Rogue Scientists and Climategate

Ah--my claims are "ideological." Calling Phil Jones "Philly Boy" and scientists "thugs", that's just non-ideological objectivity at its finest.

Have you noticed how the goal posts have shifted? At first, the claim was that the raw data has been destroyed. Now it's that the raw data hasn't been published yet again, even though the data that has been published was consistent with those of other research centers with similar data sets.

It's sort of like the Obama birth certificate fiasco: no matter what Obama produced, there was always a further demand from people who were certainly as "non-ideological" as the blistered welder.

Now I really have to get to sleep.

But before I do...

http://mediamatters.org/research/200912010030

http://mediamatters.org/research/200912010002

What is the red herring with these emails? 

That Phil Jones and other scientists were angry with the peer review process of a scientific journal because it was letting papers get published without verifying the sources of the data and they were threatening to boycott it. This wasn't some secret opinion, half the board of the journal quit that year because of the incident.

That CRU rounded up a variable to the nearest fraction of a degree in historic translations of temperature?

There is nothing in these emails that was new or secret. 

Greenhouse gas effects are proven science from about the 1930s. They are why life even exists on this planet and we don't drop down to mnus -233 at night like the moon.

The only think that is difficult and at question is projecting for how much temperature will rise.

Global warming isn't neccessarily uniquely man made. 

There is natural sun variations, and even minor axis shifts every few hundred years that affect the temperature which is why we had warming and cooling in the past.  But, when you double the concentration of carbon dioxide, its like putting a sweater on the planet, it increases heat retention.

Hot years, will be that much hotter,  Cooler years will exist but they wwill be warmer than they would have.

Greenhouse gases are not just heating the planet.  They are also turning the oceans moe acidic as CO2 becomes carbonic acid once dissolved.  We don't evne know fully how this will affect us.

CRU's emails show nothing to debate the science, and the only thing thy demonstrate is there are unknowns in past and future projections. (as opposed to real temperatures for the last 100 years).  Any report, such as the IPCC recognize these already.  They give a range of possible temperatures and the results.  Even then, some affects such as sea level change and ice cap meliting have shown the IPCC's projections to be inaccurate as the real data is more extreme.

The only thing done poorly with CRU is their IT security, and their follow up PR statements..

Oh, and this is good: Here's some choice objectivity from the non-ideological Christopher Monckton that welder linked to a while back:

"At Copenhagen this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they're going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regimes from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won't sign it. I have read that treaty and what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created. The word 'government' actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to Third World countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, 'climate debt' - because we've been burning CO2 and they haven't. And we've been screwing up the climate and they haven't. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

"How many of you think the world 'election', or 'democracy' or 'vote', or 'ballot' occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn't appear once. So at last the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year because they'd captured it. Now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathy with these points of view and he'll sign. He'll sign anything. He's a Nobel peace laureate. Of course, he will. And the trouble is this: if that treaty is signed your constitution says it takes precedence over your constitution and you can't resile from that treaty unless you get the agreement of all the other state parties. And because you'll be the biggest paying country they'll not let you out.

"So, thank you America. You were the beacon of freedom. It is a privilege to merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your prosperity away forever. And neither you, nor any subsequent government you may elect, would have any power whatsoever to take it back again. That is how serious it is. I have read the treaty. I have the seen the stuff about government, climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or no.

"But I think it is here - here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire - it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty, for there is no problem with the climate and, even if there were, economically speaking, there's nothing we can do about it.

"So I end by saying to you the words Winston Churchill addressed to your president in the darkest hour before the dawn of freedom in the second world war. He quoted from your great poet Longfellow: 'Sail on, O ship of state. Sail on, union, o strong and great. Humanity with all it fears. With all the hopes of future years. Is hanging breathless on thy fate.' Thank you."

As the Guardian's Environment Blog puts it,

"As is now the norm among sceptics, the speech contained a hearty serving of conspiracy theory about how "factions of the left" are colluding to take over the world and "do not care how many people die" as a result of their misguided policies. But the conclusion (go to 1:31:00) ratcheted up the conspiracy dial to max with a rant about how a "communist world government" is going to be created imminently. And for good measure, he throws in mention of Churchill to sledgehammer home the point to the audience that the environmental "communists" are as much a threat to the freedom-loving Americans as the Nazis"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/oct/20/climate-change-de...

Won't debating this set back the fight against climate change by decades? 

