.
That is what we are asked to do. "Trust us, we're scientists".
Remember that this is not an academic exercise. We contemplate outlays
of trillions of dollars to fix this supposed problem. Can I read these
emails and feel that the scientists involved deserve to be trusted? No,
I cannot. These people are willing to subvert the very methods--notably,
peer review--that underwrite the integrity of their discipline. Is this
really business as usual in science these days? If it is, we should
demand higher standards--at least whenever "the science" calls for a
wholesale transformation of the world economy. And maybe some
independent oversight to go along with the higher standards.
The IPCC process needs to be fixed, as a matter of the greatest
urgency. Read David Henderson or the Wegman report to see how. And in
the meantime, let's have some independent inquiries into what has been
going on.
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Who still remembers the Piltdown man fraud by some evolutionist trying to supply what in those days was called "the missing link"?
Who has heard of the federal science police who arrest scientists every year for various types of fraud?
The aberrations of senators and governors do not stop government, likewise these indiscretions will not stop the growth and predominance of climate science as a worldwide phenomenon.
While I applaud your appreciation of the seriousness of this matter, I can't help but choke on this:
You confuse science and hypothesis here. While there are a fair number of bible thumping skeptics who are anti science, the mainstream of skepticism on AGW are usually somewhat educated in the disciplines of engineering, mathematics, or computer science. People who work with math daily. People who could plainly see that the numbers did not add up and resented it. Most of them do not reject the idea that CO2 causes warming, the fight, for a long time, has been over the degree of warming. The exaggerations and data obfuscation and outright destruction (apparently) have only fed this skepticism.
Most of this stuff is not new. For just about every controversial email, you can google back before this revelation, and find discussion pointing to strong suspicion of the activity involved, from incestuous peer review to obstruction of FOI. For example, when Steve McIntyre's request for the raw temperature data was declined, he was working at the behest of the National Academy of Science.
Try this link:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=climategate+emails
Mr. Crook, could you, at the very least, provide some examples from these leaked documents of "suppression of dissent, suppression of data and methods, and suppression of the unvarnished truth"?
It's not that I don't believe you, but considering the topic, some actual evidence of wrongdoing would seem apropos.
Is this data manipulation? Why yes it is...
Never mind the constant admonitions to delete emails that have come under FOI requests. The statement that Jones would rather destroy the data than hand it over to McIntyre, who was working at the behest of the National Academy of the Sciences, BTW.
I don't know what more you need, but there is lots of it. Try this link: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/climategate-hide-the-decline-codified/
by the way, after threatening to delete the data rather than hand it over, the data disappeared. Here is a news article from September.
The dog ate global warming: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTBiMTRlMDQxNzEyMmRhZjU3ZmYzODI5MGY4ZWI5OWM
This matches up with the emails, btw. I have no idea what it is that you are looking for in terms of more proof that these guys were acting duplicitous.
I think that these frauds are a lot more clever than they are given credit for. We are about to find out that the data exists in multiple databases so CRU can claim that no damage was done. Much of the press will swallow the lie and run with it as they did with the previous questionable statements.
What won't be discussed by the mainstream media is the fact that CRU will claim that the metadata has been lost. That will mean that we will not be able to find out which stations were used and which was ignored so the reconstructions cannot be replicated. Also, it will be argued that any new reconstructions require that the latest knowledge is used. That will probably mean that Phil Jones can step up and argue that his latest UHI paper be used to modify the China data (and possibly other Asian regional data.) Of course, Dr. Jones will point out that his latest results would automatically lower the temperature profile created during previous reconstructions. If he is as duplicitous as the e-mails make him out, he might actually question why countries like NZ and Australia have added such a large 'artificial' warming signal to raw data that showed no warming. Or why the NOAA adds such a large warming signal to the temperature readings taken over the past half century. (http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/hammer-graph-2-us-temps.jpg)
I suspect that the revelations would make it hard to isolate CRU and Dr. Jones as the culprits and that the climate change establishment in other countries will fight hard to justify the reconstructions and the data manipulation. Given the money available to push the story, there is a small chance that the cover-up can work for awhile. Of course, it is likely that some in the media will see the endgame and try to salvage their reputations by attacking the IPCC process, the select group of 'scientists' identified in Wegman's social network matrix, and the editors at scientific journals that allowed authors to select reviewers and to publish paper without complying with the data and method policies.
Paul,
Go to this site. It has every email. Enjoy.
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/index.php
Just for some balance and perspective:
Nate Silver says:
Andrew Sullivan addresses data.
On the Scandal Scale™, Tony Blair's upcoming truthiness review on the Iraq invasion seems a better example of a modern-day conspiracy.
Andrew Sullivan addresses data? Surely that should make you choke.
The shills at RealClimate.org -- remember, they are the bosom buddies of Phil Jones and copied on (and are senders of) many of the emails -- claim that "the data is not destroyed". Sure, you could contact the met offices of all the countries and collect the data again. But that took East Anglia and folks decades, and is a years-long process at least. In the meanwhile, the basis for the IPCC reports is completely compromised.
There have been at the minimum hundreds of millions of dollars spent for funding of projects that *directly* rely on the HadCRU data set. Many of those studies are now completely useless, and all science citing the HadCRU data set is badly compromised until it is revisited and vetted.
Any doubts that if President Gore had gotten anti-AGW legislation back in '00-'02, the currently "inexplicable" pause in warming would have been credited to Strong Government Action and we'd have to put up with a chorus of "Gore saved us all - everything you have you owe to Him"?
Any doubts at all?
Johnny:
Good point! AGW promoters have concocted the nearly-perfect scam.
If observed temperatures go up, it is further reinforceement of their calls for even more-urgent action; if they go down, it is evidence of the effectiveness of their proscribed actions. Heads, I win; Tails, you lose.
As Lord Monckton stated, Copenhagen should be canceled. Just look at annual sea level or annual arctic ice on Google and you or anyone else can see for yourself that this is a hoax. What the left has to do is to more easily accept this as fraud is to abandon leftism. Good news folks, we are in a great chain of being spiraling upwards, not downwards. You can live forever if you seek your dharma, or feel ashamed of yourself as a useless breather and trade your path for the Queen's self-serving eugenics psy-op: nothing to see here folks, move along.
As Lord Monckton stated, Copenhagen should be canceled. Just look at annual sea level or annual arctic ice on Google and you or anyone else can see for yourself that this is a hoax. What the left has to do to more easily accept this as fraud is to abandon leftism. Good news folks, we are in a great chain of being spiraling upwards, not downwards. You can live forever if you seek your dharma, or feel ashamed of yourself as a useless breather and trade your path for the Queen's self-serving eugenics psy-op: nothing to see here folks, move along.
I was delighted to read your column this morning. Its candor was refreshing and splendid.
Most people I know didn't question the conclusions put forth by the IPCC. We didn't question them because... well, because those guys were the experts, and we believed them. Why wouldn't we?
And when the thousands of emails and documents were first thrown at us, most of us were (like you) a little dismissive of their importance because... well, because it wasn't really clear what the various documents meant, and anyway... what did we know?
Then (in the last few days) we also began to take a really close look at the hacked documents, and when we did, we were horrified to realize (just as you realized) that something stank to high heaven. There really was a there there. All of us are flabbergasted (as you are flabbergasted). And like you, we are trying to assimilate the implications of the thing.
The implications are almost unbelievable. And shattering.
Mary:
Congratulations on maintaining an open mind!
Now, perhaps, we should start the "debate" which we were told was over before it even began. The first matter to be considered in a real debate would be: Is warmer better or worse?
There is a ton of data in the geological and literary record which strongly suggests that a slightly (i.e., 5 - 10 degrees C) warmer globe would be an on-balance boon to mankind. How have we been made to fear that which is objectively desirable?
Many scientists around the world around often disagree with each other and worry about their findings and the reactions to their conclusions,but this is a clear example of political interference. Conclusions drawn up by a scientists statistical data are bieng manipulated by goverments around the world who question the credibility of data and the scientists themselves to fit their own political agenda. It's a shame that all the occcupants of this planet will have to pay for that. ian w
The left has pimped out science -- which may leave the formerly esteemed lady forever a whore in the public eye...
Mr. Crook has set out the fraudulent nature of the climate change, nee global warming, scam in a very straightforward manner. He was not the first for as far back as 1996 the IPCC and a relatively small cabal of scientists in collusion with political bureaucrats and environmentalists were intent on using science to obtain domination of the world's energy usage by damning CO2.
The very first IPCC report which is the basis for the limits set forth in the Kyoto
Accord was politically motivated, not science motivated. The IPCC
ignored the devasting criticism of the its own report by Frederick Seitz, President
Emeritus of Rockefeller University and past President of the National Academy of
Sciences (NAS). Mr Seitz described the IPCC report as "I have never
witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events
that led to this IPCC report"..."If the IPCC is incapable of following its most
basic procedures, it would be best to abandon the entire IPCC process, or at
least that part that is concerned with the scientific evidence on climate change,
and look for more reliable sources of advice to governments on this
important question."(http://www.sepp.org/glwarm/majordeception.html
A Major Deception on Global Warming
by Frederick Seitz Wall Street Journal , June 12, 1996" "
Mr Seitz also cited NAS' own study which states, inter alia, the earth
has been subjected to impressive and abrupt swings in climate during recent
periods covering thousands of years and that mankind's role cannot be assessed
without adequate .... baseline documentation of natural climate variability..
Lack of peer reviewed publications is another excuse used by the AGW supporters to blackball the arguments against climate change, nee global warming, while claiming their writings must be valid as they had been peer reviewed. One only needs to consult the Wegman Commission report on the Mann "hockey stick" curve which concluded, "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."
This is the definition of what a peer review process should not be, an old boy network providing scientific cover for work of one of their own that they could not verify or duplicate as the author(s) refuse to provide the information needed for a valid peer review.
Another Captain Renault "shocked" moment to find the experts with close academic ties peer reviewing each others papers or even their own if they were on an IPCC review committee. Since Mr. Mann refused to provide any information on his data, statistical methodology, algorithms how could there be a verifiable peer review of his work at any time prior to Congressional action and even then the Wegman Commission was not given complete access.