Here is a link to this story being covered on CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/12/03/tech-climate-east-anglia-r...

This so called "Climategate" changes nothing. Human induced climate change is still by far the strongest theory, stronger than increased solar radiation or anything else. A few emails from a few scientists changes nothing. The data supporting human induced climate change is way bigger than "Climategate".

The IPCC does not conduct research. They compile research conducted in peer reviewed journals and there is not one single credible peer reviewed journal in the world where you will find very many articles that deny climate change. There isn't a single scientific organization in the world that doesn't support human induced climate change either. Using the word "Climategate" says to me that the person using it is desperate to deny human induced climate change for some reason or simply does not understand the issues.

ruh roh...

I wonder who's going to get rich off of Cap and Trade...HHHhhhhmmmm???

welder wrote:

I wonder who's going to get rich off of Cap and Trade...HHHhhhhmmmm???

So, what's really at the heart of this? It's not the science, since the deniers were effectively blown out of the water decades ago.

You want to know what's really going on?

There is a massive and apalling information gap between the science and the general public - cue the mainstream media, allied with and representing the dominant economic forces in those nations most heavily invested in dirty energy. The dominant forces are oil and coal. Think about the Bush government and how heavily the oil industry was represented, starting with BOTH Bush and Cheney.This was a filthily corrupt regime that thought nothing of pushing that nation into an evil foreign war to maintain dominance over someone else's oil resource. It didn't work, by the way, proving they're really not that bright.

Even now there are more than four oil and coal lobbyists per congressman in Washington working to shoot down any climate legislation, such as was passed, once again years ago, in most of the rest of the planet.

Cue welder who blunders into the middle of the fray, painfully uninformed, and starts mouthing the propaganda put out by the world's most powerful lobby.

Who's going to get rich off of cap and trade? Good grief man, the oil industry is ALREADY fantastically rich and fighting hard to stay that way; like General Motors they are painfully out of touch with social needs; unlike General Motors they're able to rig the system - for now - to maintain their dominance.

While it's no surprise these inherently conservative and threatened industries are going to resist any change that shrinks their piece of the pie, it IS kind of pathetic they can count on a woefully underinformed public to do their dirty work for them.

Obviously in the shift to cleaner energy technologies new industries will prosper while those that are slow to pick up on the changes will suffer - and that is just as it should be in our wonderful capitalist system. Not a lot of cloth coming out of Birmingham these days, not a lot of steel being produced in Pittsburgh. That's the system.

It's pretty absurd. Here you are buying into the hilarious fictions put out by the denial lobby - where lots of money is being made - without pausing to examine the various interests at play. Do you really think ideas like global conspiracies of scientists, or communist world government are anything other than surreal fantasies that play to our subconscious and have ZERO traction in the real world?

So, according to you it would seem the dirty energy companies, with their track record of warmaking and perverting democracies domestic and foreign - this lot are innocent of massive manipulation to prevent the move to cleaner energy, that would somehow be beneath them or something? They're the GOOD guys in all this and it's a bunch of academics at fault? Do you know ANYTHING about academia, or the scientific process?

And for Christsakes stop going on about a few stolen emails. If you'd actually glanced at the massive quantity of data coming in from a wide range of fields from oceanography to climatology to glaciology to geomorphology to biology, you'd see how ridiculous it is to suggest such a puff of smoke means anything in the face of such diverse data sources, EMBARRASSINGLY ridiculous.

Seriously. Stop feeding off the garbage put out by the denial lobby, dig deep enough to genuinely understand the various forces in play, make clear-headed judgements as to how they have operated historically and continue to operate, get up to speed on the science, which while not complicated is obviously voodoo to the undereducated neanderthals so passionately denouncing it. You're obviously intelligent and admirably independent of mind - just dig deeper, you haven't got there yet. Obviously I think you can or I wouldn't be writing this. Happy researching.

"A civil servant who is a member of one of the most vehemently pro man-made global warming advocacy organizations in Europe which also has direct ties to the IPCC has been handed the job of whitewashing the investigation into the University of East Anglia, while absurdly billing himself as impartial and unconnected to climate science.

Meanwhile, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has ludicrously announced that it will conduct its own investigation into the climategate scandal, despite the fact that the suspects involved have intimate ties to the IPCC, with one of the primary scientists accused of manipulating climate data being a lead author of the 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports."

http://www.infowars.com/climategate-investigator-is-member-of-vehemently...