For a verifiable peer review the reviewers must be qualified, have no business, personal, academic or other ties/relationships with the author(s) and have available all data and information required to verify the findings and to insure that the results are repeatable by others or to reject them.
The following is a quote from a review of "Richard Feynman, A Life in Science by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin" which is even more important today as science takes a leading role in our lives. Check it out at http://www.friesian.com/feynman.htm
"What had gone wrong for Feynman was that he had begun taking too seriously the idea that modern knowledge is a collective enterprise. Just trying to keep up with his field had suppressed his own sources of inspiration, which were in his own solitary questions and examinations. This, indeed, is the fate of most research in most disciplines, to make the smallest, least threatening, possible addition to "current knowledge." Anything more would be presumptuous, anything more might elicit the fatal "Don't you know what so-and-so is doing" from a Peer Reviewer, anything more might invite dismissal as some off-the-wall speculation -- not serious work.
So Feynman "stopped trying to keep up with the scientific literature or compete with other theorists at their own game, and went back to his roots, comparing experiment with theory, making guesses that were all his own..." [p. 186]. Thus he became productive again, as he had been when he had just been working things out for himself, before becoming a famous physicist. ,,,,,,,,
New ideas do not come from committees, and although this dynamic is so well understood as to be part of folk wisdom, researchers in many areas of science or scholarship are so blinded by their own herd mentality, or collectivist ideology, or rent-seeking behavior, that they commonly act, both for themselves and in judgment of others, in denial of it. Of all the "curious" lessons of Richard Feynman's life, this is one of the best."
"Is this really business as usual in science these days?"
Only at elite Universities - which no longer teach facts, or method, but "community organizing" and "womens studies" and "speech codes."
The activities and strategies of the CRU crew very closely resemble those of ACORN and other community activist groups that are in power on most college campuses.
Is it surprising that the tactics espoused by the Political Science department would make it over to the Climate Science department across the quad?
Occam's razor states that the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one. Scientists often rely on this principle when designing a hypothesis. What could be the simplest explanation as to why leading climate scientists refused to share source materials? Why were they so aggresive towards anyone who offered any dissent? This is not normal behavior. Scientists and academics who do not share source materials are not given the benefit of the doubt. If a scientific journal publishes an opposing view, the normal response is not to threaten a boycott of the journal. The simplest explanation is that the science behind global warming is bad.
You are a courageous person, Clive. You have actually changed your mind about something. Thank you.
Now let's pause action planned for Copenhagen and dig in and find the original records and see if it is even warming and if so, how much of it is warming and how much is heavy math and wishful thinking.
You are a courageous person, Clive. You have actually changed your mind about something.
Astonishingly, he hasn't. He still believes the "consensus" is for AGW, and he accepts it. All he believes is that the conclusions have been achieved by manipulating, lying, hiding, destroying, and cheating.
When oh when, Clive?
Excellent writing, Mr. Crook. The purloined emails that many now call 'Climategate' underscore the need for the United States to convene our own objective, transparent Climate Truth Commission.
The Climate Research Unit's emails show small-minded, embattled thinking that reeks of zealotry, not science. It appears the researchers weren't beyond drawing conclusions that were relatively unsupported. Two of the authors, Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth, were the lead authors of one of the most important chapters in the United Nations Fourth Assessment Report. This is no small matter since the EPA, in its recent move to boost regulation of greenhouse gases, based its conclusions on the UN reports.
For twenty years I believed in man-made global warming theory, but the evidence has changed. During that period we have had ten years of warming then ten years of little or no warming. I blame the confusion on the United Nations for getting ahead of their facts. When they claimed CO2 drives global warming, I think they were more concerned about politics and funding than science. One only needs to look at their track record: UN forecasts do not fit what actually happened.
- Robert Moen, http://www.energyplanUSA.com
"Belief" is for Anabaptists of Munster [see Will James]. Rational assessment of hypotheses --not theories-- is for Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Einstein, who asked ultimately simple questions, applying geometric/mathematical depictions not to "explain" but to objectively describe phenomena in terms available to their milieus, aware that scientific constructs if not complete at least require self-consistency.
Richard Feynman, charismatic originator of quantum chromo-dynamics (altogether: Aargh!), once put a century of hard science in perspective: All of modern physics, from Planck and Einstein to Heisenberg and Schrodinger, is but a gloss on Young's double-slit experiment (qv). Understand nature's workings in terms of chance-and-necessity, said Feynman, phenomena on macro-scales (Relativity) will correspond one-to-one with thermodynamic quantum-physical events on micro-levels. Since nature is all-in-one, one-in-all, how could they not? Some unsung genius may publish a viable Theory of Everything tomorrow; quite possibly, that will never happen; meantime, absent real-world empirical verification, ranting advocates impart "soft" postulates such as AGW no rational credence whatsoever.
"Climategate" does not impugn the scientific enterprise, but vivifies integrity, transparency, as keys to honest replication: The sine qua non for all abstruse technical endeavors. The more Climate Cultists such as Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al. resort to arguments from authority by stipulation ("it's true because we as Ascended Masters tell you so") the easier it will be for true scientists to chuck them altogether.
The biggest balloon bursts at a single prick. Hatpin, anyone?
Excellent piece Mr. Cook.
I have been watching this story unfold and it seems that you are the only one reporting on climategate who is appropriately alarmed without being alarmist. You have yourself a reader, keep digging.
I for one think the CRU was hiding their 'raw' temp data because when you look at it in detail it does not show much warming.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11582
The only way to make the data provided by the individual countries turn into runaway warming is to smear it with highly inaccurate proxy data (e.g., tree rings). You can see this in the New Zealand data
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11542
And you can see it in the CRU code which does the 'correcting' to push down the previous warm periods and raise up the current cooling temps:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11518
It would be far too easy to project your outrage at the climatologists' misconduct with clear examples or clear evidence. Instead, you've simply echoed the climate-skeptics major talking points - albeit in a very intelligent way.
The major flaw with your argument is this: you have not put the sins of these scientists in context. You have not properly balanced their transgressions against the hard scientific facts about global warming.
The truth is that while these scientists have massaged their data to better fit the prevailing hypothesis, they have not created AGW out of nothing. Slapping the "incestuous" modifier in front of "peer-review" doesn't give you the authority to denigrate the peer-review process that is so essential to the scientific process, not just in climatology. Where's your evidence that peer-review is compromised? The climate emails don't bear this out. Not even close.
You - and the talking heads like you - have simply exploded with outrage at climate scientists for conduct that does absolutely nothing to disprove or discredit the work of other honest scientists. You cite the trillions that will be spent to slow AGW with no mind to the trillions we will lose if we don't. Your column is anti-science and irresponsible. Please prove me wrong with a credible theory for global warming that does not involve human influence. Please prove me wrong with hard evidence that AGW is false.
It's only fitting that you are attacking the very scientific community that has brought the world great advances in the quality of life, with little scientific background, little presentation of clear evidence, and much hyperventilation. I would agree that these scientists should be censured. The science should not be.
Being skeptical of a specific theory is not anti-science.
I have reviewed much of the evidence and come to a different conclusion than the CRU. While I have not reviewed all of the evidence, I have yet to find anything compelling.
I am an engineer and consider myself not only pro-science, but a part of the scientific community, even if my work has mainly been in applied science.
I do not mind when people point out flaws in my reasoning, but I resent being called anti-science.
How's this:
1. Well before any industrial activity, there were a series of ice ages.
2. For one ice age to end, there had to be warming.
3. If ice ages ended before industrial activity, industrial activity must not be required to cause warming.
4. Warming can occur without human influence.
Where's the proof that any of this warming is caused by human activity, and isn't caused by any of the natural processes that led to earlier warming periods? Since you're proposing huge upheavals in our way of life, it seems the burden of proof would be upon you to show a) that there is solid proof of warming outside the doctored reports, and the reports that flow from them, b) that this warming follows from human, and not natural, causes, c) that this warming is actually a net negative and not a net positive, d) that the predictions made by the models reflect accurate reality rather than the subconscious wishes that would empower those making the models, e) that proposed solutions would actually prevent and roll back warming, and f) that rolling back warming is a cheaper and better alternative than living with and adapting to the warming.
Oh yeah, it might help if those who keep telling us it's an emergency, actually start acting like it's an emergency. Al Gore telling me I'm raping Gaia if I don't telecommute rings rather hollow when he's jet-setting all over the world.
Sir, you evidently have not read any of the leaked Emails.
They stifled dissent - and talk about it openly this is provable from the emails
They rigged or attempted to rig the peer review process – and talk about it openly and this is provable in the emails.
They manipulated data or possibly just made it up - this is a provable a statement from the leaked emails
They went to great lengths to not release their material - and threatened to destroy it rather than release it which is again provable by the emails
They used poor statistical method - the presence of fudge factors or magic numbers in a way that would have gotten then sacked as a clerk at 7-11 and this is provable by the emails.
They did not keep their data organized.- and apparently lost or misplaced some of it (Assuming they didn't destroy it) and this is provable by the emails.
They did not maintain the integrity of the file structure - duplicate file names. Once again, this is provable by the emails.
If these problematic areas do not convince you that there are serious problems with this data then please enlighten us, what will? I am serious. Please list in simple bullet points what additional information do you need to be convinced? I’d like to know, I am sure other would too. Or, do you really believe that this IS simply normal science?
False. I have read the emails, though I have not read the entire batch. [I'm a bio/chemical engineering PhD student. I have no political incentive to make these arguments, but I'm generally appalled that the broader scientific community is given so little respect by journalists and talking heads who obviously have little to no scientific training.]
You are absolutely right that these scientists stifled dissent. They attempted to rig the peer review process (and failed - peer review is much more robust than the commentariat class is trying to portray). They manipulated data. You're right to say that this is not normal science.
The problem is that the skeptic community is hyperventilating. Let's put this in context. These ~1000 emails represent a fraction of the correspondence of all climate scientists. True, some scientists are petty, but this does not implicate all climate scientists. What malicious hacker would want to leak harmless emails?
Your 7-11 analogy isn't helpful; their statistical transgressions are minor at best. They only "massaged" the data, which are otherwise strong enough that you'd have to drop most data points to change the conclusion. Massaging data is wrong, but just because a few scientists massaged data does not compromise the strength of legitimate, independent AGW research.
Now, you might say that this incident calls into question all climate scientists and their motives. The irony is that you'd be wrong for a perfectly statistical reason. Namely, you don't have enough data points. Here's how to convince me that there is an AGW conspiracy:
1.) Show me more data points of scientists manipulating data. Get a good sample size. Even a thousand emails from dozens of climatologists is not enough. The field is huge.
2.) Show me that the manipulation CHANGED THE CONCLUSIONS of AGW - and did not simply make it look marginally stronger.
3.) Show manipulation of the several other proxies used to describe past temperature changes (and not just tree-ring data, which are the primary "smoking gun" in these emails).
Finally, a contrarian might say that this is our first unobstructed view into the scientific community, and it's a messy one. We might expect all scientists to behave this way in secret. But this argument is also a weak one. There are many other climatologists who have been honest and transparent. Don't denigrate their work. Don't blame the science for the mistakes of a few scientists.
I believe inquiry is needed. There should be an investigation, if only to prove to the public that the scientific process is robust. There is much evidence that it is robust, and little that it is not. We need to be scientific about our audit of climate science.
Dr Jamf, your position in this post is totally unreasonable - you will only accept the arguments put forward by the critics of your first post if they provide you with the bulk of the personal correspondence and emails of all scientists studying climate change - and most of them are sufficiently intelligent not to leave damning evidence if they are trying to cheat. Would you have asked Galileo to take you on a spaceship to outside the earth's orbit so that he could show you the earth rotated about the sun?
Clive Crook still accepts that mankind contributes to global warming and bemoans the actions of a group who have cast doubt in the public on all the scientific arguments about climate change. His column is sympathetic to the AGW.
"The major flaw with your argument is this: you have not put the sins of these scientists in context. You have not properly balanced their transgressions against the hard scientific facts about global warming."
This comment makes you appear didactic and unscientific because the trouble is that there are no hard scientific facts about the hypothesis that mankind has caused and is continuing to cause global warming, merely rational deduction from analysis. This makes honest competent statistical analysis of the data a vital element and the selection of a team that was statistically incompetent highly suspicious. Clive Crook has put their transgressions in context - the context is that they have discredited the AGW hypothesis in the public mind. I am personally convinced that mankind is contributing to global warming - I just don't know how much nor even whether it is significant or insignificant - but every time I see blatant lies my gut reaction is to doubt the arguments being put forward. If something is true then you can support it by telling the truth, so why not?
That email is best accompanied by the sound of fists pounding on table, and should be visualized as being enacted by that one Hitler portrayal Ms. McCardle had on her blog the other day.
"The truth is..." Yes, tell us the Truth! We can handle it.
"You - and the talking heads like you - have simply exploded with outrage..." Yes. Exploded. 500 TNT tons.
"Please prove me wrong with hard evidence that AGW is false." Um, I think someone is reversing who should bear the burden of proof here. Aren't you and yours supposed to demonstrate theories you posit are correct? (And if your case is so strong, why the shouting?)
"I would agree that these scientists should be censured. The science should not be." The "science" of these scientists should be ignored until others can reproduce their findings using untarnished data sources, properly understood and testable experiments and models, and published for review without any information held back. Anyone who built their own work on this suspect work similarly needs to back fill before we can rely on them.
Um, no. I'm not reversing the burden of proof. There is robust science conducted by scientists outside of the CRU. A lot of robust science. Climate science is a big effort. Journals like Nature and Science (and many others) have already (very, very nearly) demonstrated - in a very transparent way - that AGW exists.
ClimateGate is one data point that says scientists can be manipulative. There are thousands of honest scientists out there. There are many pieces of evidence that support AGW. The burden is on the hyperventilating climate-skeptic class to provide a workable theory that explains why temperatures are rising without human influence.
Criticizing my writing style is petty. I wasn't shouting. I'm being forceful, if only because climate-deniers are shouting too. Note that I was respectful, and didn't resort to questioning their integrity.
You say that "The 'science' of these scientists should be ignored until others can reproduce their findings using untarnished data sources." Go read Science and Nature. There are many untarnished data sources and independent findings. Do your homework.
Setting out all of the science in the comments isn't really workable.
But let me introduce you to Dansgaard-Oeschger Cycles. They're relatively regular 2-3degree warming/cooling cycles that cover about 1500 years, tracking back in the geologic record for close to a million years. Think Rome's golden age (warm), fall of Rome/barbarian invasion/early Medieval period (cold), Medieval Warm Period (MWP, obvious :-), Little Ice Age (again, obvious), and NOW (starting about 1850, still warming up). You can read all about them in Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years (available on Amazon for under $14). Check out the footnotes.
As far as I can tell, there is nothing in the current warming cycle (other than the now-discredited Mann-made "hockey stick") that sets this warming apart from the 600-odd cycles that have gone before it.
Seems to me like the people who want to cripple the world economy ought to bear the burden of showing the difference. Oh, yeah ... didn't those emails discuss ways of "getting rid" of that pesky MWP? Hmmmm ....
You just have to LOVE the "logic" of these AGW "scientists!" The AGW crowd states that the anti-AGW scientists are not credible because they have no peer-reviewed research while behind the scenes the AGW scientists conspire to PREVENT dissenting research from being peer reviewed. Follow the money and politics people. This is a tried and true practice of inveting a "crisis" that only certain people can solve if you give them huge amounts of money and power. These leaked e-mails are just the beginning of the unravelling of the biggest scam since the EXACT same "scientists" told us in the 1970's that we were about to enter a new ICE AGE. They were dead wrong then and they are dead wrong again. Anyone who buys the AGW scam now is nothing but a schmuck who doesn't deserve the money the AGW are looking to fleece from them with their hysterical claims of impending disaster. LOL. Also, for the "overpopulation" alarmists on this board, I recommend mass suicides to solve the problem. You first. ;-)
Mr. Crook:
Your post gives me great hope. As this story broke, I was originally very pessimistic that there would be any lasting impact to public opinion. But with each passing day, I see greater and greater numbers of people who are at least willing to look at the evidence instead of dismissing it immediately. For AGW(anthropogenic global warming)-agnostics, the most frustrating part of this problem is the unwillingness of average people, and even scientists, to take just a few hours to independently evaluate the data. The CRU data leak has solved that motivation problem.
For those interested enough to look for themselves, they will soon discover there are two problems here - first, the research and data underpinning the AGW theory are highly suspect. The second problem is that the climate research field has been politically corrupted, to the detriment of scientific integrity, for the purpose of advancing political goals. The first problem would not have not existed for so long without the second. This is critically important, because the credibility of the global-warming-activist movement depends wholly on the extent to which the public believes that AGW-theory is scientifically sound.
The CRU emails have exposed the extent to which AGW-research was politically motivated, and the extent to which scientific integrity was compromised for political goals. I wasn't surprised, but I also didn't expect it to be this bad. I can now truly appreciate the lament of MIT Prof. Richard Lindzen, when he said, in multiple public addresses, that "climate science is totally corrupted." I encourage you to interview climate scientists who entered the field prior to 1988, when the politicization of global warming drove a massive influx of people and money into this field. You will shake your head at what a 10-fold increase in funding, all of it due to political causes, can do. It's often hard to imagine climate science without thousands of activist groups, think-tanks, and NGOs. They were hit by a freight train.
My hope is that a few enterprising (and fearless) journalists can expose the political aspects of the AGW-advocacy bureaucracy. After the political influence is removed, newly-freed and emboldened scientists can begin the slow process of reviewing and revising the climate science of the past two decades. The actual science of climate is far more complicated that the kindergarten-model of CO2-greenhouse gas (light in, no heat out) that has been drummed into us for years. It may yet turn out that humans are the primary drivers of the observed warming in the past century.
All of the "nothing to see here folks" comments that have come out since Climategate started fail to answer this question:
If the science and process is so robust, why did the CRU scientists spend so much effort hiding data, obstructing the UK FOIA, intimidate science journal editors, and block conflicting scientist views?
Why?
Their actions imply that their own science is unstable and that their consensus was a "manufactured" consensus.
I think the scientists should be censured, but I know why they did it. Politics, pure and simple. Their profession is under assault from commentators, politicos, and ideologues who have no interest in science whatsoever. Mr. Crook is not generally one of these (though today's column belies that). The degree to which scientifically-untrained politicans can distort even a modestly counter-intuitive data point into "evidence" against AGW is absolutely breathtaking.
I'm not advocating that we cast aside scientific rigor. That would be a crime. But the climate-skeptics do that with alarming frequency.
Whatever. Look at the poll numbers and see for yourself that the stonewall approach is losing support for your side. All most serious skeptics ask is openness. There are trillions of dollars at stake. Don't pretend there aren't. It seems to me that providing convincing answers to questions would go a long way to winning over public opinion.
Like the "non scientist politician?
"But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science." -Mike Hulme, climate scientist at the University of East Anglia
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/a-climate-scientist-on-climate-skeptics/#more-11377
How about this "non scientist"?
"This is an absurd claim that the new data is “value-added”. Indeed, we document a number of unresolved issues with the surface temperature data, which CRU now prevents anyone from assessing in our paper" - R.A. Pielke Sr, Senior Research Scientist, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado in Boulder
Professor Emeritus of the Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/news-release-in-the-sunday-times-by-jonathan-leake-climate-change-data-dumped/
Or this "non scientist"?
"On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere -and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now- editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations,even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the 'politically correct picture'. Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had the 'pleasure' to experience all this in my area of research." - Eduardo Zorita, senior scientist at the Institute for Coastal Research of the GKSS Research Centre in Germany.
http://coast.gkss.de/staff/zorita/myview.html
What about the 31,000 scientists, including 9000 PHDs that signed the petition saying that AGW hoaxsters were full of sh-t?
http://www.petitionproject.org/index.php
Then we have these clowns actual emails discussing how to penalize and punish "dissenters" and get editors who publish anything dissenting from the orthodoxy fired. But. according to you, only the anti AGW people distort things.