Funny....

..and interesting...

Merowe,what are your feelings on "The Big Lie" theory and do you think that modern society is too intelligent to fall for massive macro-economic absurdities?

Merowe,

if it's topnotch science credentials and a real track record in atmospheric physics you need,

why didn't you say so ?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html

By RICHARD S. LINDZEN

Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally-such as for the last dozen years or so-it does little that can be discerned.

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%.

 [...]

Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.

Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.

Mr. Lindzen is professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

DaveW wrote:

Merowe,

if it's topnotch science credentials and a real track record in atmospheric physics you need,

why didn't you say so ?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html

 

 

I'm reminded of the famous Max Planck quote around the turn of the 19th century, that all the major work in physics and atomic chemistry had been done and all that remained was to fill in the blanks. Planck's contributions to modern physics were significant and are still in use. Within a decade or two, Rutherford had smashed the atom and Einstein had built the Lorentz Transformations into the paradigm shifting relativity theory and Planck was shown to be DEAD WRONG.

First of all you are quoting from The Wall Street Journal again, haven't I spoken about that? I should sooner heed some utterance from the Pope then credit that far from disinterested arse-wipe.

Secondly, your Mr.Linzen, an esteemed scientist, is also a highly paid shill for oil and gas interests. Equals conflict of interest, equals, ruled out of order, once again for compromising DISINTERESTED scientific integrity. I'm all for submitting climate science to the most rigorous examination and he perhaps has a role to play. But you give us one compromised scientist who thrives on his 'maverick' reputation, cited by one 'source' utterly lacking in credibility against, what? An international consensus?

Sorry mate, I'm not buying.

This is an excellent indicator of just how low the CBC has dropped in quality since Peter Gzowski left the scene.  Rex Murphy may have lots of formal education but I have always considered him to be a buffoon.  

al-Qa'bong wrote:

Quote:

Hm, interesting. I think Hitler's 'Big Lie' was fairly shrewd (and cynical) and could be traced back to Macchiavelli though I cannot support that.

 

Goebbels learned a lot, the "Big Idea" included, from a little Jewish PR whiz from New York named Eddie Bernays.

 

Quote:

But in terms of manipulating the masses, the Nazi Reich and perhaps Stalin's Russia pioneered many of the propaganda techniques which have since been so instrumental in constructing our modern 'managed democracies' in North America.

 

We have Bernays to thank for the concept of "engineering of consent" that has dominated post Great War propaganda in North America as well.

'Century of the Self', no? Yeah, it's brilliant.

Proof?

Great piece.
This guy explains global warming better than most anyone else.
I love his analogy at the end - you'll have to click on the link to read it.
How I Wish The Global Warming Deniers Were Right...

Every day, I pine for the global warming deniers to be proved right. I loved the old world – of flying to beaches wherever we want, growing to the skies, and burning whatever source of energy came our way. I hate the world to come that I've seen in my reporting from continent after continent - of falling Arctic ice shelves, of countries being swallowed by the sea, of vicious wars for the water and land that remains. When I read the works of global warming deniers like Nigel Lawson or Ian Plimer, I feel a sense of calm washing over me. The nightmare is gone; nothing has to change; the world can stay as it was.

But then I go back to the facts. However much I want them to be different, they sit there, hard and immovable. Nobody disputes that greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, like a blanket holding in the Sun's rays. Nobody disputes that we are increasing the amount of those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And nobody disputes that the world has become considerably hotter over the past century. (If you disagree with any of these statements, you'd fail a geography GCSE).

Yet half our fellow citizens are choosing to believe the deniers who say there must be gaps between these statements big enough to fit an excuse for carrying on as we are. Shrieking at them is not going to succeed.

Our first response has to be to accept that this denial is an entirely natural phenomenon. The facts of global warming are inherently weird, and they run contrary to our evolved instincts. If you burn an odourless, colourless gas in Europe, it will cause the Arctic to melt and Bangladesh to drown and the American Mid-West to dry up? By living our normal lives, doing all the things we have been brought up doing, we can make great swathes of the planet uninhabitable? If your first response is incredulity, then you're a normal human being.