Of course this whole "realclimate.org" website is just a propaganda site set up by a leftwing propaganda outfit known as Environmental Media Services which was created by leftwing PR outfit Fenton communications to push every leftwing cause under the sun.. It's so "scientific" and unbiased that it has the following meta tags in its homepage headers:
Those tags give away the thing as propaganda rather than pure "scieince".
So, DrJamf - you can pretend that these clowns are just "pure of heart scientists", but the fact is that their plain old hucksters pushing a theory that's not even close to proven - backed by a whole plethora of leftwing outfits.
Scientists do not belong in politics, they prostitute themselves and their discipline by doing so. Their job is to objectively and dispassionately determine the facts, the actual facts, without distortion, and be personally open to letting the science determine its own result irrespective of their personal opinions. Any person who lets their personal agenda drive their science and their results is not a scientist but an advocate and activist abusing science and manufacturing pseudoscience.
As for the skeptics, the big name ones like Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts, Roger Pielke Sr., Lord Monckton, Jeff Id, Hu, Lucia, etc are all scientists themselves who hold these climatologists to proper scientific standards and find them severely wanting.
The profession of climatology is under assault properly because it is not a scientific profession but one of political advocacy manufacturing fake science to fit a predetermined agenda, as much as cigarette company researchers did so in prior decades. The fake science they put out has been found wanting and not meeting basic standards of scientific rigor, including openness and transparency of data and methods to enable replication, openness of publication, and nonincestuous peer review. Climate scientists on the "Hockey Team" fail in all these categories. Beyond that they've filed false expense reports with government agencies (a felony), defrauded the taxpayer, and engaged in threats of bodily harm.
Based on the facts known so far, the scientists here may have committed a literal crime here, not the climate-skeptics.
And did you really just attack others for their lack of scientific rigor and knowledge, after what these scientists seem to have been up to? Really? Don't you see the weakness of that out-of-place umbrage?
We--the public--have every right to demand inquiry into this matter. And we get to judge the matter. We pay the bills, after all.
Is science really that scared of scrutiny by the people who pay its bills? Really? If so, why? Because believe it or not, there are many people in the non-scientific professions who understand statistics, data collection, experiment protocols, etc. well enough to form an informed opinion. Telling us we are unfit to judge, however, so you don't have to make the case is very poor way to respond to mounting skepticism over what has occurred in this field.
In sum, defending science against non-scientists by insulting the non-scientists is a really bad ploy right now. Do as you will, though.
"..but I know why they did it. Politics, pure and simple. Their profession is under assault from commentators, politicos, and ideologues who have no interest in science whatsoever."
Are you serious? Isn't it obvious that it was the scientists that were skeptical of the methods used by the AGW-political complex that were "under assault"? And by the very people that you are now defending?
Isn't it really more likely that the reason they "did it" was the simple, human reluctance to face that they had invested a huge amount of time, money and effort into proving a theory not born out by the evidence?
If I understand DrJamf's comment, it boils down to, "we can't share our raw data, because the dumb public might be misled by it." In other words, let's create a class of designated interpreters who will tell the unwashed masses not just what the facts might mean, but what facts they do and don't need to know.
I remember studying a period when Europe took this approach -- The Murky Ages? The Dim Ages? Something like that...
I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that climategate is a single data point. We shouldn't draw conclusions about the entire scientific effort to understand climate from a single data point. This is especially true when there exist hundreds of legitimate, untainted pieces of evidence that support the hypothesis. And, very little explanation for why we see this kind of warming without a human influence on global warming.
That is such a silly argument. Firstly any one who has been in science will know that the general tenet is that if your findings are correct and support your hyopthesis and are reproducible no amount of "assault" will keep it from seeing the light of day. And of course if it is all so politicised, the emails make it clear that the AGW guys at CRU knew how to play the game.
Rest assured there are plenty of sceptics within the scientific community including me. They may not be in climate science but most of us know that a number of tricks are employed by scientists and that scientists committed to their ideas will go to any lengths to promote it and also are quite paranoid about sharing results. Aka no one comes to the conclusion that the science is settled. The difference is that normally this remains within the scientific world and is corrected by the usual checks and balances. With AGW, "commentators, politicos, and ideologues who have no interest in science whatsoever" have jumped onto the gravy train of global warming and now no one can step off. It's not the scientific process but the way it has played out in the larger world and spun into beleivers and deniers - and clearly CRU was happy to participate in this - that makes this a public interest story that sadly is being downplayed by everyone except people posting comments.
What the good doctor appears to have overlooked, is that the scientists in question (and many like them) have chosen to play politics. In the interest, perhaps, of ensuring continuing grant funding, and perhaps out conviction as well, they entred the political realm. The emails, which I think the Dr. needs to read a little more thoroughly, provide evidence that they were prepared to suborn the process - peer review, replicability, honest statement of levels of uncertainty - in order to make their graphs prettier and conclusions more certain. Unfortunately, they were senior in their field and ideally placed to have a signifcant impact on the science that was published and which became "accepted" (and in the case of Dr. Jones, to influence the base data that is used to support that science).
They actively colluded to suppress dissent - to the point where even members of the "Team" (as they called themselves), were scared to stray from the fold. I commend to everyone's reading an email from Ed Cook to Keith Briffa in 2003. Mr. Cook proposed that they undertake an examination of the inconsistencies in the published papers dealing with the millenial temperature record. (This record is a critical component in the IPCC argument that the current "warming" is "unprecedented" and therefore anthropogenically induced.) See: 1062592331.txt
Now, all he was actually looking at doing was considering the inconsistencies and problems with the existing published papers - he wasn't proposing to review whether the proxies that had been used were actually a good record of past temperature.
What is striking is not his conclusion that about the likely results, but his fear of undertaking the endeavour. He outlines 5 ideas or issues to be examined and then writes as follows:
"6) Point out implications concerning the next IPCC assessment and EBM forcing experiments that are basically designed to fit the lower frequencies - if the greatest uncertainties are in the [greater than]100 year band, then that is where the greatest uncertainties will be in the forcing experiments
7) Publish, retire, and don't leave a forwarding address
[...]
If you don't want to do it, just say so and I will drop the whole
idea like a hot potato. I honestly don't want to do it without your participation."
In essence, he was scared to challenge the orthodoxy, for fear of what it would mean to his career. (On that point, consider Dr. Zorita's published statement about what has been revealed here - and his expectation as to the effect his views will have on his career: http://coast.gkss.de/staff/zorita/myview.html)
Oh, and what did Mr. Cook expect the review would show (based on his knowledge of how the millenial temperature records had been constructed, including his own work in constructing them)?
"Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about [less than] 100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know f***-all about what the [greater than] 100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know f***-all)."
The good Dr. also appears to be willing to overlook the discussions of the code used by the CRU to create the "value added" data. There are numerous reviews out there now - what it shows is that the code is poorly designed, is subject to virtually no Q/A and suffers from a series of intervention points where the data can be made to look "more right". The emails show a definitive conviction on the part of the scientists as to what "right" would be, giving rise to a serious question of whether the product suffers from confirmation bias.
If good is to come of this, the following needs to occur:
1. For any work to be used to support or bolster the political agenda, the authorist must first make available the raw data, their code and their methods, so that full replication and analysis can be undertaken. Where such disclosure is not made, the views cannot be used by the IPCC or to support (or oppose) the development of policies in relation to putative catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.
2. The peer review process must become more transparent. It is not the role of scientist to act as gatekeepers for orothodoxy.
The core question of course surfaced by Climategate is whether the data set has been fraudulently manipulated and/or the "model" coded to produce a predetermined or biased result.
The most damning items against the CRU crew are the withholding of raw data and refusals to release model source code for public examination by unbiased professsionals, combined with the "puzzling" lack of warming over the past 10 years.
With regard to the data, strangely enough CRU now claims that raw "older" data sets were tossed years ago. Now only "homogenized" and "quality controlled" (e.g., fiddled) data is available for ultimate FOI spurred release. Were these data fraudulently fiddled or merely fiddled in the better interest of intelligible science by removing "bad" data points? We probably will never know, but we sure ought to do some digging in effort to find out.
But in this context an assumption of evil doing makes sense relative to the absence of recent warning: Since the world has been watching the thermometer with bated breath in fear of more AGW (and derivative data has been available to many for independent analysis), it hasn't gotten warmer! While this may merely be proof that a watched pot never boils, a world-watched pot makes it hard for someone wanting steam to turn up the burner. In otherwords, if data has been fraudulently fiddled, it is most likely the old stuff.
And the models? Here it should be noted that the purloined files do include one or two documents suggesting grotesquely amateurish computer skills at CRU.
Maybe CRU's reluctance to release the model source code for scrutiny is embarassment at "hack and bash" and probably bug-ridden model coding. But crappy code can produces indeterminate output. Release the code. Prequalifyt 10, 100, or 1,000 expert and properly credentialed professional software engineers with no professional ties to global warming. Set up a bulletin board with write privileges restricted to them as a means for them to document and internally debate their findings. Give them the CRU code and a month. Let the world watch the bulletin board postings. Most will voluntarily stay awake nights examing the model and sharing their findings.
As a second effort, souce code for the models should be publicly released and the repeatability of published model output with the normative ("fiddled") data set validated with output from a new and independently done assembly of the model code. If such an "IV&V" effort fails to duplicate published output, that should be firm evidence the "model" has not been released.
If the IV&V effort succeeds, bias or fudging inside the model should be easily detectible with input of known data sets. For example, input of a random data set should not show a warming trend as output. Given an absent of built-in bias, running the model on source data, but constructed as a reverse time series, should yield predictive output in mirror opposition to published findings. If this is not the case, something is rotten with the CRU crew.
These are suggestions as to what can and should be done. At most and absent stonewalling, 60 days would be required. All professional effort would be voluntary.
I agree with you, but I think you are making this far more complicated than it needs to be. One of the planks of science is that other scientists are able to replicate your work.
The tree-ring data is corrupted, we don't know how badly. The only acceptable solution is to recreate it from scratch.
I agree that open-sourcing the code is required. Preselected experts and forums will not be. One of the great things about sciene is that any bozo working at the patent office is free to re-write all of physics.
You of course are ultimately correct. As a rule, the truth, or at least a closer approximation, tends to emerge in the end.
But lots of stupid decisions are looming. If we wish to guard against their being made in register with the work of bozos or frauds (and paying the price), we need to bring in the A-team.
I intentionally referenced "software engineers", thinking selectively of qualifying the upper third by way of reputation with sound engineering degrees, 10 years working experience, and earning a six figure income in a nonmanagerial software engineering position. I mention this partly because people of this caliber with open access to CRU software can give me an evaluative answer I would bank on in less than a week and tend to their day job at the same time.
I mention it also because so much of the discipline-peripheral scut work (e.g., statistics, instrumentation, programming) in "science" is done by reasonably bright, but totally untrained, and poorly supervised graduate students rather than competent professionals.
I am not a scientist either, but I am an engineer with a particular emphasis on statistice, and I have been concerned about the state of climate science ever since Wegman issued his report.
This leak confirms his worst fears. The misuse of statistics involved is more fuel to the fire of those who distrust statisticians. It is not the statisticians, but those who would misuse statistics who are the villians.
I no longer have any confidence in climate science. These so-called scientists have done nothing to advance our knowledge since 1990. 20 years wasted, and we still don't know if climate change is all part of normal cycles, or if our ongoing experiment of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is causing changes.
All involved should be fired, and truly dispassionate real scientists should be put in charge of determining what the actual facts, as best we can determine, really are.
And from what I can tell, tree ring proxies are a TERRIBLE way to try to reconstruct past temperatures. Which means we have at best 200 years of data for a few percent of the earths land surface that could be reconstructed. Which is not long enough to determine anything.
… and so goes away this United Nation, Global Heating science – ooops, sorry, new religion…
… and since (fortunately) attitudes a’changin’ in a helthier direction, soon, and in the same manner will go away the “scientific” truth that has established that homosexuality is a “normal facet of the human sexuality”, fraudulent tenet so dear to liberals.
Since we are talking about “Mike’s NATURE trick” – pray, can anyone explain where is the science that allowed the removal of homosexuality in 1973 from the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association list of mental afflictions?
Doctor Hooker’s study (a piece of Michurin/ Lisenko science in itself) was the convincing science piece that was embraced by that collection of “scientists” and since 1973, the issue has became taboo, and has developed in an ample and completely fraudulent doctrine nicely rounding the warming fraud -
Sooner or later we’ll hear about this…
"The scientists have let them down, and made the anti-science crowd look wise."
I am offended by being called anti-science because I do not believe in man made global warming or our ability to stop it if it was occurring.
We do not believe in such things because it was obvious that real science was not being used to form the theories in the first place. We are anit-propaganda, anti-fleecing, anti-excess government control. Not anti-science.
"She has criticised the emails and the IPCC response to them, then says she still believes the consensus view on climate change."
..and that is precisely why nothing will change at IPCC. As far as I have seen, darned few in media and government have elected to suspend their pre-existing beliefs until this has been resolved, including yours, Clive.
So why should the IPCC turn itself inside out and risk coming up short on allaying the fears of a public that in all likelihood will support the IPCC anyway if it just keeps a low profile until another distraction comes along?
The data that was released by a whistleblower from CRU this last week, known as “ClimateGate”, will change the debate on Global Warming.
The emails are bad, but the data files are worse. CRU looks to have lost large parts of their data and made the new files conform to expected values. The programmer comment files are worth reading , Harry_Readme.tx, as he could validate very little of the data that remained, and made quite a bit up to fit expected values just to make the program work.
As many peer reviewed papers use CRU data as a basis of their paper, and CRU can be shown to have submitted bad data, this calls into question the entire paper. As professional reputations are on the line, the fallout will be interesting to watch.
It is very sad that Michael Crichton is not here to see this. His National Press Club speech from 2005 is startlingly prescient.
Dr Jamf poses the classical non-question. Prove a negative.
"You cite the trillions that will be spent to slow AGW with no mind to the trillions we will lose if we don't. Your column is anti-science and irresponsible. Please prove me wrong with a credible theory for global warming that does not involve human influence. Please prove me wrong with hard evidence that AGW is false."
OK. The end of the Little Ice Age was followed by a century of warming. That has now ended. Why does the climate shift from ice age to Medieval Warm Period (In spite of the efforts of people like Michael Mann) ? Probably solar fluctuation, as seen in the sunspot cycle. That happens to be at a low point right now. Therefore, we are cooling.
You are wrong to say that I have asked climate skeptics to prove a negative (otherwise known as argument from ignorance). The globe is still warming (2005 was the hottest year on record, but we're still warming on average).
I'm asking them precisely how to explain away the body of evidence that points toward AGW. If you want to say that humans don't influence climate, you have to put the current warming in the context of something else, like solar fluctuation. If you can't do that, you've failed to prove a positive - that global warming is independent of human activity. Your explanation might be right, but it's not borne out by the evidence.
Don't worry. I'm not pulling a Rumsfeld. But let's be reasonable. There's a huge body of theory that supports AGW. The skeptics have weak evidence (or little evidence with positive-explanatory power). They're just busy poking holes.
The skeptics on this board (almost all of the comments?) should take note that the science has been generally settled. AGW exists. We're working out the details regarding how soon it will be catastrophic. All signs point towards an urgent need to take action. If you want to be helpful, join the debate as reasoned individuals. Let's cast aside the fear mongering about economic losses, the uneven criticism of relatively robust science, and the partisan bickering.
If all is well, what were they hiding and why?
This whole global warming science reminds me of many of my former Wall Street colleages that try to build mathatical models to predict stock price movements.
These people get a logical hunch that certain parameters presage stock price movements then build models using these parameters. These models never work- in fact the developers figure that out during backtesting. So they tweak and tinker until the model backtests perfectly.
But of course it is a lot different manipulating the data (selective selection) and model variousions and algorythims to get a great backtest than it is to get a model that is absolutely predictive.
And the funny thing on Wall Street is you only have to be right most of the time. The so-called GW scientist said not only are they 100% correct but there is no need to do any more research. The science was settled.
I dare say that as complex as wall street is climate is vastly more so. Just my "guess".
If they said they think it is "likely" that man's use of fossil fuel was resulting in excess CO2 that is, and would be, deterministic in driving climate change maybe they get a pass. But the certainty and their inability to deal with critics as adults is their undoing.
"let's have some independent inquiries into what has been going on."
Independent inquiries have been going on for many years. They've been made by the people you so lightly dismiss as the "anti-science crowd." Now you realize that maybe they were right, and those you took to be authorities are charlatans. It's about time.
My background is physics. ("Background" is a nice shorthand expression for many years of skull-crushing courseloads at MIT. But no matter.) I noticed the stench from the AGW camp years ago. I doubt that you have the educational credentials to declare me to be a member of the anti-science crowd.
Your faith in "peer review" as practiced today is also, I believe, misplaced. In science, criticism is vital. Peer review is one way to implement that. Fortunately it's not the only one.
I could not have said it better. Your opening paragraph demands applause!
I would add, with respect to peer review:
Peer review is worthless unless the reviewers have the ability to replicate the results. Theories do not become more sound by being published in a journal. They become more sound when other people review your methods and reach the same conclusions.
By routinely withholding their code and data they made their work impossible to review. It might as well not been published at all.
Crook fails to provide any examples of statistical incompetence revaild in the stolen emails. This is only going to be persuasive to the folks who think that global warming is a commie plot. Better quality journalism, please.
A very honest and important piece. I agreed with everything, right up to the last paragraph: The IPCC process doesn't need to be "fixed." It needs to be scrapped.
Would it surprise the author to find out that the data was garbage prior to scientists altering it to their advantage?
A veteran meteorologist had reason to suspect the US climate data and founded www.surfacestations.org. His team audited 1003 out of 1221 weather stations in the United States and found that:
"89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.
In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited."
A PDF version of their very thorough study is available via their home page.
Here is some information about the author:
Anthony Watts is a 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran and currently chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio.
He got his start as on-air meteorologist for WLFI-TV in Lafayette, Indiana and at KHSL-TV in Chico, California. In
1987, he founded ItWorks, which supplies broadcast graphics systems to hundreds of cable television, television, and
radio stations nationwide. ItWorks supplies custom weather stations, Internet servers, weather graphics content, and
broadcast video equipment. In 2007, Watts founded SurfaceStations.org, a Web site devoted to photographing and
documenting the quality of weather stations across the U.S.
Very insightful and important article.
I have a scientific background and I’ve studied and read articles for and, most importantly, against AGW. I came to conclude that the case for identifying a recent warming trend as solely due to human activity was weak. I believe it will take many decades of research if not a century or two before we can understand the underlying causes and perhaps make some projections.
I thought the IPCC research presented was incomplete and self-serving. I did not understand until the emails were released that it was corrupt to its core.
I’ve studied the history of scientific discoveries and understand the rough and tumble nature when two opposing theories conflict. In the history of science, I have never encountered such a coordinated effort by a cabal of scientists in democratic societies to suppress and twist logic and data to their own ends.
I had to qualify “democratic societies” because in both fascist Germany and Stalin controlled Russia, science was state policy and completely controlled.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
What is beyond the pale is the destruction, i.e. “loss”, of the original station data used to draw conclusions and to develop climate computer models. Of all sins of research, this has to be in the top five.
I wonder how many more valuable data files are being expunged so only the end results, their desired results remain.
One more point, the propagandizing of the public for their Cause.
From the data dump:
“To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. This "double ethical bind" we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.”
Stephen Schneider, Stanford University, senior "Team" member
The right balance was found by throwing “honest research” into the crapper.
***What is beyond the pale is the destruction, i.e. “loss”, of the original station data used to draw conclusions and to develop climate computer models. Of all sins of research, this has to be in the top five.***
From an early age I believed science had a vital role in the world, and it had to do with a search for the truth; a mathematical representation to describe the phenomena observed. The observations are recorded as data.