It's tempting to allow this first response to harden into a dogma, and use it to cover your eyes. The oil and gas industries have been spending billions to encourage us to stay stuck there, because their profits will plummet when we make the transition to a low-carbon society. But the basic science isn't actually very complicated, or hard to grasp. As more carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, the world gets warmer. Every single year since 1917 has been hotter than 1917. Every single year since 1956 has been hotter than 1956. Every single year since 1992 has been hotter than 1992. And on, and on. If we dramatically increase the carbon dioxide even more – as we are – we will dramatically increase the warming. Many parts of the world will dry up or flood or burn.

This is such an uncomfortable claim that I too I have tried to grasp at any straw that suggests it is wrong. One of the most tempting has come in the past few weeks, when the emails of the Hadley Centre at the University of East Anglia were hacked into, and seem on an initial reading to show that a few of their scientists were misrepresenting their research to suggest the problem is slightly worse than it is. Some people have seized on it as a fatal blow – a Pentagon Papers for global warming.

But then I looked at the facts. It was discovered more than a century ago that burning fossil fuels would release warming gases and therefore increase global temperatures, and since then, hundreds of thousands of scientists have independently reached the conclusion that it will have terrible consequences. It would be very surprising if, somewhere among them, there wasn't a charlatan or two who over-hyped their work. Such people exist in every single field of science (and they are deplorable).

So let's knock out the Hadley Centre's evidence. Here are just a fraction of the major scientific organisations that have independently verified the evidence that man-made global warming is real, and dangerous: Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, L'Academie des Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, the UK's Royal Society, the Academia Brasileira de Ciencias, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the US Environmental Protection Agency... I could fill this entire article with these names.

Lovely, NR and Eliza.  Needed that.

Merowe wrote:

DaveW wrote:

Merowe,

if it's topnotch science credentials and a real track record in atmospheric physics you need,

why didn't you say so ?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html

 

 ....you give us one compromised scientist who thrives on his 'maverick' reputation, cited by one 'source' utterly lacking in credibility against, what? An international consensus

Lindzen (check spelling) and his climate science will come out on top after Copenhagen, no doubt, and the current sky-is-falling hysteria will be seen as a bizarre turn away from science

time will tell

Maybe there a few who post here who could be added to the list

Quote:

Civil Conspiracy Lawsuits Filed Against Climate Change Deniers

By Linda McClure,
Dec 6, 2009

The need for climate legislation is based upon a wide body of scientific evidence that shows global warming is happening now and warns of climactic changes as that warming continues.

Skeptics and some in the fossil fuels industries have joined forces to claim that the climate science is invalid, hoping to decrease public and Congressional support by tainting the foundation for legislation.

In many ways, their disinformation campaign carries similarities to the tactics of the tobacco industry that "misled the public about the scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease," the Union of Concerned Scientists notes in its report Smoke, Mirrors and Hot air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science."

http://solveclimate.com/blog/20091206/civil-conspiracy-lawsuits-filed-ag...

 "The UK's efforts to quash the Met Office's review, which is what scientists would demand in any other context, shows that the politicians aren't terribly interested in whether AGW is scientifically supportable, or even true at all."

Dumb bunnies. Can't imagine why they would do that. They are just into scarin' folks? Or is it a plot (with a very, very complicated,even twisted, history)?

Here's the original article that the newbuster post is based on.

 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6945445.ece

Quote:

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

 Great as far as I'm concerned.  Still doesn't mean that it's all a big hoax, not true or an indicator of a global conspiracy which is what I've seen people jumping to conclusions about.

Most places I've seen reposting quotes from this particular article seem to gloss over this part though....

Quote:

Since the stolen e-mails were published, the chief executive of the Met Office has written to national meteorological offices in 188 countries asking their permission to release the raw data that they collected from their weather stations.

The Met Office is confident that its analysis will eventually be shown to be correct. However, it says it wants to create a new and fully open method of analysing temperature data.

 And there's the kicker and hopefully the silver lining in all this.  At least arguments based on secret and the darkness of the scientific underworld can be put to rest.  Oh wait....what if the Met is in on it too!

Quote:

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.

Which is true and exactly what places like Newbusters and other skeptic people are doing. Yes it's ironic. Painfully actually.

I don't personally agree with the politicians on this particular point. I understand it though.

Duh!

Attempted breaches show larger effort to discredit climate science

http://www.nationalpost.com/most-popular/story.html?id=2300282

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climategate has "climategate" in context.

It is kinda like watergate except this time the press is targeting the climate scientists

while the Nixons who ordered the smear campaign get away.