I trained as a Chemical Engineer; we were taught to record the data 'warts and all' in our hard-backed notebooks with numbered pages. No pages to be removed, no data to be changed, graphs have error bars,etc. this is undergraduate stuff - foundational.
Yes Mr. jgfox this is a "cardinal sin" in the world of science, and one I don't think should be excused or trivialised. In fact, I wonder if prison time is in order.
Perhaps prison seems harsh, but there may be a case that these people have defrauded governments and thereby possibly been the cause of trillions of dollars to be wasted. My concern all along has been that money that could have been spent on projects to help humanity has been spent on what I consider a boondoggle. For example, much of the world does not have clean water; how much suffering might have been averted for a fraction of the money poured into trying to prove CO2 warming?
So called climate science seemed to me to be a particularly liberal-elitist sort of fad for the rich western societies to feel guilty about and get themselves into a panic; while other societies don't even have clean water to drink and wash with.
I am a Christian, and I believe in forgiveness, mercy, and restoration. I also believe that forgiveness follows repentance, and repentance often follows facing justice and confrontation with ones sins.
Left to ourselves, humanity usually gives itself a free pass. Perhaps a spell in prison like Chuck Coulson of Watergate days would actually be a benefit to these defrauders.
Just some thoughts ... I am angry about what we have been put through with this global warming caper.
http://luxeveritas.blogspot.com/
Don't think it would work, Rigby. Judging by the harry readme file, even they are no longer able to duplicate their own results. I'd assume no one else can either. And they don't have some of the raw data to work with anymore.
It's going to be difficult to figure out how much of what they produced can be used, and (if it's a total loss) how much of climate science is affected. But if the impact of all this is an real insistence on transparency in the science, it can only be good.
I don't expect CRU to be vindicated or salvaged by my "suggestion."
My expectation, based in good part on the harryreadmefile, is that a professional evaluation of the model code is certain to find it trashy, bug-ridden, and fraught with computational error. It may find evidence of designed in bias (fraud). Any such evaluation will not be subjective because any flaws will be pointed to and obvious to those skilled in the art.
If serious internal flaws can be clearly demostrated, then none of the CRU work which relies upon the analysis is salvagable. At best, it is back to whatever raw data may exist.
The CRU emails will do for Climatology what Tom Cruise's couch-jumping on Orpah did for Scientology.
Both religions are crocks full of crackpots.
"Anti-Science Crowd"!? No, idiot, we're not the ones who crawl into denial. We listen to ALL the experts in the field while you obviously never bothered.
Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in history . . .When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, and award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.
“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds. . . I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists.” – Indian Geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.
“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.
“Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” - Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal
“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.” - Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”
“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy
“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” - Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland
“I have yet to see credible proof of carbon dioxide driving climate change, yet alone man-made CO2 driving it. The atmospheric hot-spot is missing and the ice core data refute this. When will we collectively awake from this deceptive delusion?” - Dr. Gn LeBlanc Smith, a retired Principal Research Scientist with Australia’s CSIRO.
“I am a skeptic. . . Global Warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.
“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly. . . As a scientist I remain skeptical. . . The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system.” (Emphasis added.) Meltdown--The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media by Patrck J. Michaels
Thanks you Winghunter for highlighting the dissent of reputable scientists.
Churchill’s WWII quote applies to Climategate:
“But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
And, as to the canard of “consensus science” and “2,500 or 10,000 scientists support anthropogenic global warming:
“Indeed, when Albert Einstein was informed of the publication of a book entitled '100 Scientists Against Einstein', he is said to have remarked,”
‘If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!’
One hacker was indeed enough.
In an era where the bad guys are the Wall Street tycoons and insurance companies, why does Al Gore, Green Billionaire, get a free pass? In an undeveloped market, it is pretty amazing how this clown made his fortunes in 9 years. Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer swooned all over him about how great he was and how legislature would only make him richer. Do you think either one of them has commented on Climategate?
In regards to the "decline" statement, the problem is that inferring temperatures from tree ring growths don't work so well after 1960. Meaning if you compare reliable temperature measurements with tree ring growth inferences, the tree ring inferences will be incorrect:
Read the 7th paragraph down:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/
Talk to some real climate scientists:
http://www.realclimate.org/
How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic:
http://www.grist.org/article/series/skeptics/
Healthy skepticism is a part of science, but any science that accepts all ideas as equally true is no longer a rigorous science. All ideas have grain of truth, but some ideas have more of these "truth grains" than others and that is what scientists are looking for.
Simply because some scientists may not be the nicest people in the world, does not automatically imply their ideas or methods are false.
Isaac Newton was not a nice man, he poked fun at Hooke's (Hooke's Law dude) disablilty among other things, but his ideas work very very well for macroscopic size objects.
William Shockley was a notorious racist and eugenicist, but his ideas regarding semiconductors works very well. In fact his equations are used everyday to design and build the very same semiconductors inside this computer.
We must separate the person from the theory and judge the theory.
Nobel Prize(you pick the type) for the email leakers!
Every Liberal remembers Eisenhower warning against the, "military-industrial complex" but few if any know his second stated warming in that same farewell message, his warning against the, "scientific-technological elite"!
This speech could have been made last week, read the whole thing.
David
So, the question is, now what? We need a group of honest scientists/statisticians to tear into the data and tell us what the scoop really is. Now where are they and who are they and what governmental body is going to put them together and oversee the process? Lets ask that really old guy who has been wondering around holding up a lantern if he has any ideas.
Like others, I browsed through many of the leaked emails posted online. Some of the comments, from Phil Jones and Michael Mann in particular, are outrageous. As a trained scientist with a PhD in physics, I must confess that I feel very disillusioned: Science has been hijacked by those who really don't care for integrity or the scientific method.
I'd like to quote from one email in particular, because I haven't seen this excerpt in any of the media reports. To me, this is the most damning statement of all and should be publicized. It's a flippant comment made by Phil Jones about Hubert Lamb, the founder of CRU. I quote: "Hubert's chapter has lots of detail, many figures which have lines with the phrase 'analyst's opinion' - one of his favourite terms for things he made up."
It's important to understand the full import of this comment. The current head of the CRU is telling a colleague that the founder of the CRU made things up in work he submitted for publication! If two heads of the CRU believe it's quite OK to make things up to fool their colleagues, how much of their work is pure invention?
This statement undermines everything. It undermines the work of these scientists, the CRU as a whole, the scientists who knew about this (including Mann), the models and forecasts they produced, the IPCC reports based on their data, and government policies resulting from IPCC alarmism. All credibility just evaporated.
By the way, here is a link to the email from which I quoted.
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=762&filename=.txt
This is more damning in that it will bring much fodder to those that challenge any and all science that could prove to have political implications. Consider the creation vs. evolution or the abortion debates.
All scientists will be damaged by this. Scientists need to be on the front line of correcting this issue.
This will be held up as an example for years to come as to how much scientists can and will be trusted. The fallout is just starting but by no means finished.
Planet Bob;
I have to disagree; just as there are good and bad lawyers, pastors, doctors etc. that there are good and bad scientists.
I think people will realise that science isn't bad, especially if science is done the way it is supposed to be done. i.e. you publish your stuff and other scientists try to reproduce your results. But some scientists will not be true to science itself.
Remember a few years ago Fleischman and Ponds (Cold Fusion - sorry if the spelling is off). In that case, if I recall correctly the two chemists had not falsified their data in anyway but other scientists could not reproduce their results. I think it was an error in experimental method that was the problem.
Whatever the reason, it was very disappointing because it seemed Cold Fusion was a big break-through, which promised big rewards for humanity.
***Consider the creation vs. evolution or the abortion debates.
I am not sure what your point is as far as these debates, but from what I observe, theories of Intelligent Design (ID) are dismissed because they support creation science, whereas ID theory itself is purely scientific proposed by many non-believers.
Dismissive rhetoric against ID is an example of anti-science. If ID is faulty it should be refuted on scientific grounds not on the grounds that because it points to a creator then it must be faulty and is outside of the realm of science because science only deals with physical matters.
If studying the data leads some scientists to reach a conclusion of ID then other scientists who disagree should show the fallacy in the ID theory and not dismiss it out of hand.
Gurth Whitaker
http://luxeveritas.blogspot.com/
Clive, I think you were closer to the truth in your first post.
The consensus on climate change presented through the IPCC and many other national and international science organizations reflects the work of hundreds of scientists over several decades published in 1000s of papers. Both the science and the conclusions have been reviewed and confirmed by all of the relevant American science agencies, from the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences to the American Geophysical Union.
This scientific work and its interpretation is not diminished by the "controversy" that critics are trying to raise over the intemperate comments or actions contained in these emails.
The basic facts of CO2 increase and consistent patterns of warming, melting, retreating, etc, across the globe remain unchanged by this "controversy".
To understand the occasional over-reaction of the hacked researchers in their private correspondence, you might read the book that George Monbiot recommends: James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore's "Climate Cover-up".
The profits of the industries endangered by the IPCC is 100 times the entire global budget for climate research. With these profits as both means and motivation, they've found it easy, like the tobacco industry before them, to stir up broad-based "dissent".
Don't let their continuing efforts distract you from the basic facts:
Atmospheric CO2 continues to increase and consistent patterns of warming, melting, retreating, etc, continue to be documented across the globe.
The basic facts of CO2 increase and consistent patterns of warming, melting, retreating, etc, across the globe remain unchanged by this "controversy".
But do we really know that anymore? Given the cloud of suspicion now over the veracity of so much of the historical temperature data, I'm not sure we know more than the fact that CO2 has increased and the fact that the 20th century was a century during which the climate around the world got a little warmer. We don't know anymore if the 20th century's warming was "unprecedented," which is the necessary premise behind AGW. If the earth was warmer previously in the absence of man-made influences from burning of fossil fuel, then we can't say anymore that there's a pattern tying CO2 with climate. Break that link, and you don't have an issue anymore.
You're also assuming that there is a link between dissent and "the profits of the industries endangered by the IPCC." This is manifestly not true. While those industries might be lobbying for their interests as expected, there are numerous scientists at sufficient distance from those expenditures to where you can't possibly link their dissent to industry profits. Moreover, within the scientific community, there is an equally strong incentive to agree with the AGW-alarmists, and that is their control over the publication of research. You've heard the expression "publish or perish?" In academia, that's not a joke -- it's how the business works. If you don't get published, you don't have a job -- a job hundreds of other scientists would like to have. Manipulating that process isn't hard, and was clearly done here. So for all the dissenters who got smeared by these scientists, there are multiples of them who published what the journals would accept, just to stay on campus.
The "who benefits" question cuts both ways. You can't use that as a reliable guide to which side the angels are on and which side the devils.
Oregon Perspective, as Vail Beach does, I challenge your climactic assumption. Even good correlation is not causality. At a de minimus level, I ask what mechanism involves a monotonic rise of a putative prime cause and only indifferent correlation with the asserted effect, to wit: a ~50% increase in CO2 and a 0.2% increase in average global temperature, particularly when the rise in CO2 has been consistent, and the temperature has varied from minus a few tenths to plus a few tenths dependent on specific decades.
The onus, the burden of proof, is on the proponents. They have not met the burden.
Oragon Perspective, and I challenge your assumption that the 0.2% increase in average global temperature has anthropogenic sources, and is not simply a natural result of the world "recovering from" the Little Ice Age.
This whole bloody issue could be understood through science if the people involved remembered that science is more a method than a religion.
This will prove to be very significant in the whole debate. The story line has changed dramatically on Climate Change.
How this all plays out is political. Without money and clout nothing will get done. Once you've been found out to be deceitful you cannot quickly gain that lost trust. Many politicians have been looking for anyway to escape passing supportive legislation and this is going to make it far harder.
The hit on scientists is that they have a similar situation but not identical to legal structures. Evidence is presented and an adversary or "peer"seeks to prove it right or wrong. Those that watch the whole presentation then make a judgment based on the two or more presentations. When one side that could challenge the data is handicapped then truth is usually the first casualty. This appears to be the case here.
These scientists sought to keep their data and presentations from being reviewed by any that would seriously challenge them.
The damage is going to be huge to climate change politics, regardless of the facts. Clearly, though, the data and analysis must be reconsidered before huge changes are made, for it is clear that things have been manipulated and there is no evidence that this isn't the only place where this is going on.
About the best article I've read on the subject, so far.
Thank you for getting mad. It is worthy of it. If global warming is a sham these guys should be humiliated, but if it is true, then they ought to be shot.
The whole saga reminds me of the way the Catholic Church persecuted people like Copernicus and Galileo in the 1600's when they dared challenge the church's dogma which stated that the sun and the planets revolve around the Earth. It wasn't about science then, and it's not about science now. It's about money, power and control.
Any time a scientist or a group of scientists refuses to allow others free access to their data for purposes of analysis and critical review, ignores repeated Freedom of Information Act requests for access to that data despite the fact that it was obtained with public funding, and then claims that the original data has been "lost" or "destroyed", alarm bells should be ringing like crazy.
This would be wholly unacceptable behavior if we were talking about just a $10 million study on the mating habits of African tree frogs. But the fact that we're talking about climate data that's being used as the justification for an attempt to impose a multi-trillion dollar re-allocation of global resources makes this a HUGE deal, one that warrants a full investigation by the governments of both the US and the UK. If it can be shown that Messrs. Mann, Jones, et al deliberately falsified and/or destroyed data in order to advance a particular policy agenda, then they should spend time in jail.
There are thousands of perfectly reputable scientists around the world who have serious doubts about the theory of anthropogenic global warming. There is also an abundance of empirical evidence that should make any rational person question that theory. (For example, if the planet is melting, why is the size of the antarctic's ice sheet increasing and not decreasing?) However, these dissenters have been subjected to a deliberate campaign of suppression and intimidation by the self-annointed high priests of climate change in both academia and the media. The subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) message that has been given to these people is "If you still want to get your research money, if you still want to be a part of our community, then you'd better get on board with the 'consensus' we need here. If you don't, you'll be sorry." It’s a total disgrace.
Truth be told, there has never been anything even remotely approaching a real "consensus" on this issue and the general public is, thankfully, finally beginning to figure that out. As much as Al Gore might want to have us believe otherwise so that he can continue to line his pockets, the science is most certainly NOT "settled"!
The whole process needs to be started again from scratch, and this time not allowed to fall under the sway of a small cabal of researchers more interested in advancing a particular ideology (and of course, their own careers) than getting at the actual truth. In the meantime, "Cap & Trade" is now dead for the forseeable future, at least here in the U.S.
The upshot of all this is that the whole process needs to be started over from scratch. The data and methods that have been used to date are now totally compromised and are therefore completely worthless as a basis for formulating public policy.
The governments of the US and the UK each should establish independent commissions (composed of equal members of both major parties) to oversee a new effort to collect and analyze climate data to determine A) if there is, in fact, any warming underway and if so B) to what extent, if any, does mankind's burning of fossil fuels contribute to it. But THIS time, there needs to be an emphasis on maintaining the full transparency of the process at all times and on making sure that a sufficient number of scientists from both sides of the debate are involved so as to prevent the process from once again being co-opted by a small cabal of like-minded researchers.
In addition, the IPCC needs to be immediately dissolved. It has become hopelessly politicized and can no longer be trusted. Finally, all pending "cap & trade" legislation should be put on indefinite hold while the new data are gathered, processed and analyzed.
I see that I was beaten to the punch in offering Dr. Zorita's statement. Ah, well. Here is a link to a paper that offers a contrarian analysis of the (alleged) CO2 contribution:
"Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics"
Version 4.0 (January 6, 2009)
replaces Version 1.0 (July 7, 2007) and later
Electronic version of an article published as International Journal of Modern Physics
B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) 275{364 , DOI No: 10.1142/S021797920904984X,
c World Scientific Publishing Company, http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmpb.
Gerhard Gerlich
Institut fur Mathematische Physik
Technische Universit¨at Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig
Mendelssohnstraße 3
D-38106 Braunschweig Federal Republic of Germany
Ralf D. Tscheuschner
Postfach 60 27 62
D-22237 Hamburg Federal Republic of Germany
http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
" Abstract
The atmospheric greenhouse e ffect, an idea that many authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896), and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarifi ed. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse e ffects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned di fference of 33 C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsifi ed."
-AleG
The actual hacked climate model source code explained by a software developer:
Source Code Explained
This puts the emails to shame, trust me.
The entire thing is one big gigantic fraud.
Thank You!
I was beginning to despair that people could change their minds even a bit.
Is it true that Phil Jones said in one of the emails he would destroy the data rather than reveal it?
And now we are told the data does not exist?
The scientists have let them down, and made the anti-science crowd look wise. That is outrageous.
What is outrageous is to suggest that people that opposed AGW were anti-science. While the opponents include some clear scientific illiterates it should be pointed out that it also included some of the world's most prominent scientists. Most rational sceptics never claimed that there was no warming after the end of the Little Ice Age. They simply wondered about the statements that the warming had to be caused by human emissions of CO2 and questioned just how much warming has occurred since the 1930s. It was clear that the raw data did not support claims of extensive warming since the 1930s so there were questions about the 'adjustments' that added a warming signature to that data. It is precisely this issue that needs to be addressed. Let us look at the raw data and go over the reconstruction methodology to evaluate why temperatures in the past were lowered and why current readings get an artificial signal added to them.
It is clear that the Atlantic failed to look at the findings of the Wegman Committee and the Wegman testimony in Congress. Like most of the mainstream magazines it failed to follow up on the debate between McIntyre and the dendro community and chose to drink the Kool-Aid that the AGW promoters at the IPCC were pushing. There was nothing said about the fundamental requirement of the scientific method; that all data and methods be clearly documented and available for review to anyone who wished to replicate the conclusions reached. The media ignored the clear fact that the scientific journals failed to meet their own data policies and allowed authors to avoid posting their data or methods for independent reviews. For the life of me, I can't figure out why the Atlantic is not going after the people that were clearly responsible for the perversion of science and allowed this scam to take place; the editors at Nature, Scince, Journal of Geophysical Research, Climatic Change, and other journals that allowed authors to publish papers without allowing their methods and data to be accessed by other researchers wishing to review and replicate the process and validate the conclusions. Clearly the journals have failed to keep the scientific method from being compromised and have allowed clear fraud to take place. Those editors clearly have to be fired and replaced by people who will be very diligent and insist that all policies are followed so that this type of fraud does not take place again.
This global warming agenda was planned years ago, we are just seeing the script unfold. Cap and trade will double the price of food i.e.wheat etc... which will cause a percentage of the worlds 1 billion people on the brink of starvation to go over the egde. Gore and the rest of his bunch believe there are too many people so its good policy to get rid of a couple hundred million of the anyway.
"The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself."
- Club of Rome,
premier environmental think-tank,
consultants to the United Nations (circa 1970's)
"We need to get some broad based support,
to capture the public's imagination...
So we have to offer up scary scenarios,
make simplified, dramatic statements
and make little mention of any doubts...
Each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest."
- Prof. Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
lead author of many IPCC reports
“The data doesn't matter. We're not basing our recommendations
on the data. We're basing them on the climate models.”
- Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
Some more information at http://newstheylose.com
Question:
If I told you that we were going to launch a massive campaign to covert the world to christianity, would you go along with it?
If you buy into "global warming", this is exactly what the key leaders expected. They have turned it into a religion and propogandized the world to obtain power over you. But dont take my word for. Read it in their own words: www.iisd.org/pdf/2007/unep_we_want.pdf
"The environment should compete with religion as theonly compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity."
"an extensive propagandizing role ... to support UNEP strategic objectives"
"along with increased political leverage for UNEP, bringing increased financial leverage to its cause, once again by reaching beyond the national environmental ministries that traditionally are the organization's financial base to more powerful sectors of government as well as business and other interest groups that will see profit and advantage in the new, environment centered approach."
scarry ppl. scarry.
Amazing how ego and hubris are the great equalizer even among the most educated. The energy the proponents of global warming have behind their cause and its influence on their ability to affect public policy does not originate in the scientific community. It comes out of pop science from Al Gore and others. The problem is that no one involved in this discipline is willing to give up that energy and momentum by stating the truth and that is completely understandable. Climate scientists feel deeply that being responsible with our carbon emissions is the best posture to take at this time. There is evidence that SUGGESTS our carbon contribution MAY affect global temperatures but respectable scientists also have to admit that the state of the art in climate modeling is inadequete to explain everything we see and that conflicting data will be the rule of the day as they attempt to better those models through the scientific process. Taking that truthful position deflates the certainty baloon that propels the current passionate support.
First off I must preface my comments with the fact that I am no scientist. However, I am a Level 3 Technical support Engineer with a major communications company, and therefore have spent most of my adult life solving problems.
With respect to the anthropogenic global warming debate, and I firmly believe it is still in debate mode, since there are many scientists who dot believe the findings of the IPCC, how can we in the public demand the public debate? I listened to a couple of Climatologists last night, who appeared amused that anyone in their particular field who did not believe man was a major cause of global warming to be a comical flat earther, and made fairly coherent arguments to support that opinion.
As a non scientist, the fact the Co2 is one of the basic elements required for our planet to support life, in and of itself, rules out Co2 as a danger to the planet. Were that the case, would not the population explosion of man, and other mammals have already rendered the Earth inhabitable? If not, where I am missing the logic. I have read, though now I question the source of all information with regard to the global warming debate, that human caused Co2 emissions have increased dramatically over the last decade, while the average temperatures around the globe are in a cooling trend over that same decade. To be sure, the IPCC scientists I listened to last night disputed those presumptions adamantly. My own research with respect to weather related communication failures over the past 20 years do indeed support the cooling trend, and subsequent reduction of lightening activity since 1999. My research is limited to North America, and while I realize my numbers are in no way representative of the globe at large, they do, in my mind, lend credence to the claim of the leveling off of global temperatures over that same time period.
At any rate, if the claims are true, that IPCC climatologists have destroyed the raw data supporting their premise that the science is settled with respect to anthropogenic global warming is evidence enough, disregarding all the emails, that the science is indeed not settled. Without raw data to support any conclusion in the business world guarantees no executive would be willing to spend one dime toward a proposed action to reverse or control whatever conclusion was reached and presented as part of business case.
Executives with which I am familiar, to a man, demand to see the raw data, the summary of that data, as well as the logic used to support whatever my investigations indicate require funding to reach a stated goal, or a cost effective solution to any given problem set.
Are scientists, because of their credentials, or past performance, not required to meet the same standards of proof, before spending Government funding, or in the case of this global warming question, the additional tax and expenditure of $145 Trillion? I have had my doubts about Co2 related causes to global warming from the first day I heard Al Gore speak on the matter, partly because of my knowledge of Al Gore's reputation, but mostly because such a claim violates my sense of logic with respect to the oxygen/Co2 place in the planet's ability to support life. While I recognize that may be a simplistic response, it does appear to me worthy of further investigation before embarking on a world wide economic disaster.
Were I in government, I would expect the entire set of conclusions of the IPCC to be disregarded, and new comprehensive research of the data to be collected, analyzed, and presented by a group of scientists heretofore having had nothing to do with the IPCC's conclusions.
Does that make me a flat-earther? Are people, like me, who have reached new heights of skepticism with regard to the IPCC simply in the way of progress without reason? Risking being labeled a conspiracy theorist, I would further submit that the United Nations has a substantial financial interest in accepting the settled science of Global Warming, as stated by Al Gore and others, and should therefore be denied direct access to an ensuing investigation into this subject going forward.
When business people fudge/manipulate their corporate numbers in such a way as to (a) attract investors and (b) earn bonuses, recognition and promotions ---- they get punished. By law, they get prosecuted. And investors shun them. Sometimes they go under, like Enron.
In this instance, are we being bilked by people whose livelihood and fame, and by those invested in the future of sectors who stand to gain financially --- and in the case of elected government, who seek the power to control via taxation and public policy? And in this case, the "we" are those who would be impacted financially (like shareholders are in the private sector), and economically (like consumers are when the prices become artificially inflated).
If there is no genuine righteous indignation and retribution from Congress and other key political figures regarding this bilking, then one has to wonder how far in the tank they are, doesn't one?
As in case of businesses, those running the research in return for grants and other kinds of financial gain ARE a big cog in the economics of this country (and the world). They, like busnesses, need to be made accountable in ways beyond their tarnished reputations.
The biggest thing that slaps me in the face is that Mann and the others were using a lot of scientific and statistical flim flim to get around a fairly well-known historical fact: The weather was warm enough in the late middle ages for Greenland to be green, and for wine grapes to be grown in southern England. The statistics show what is manifestly not true.There must be a problem with reality or with the statistics.
There's a thing that further disturbs me. If we have actual cold rational data, and they really can predict how much warmer the temperature will be, we could plan accordingly. Are we just all going to broil alive? Will we see major expansions in desertification? Or will we see more frequent and stronger el nino currents, leading to much more rain in the Southwest? Will the seas really rise twenty feet, as predicted a few years ago, or are the current predictions of a three to six inch rise the correct ones? That rise, spread over a century, can be pretty easily handled. Much of Houston might be underwater, but much of Houston was built in the past fifty years. In a century, it is a fairly simple matter of urban planning to move the city to higher ground, over time, building on higher land , demolishing and not rebuilding on lower, making a great deal of nice parkland. New Orleans and a few other places would have to be handled similarly.
However, when someone comes to me screaming about an impending disaster that can only be averted by my handing over my wallet and checkbook, I, like any prudent man or woman, would be at least a bit cautious. This hue and cry over what ought to be cold rational science makes me similarly suspicious. The solution offered as the ONLY HOPE!!!! is a complex Rube Goldberg sort of taxing scheme designed to force de-industrialization, and sounds too much like other academic dreams I have heard, and, in my youth, believed and supported. I saw some comment in the New York Times last year that predicted that the limits on transportation would bring about the death of WalMart, a dream so dear to the heart of every "liberal" elitist in the USA. In fact, of course, when people went to town in a horse-drawn wagon, they still went, once a week. Nothing in the present proposals would change that, except for a general impoverishment of those tacky people who shop at the discount stores.
So, first the data ignored an established historical fact. Then the solution offered was impractical. Then, finally, the elements of wishful thinking began to show through the hastily applied coat of paint. No, give me some believable data. Don't ignore what I already know to be true. And don't come at me with some hare-brained plan to solve the whole problem, if it exists, by plunging most of the world into poverty for several generations.
I have made some goof, causing my post to appear under the name "M". Sorry. I have little fear and less desire for anonymity I am Michael Adams, of Austin Texas.
Climategate reminds me of a couple of scenes in "The Wizard of Oz." One comes when the Wizard puts a noisy, intimidating bluff over on Dorothy and her companions until Toto pulls the curtain aside, exposing him as a fraud. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," he continues to bluff until he realizes that the game is up. This takes about a minute on the screen; it should take a few months to play out in real time. In the movie, the Wizard comes clean and we end up liking him. I'm not so sure this will happen with the Climategate deniers.
The other is the general rejoicing to "Ding, dong, the Wicked Witch is dead."
"The people whose instinct is to respect and admire science should be the ones most disturbed by these revelations. The scientists have let them down, and made the anti-science crowd look wise."
A certain amount of disambiguation is required. Those fellows are no more "scientists" in the sense of damnation to science than snake oil salesmen are "doctors" whose misdeeds damn physicians or medicine.
Thus, it does not make "anti-science...look wise" when people falsely practicing some dark art *they* call science are caught out. There were and are many straight-arrow scientists who saw Jones', Mann's, Hansen's and others' behaviors as improper practice of science for many years. My own claim in this regard (as a straight-arrow scientist) followed a year-long meta-study culminating in a paper submitted for publication in 2005. Many others saw the scam much earlier.
Indeed, the shame goes well beyond the halls of East Anglia; that paper I wrote challenging some central elements of IPCC's assertions was rejected by Science when I would not provide a preferred list of referees. I expected them to know who *they* could rely upon for a critical review and to do so. Without the complicity of Science and other journals, the swindle would have been revealed by scientists themselves, in open challenge.
As an aside, I see this hoax, insofar as it has reached upper government levels and been declared "settled" by at least one former official, as akin to the Soviet Union's declaration that Lysenko's teachings were official science after 1948.
Carbon dioxide cause or effect?
We should take the climate change seriously because these changes have created and destroyed huge empires within the history of mankind. However, it is a shame that billion dollar decisions in Copenhagen may be based on tuned temperature data and wrong conclusions.
The climate activists believe that the CO2 has been the main reason for the climate changes within the last million of years. However, the chemical calculations prove that the reason is the temperature changes of the oceans. Warm seawater dissolves much less CO2 than the cold seawater. See details from:
http://www.antti-roine.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=73
This means that CO2 content of the atmosphere will automatically increase, if the sea surface temperature increases for any reason. Most likely, carbon dioxide contributes to global warming, but it is hardly the primary reason for climate change.
The magnitude of CO2 and water vapor emissivity and absorptivity are the same, however, the concentration of CO2 (0.04%) is much less than water 1% in atmosphere. In this mean the first assumption is that water vapor effect on the climate change must be much larger than CO2.
The climate models may give wrong results, 1) if they assume that the CO2 is the primary reason for the temperature changes, 2) if they do not take into account the role of oceans, and 3) especially if they are based on purpose-oriented CRU temperature data.
Kyoto-type agreements transfers emissions and jobs to those countries which do not care about environmental issues. New post-Kyoto agreements must channel emissions trading funds directly to the R&D of new solar technology and commit to curb population growth. Feeding money to underdeveloped countries does not help, because this money will be used to increase population and wellfare.
How ironic it is that global warming enthusiasts have turned skepticism into an ad hominem.
This particularly distressing since skepticism is the mother’s milk of scientific inquiry. Without the protecting influence of skepticism, science can rear misshapen and weakened children susceptible to the corrupting influence of politics and the diseases professional tribalism.