Harry's Place

Monbiot has shown some class here. Hiding scientific data is wrong whether it is done for the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical industry, or climate change. If it isn’t ideological, the data will speak. Monbiot has correctly noted that trying to defend this behaviour will backfire and damage attempts to get legitimate science accepted.

Of course the next thing he ought to tackle is the hyperbole. There is enough of a potential problem with climate change without going beyond what the data shows.

George Moonbat commenting on his own cif post

I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.

The timing is interesting, ahead of the Copenhagen fakefest.

Honest people will have to re-examine their attitude to man-made climate change in light of this revelation.

No, honest people will refuse to take the views of the “skeptics” who have siezed on these emails to promote their agenda at face value. Not a single one of those emails contained anything which even remotely called the scientific basis for AGW into question.

The IPPC reports are compiled by hundreds of scientists. The UEA group is only a small part of IPPC, so I remain to be convinced.

Well just follow the links at Mel’s place and demonstrate how lovely these scientists are. They even “celebrated” the death os a skeptic scientist and refused requests under FOI to reveal their documents.

I think the GW scientists just met their Watergate.

And those links would be at http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5559816/the-smoking-iceberg.thtml

While I don’t have enough of a scientific background to comment on the subject matter of the documents, nor enough time to hunt for and even skim review them I’m more than able to recognise anti-scientific methods when it’s as blatant as his.

Oh come on, cherry picked comments taken out of context can always be made to appear damaging. And the people pushing this stuff have their own agenda and very little credibility on this subject. Even if there was serious misconduct here, to make a judgement based on it just looking bad without making an effort to understand the background or even read some of the emails is just ridiculous.

They even “celebrated” the death os a skeptic scientist and refused requests under FOI to reveal their documents.

Well that mean they can be unpleasant people at times but that has no relevance to the science. They didn’t release this particular data because some of it belonged to other institutions and they had no right to distribute it. And there is plenty raw data available from the CRU website for anyone who wants it.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/

They may be right but that doesn’t mean they didn’t cheat, if all of these files are genuine then the boys in blue are going to be involved.

Are the skeptics saying a) that global warming isn’t happening and b) that human activity isn’t extremely harmful to the planet?

I don’t get it. Tuna are nearing extinction. TUNA. The oceans are a mess. The icecaps (both) are melting.

What about this don’t people get?

Do the “skeptics” simply want the right to continue forever in their wasteful, polluting ways?

Sophia, either by mistake or on purpose, you are mixing up two separate (though overlapping) questions. Of course pollution happens, and of course the environment needs to be protected against that. And there are plenty of people, myself included, who wish to see even greater efforts on the environmental front, and yet remain profoundly sceptical about so-called “anthropogenic global warming”.

Sophia, if the world is warming due to carbon emissions, how come there has been no increase in temperature during the last decade when emissions has been at their highest level?

*have

Monbiot is right of course. Even if a scientist does not know that it is wrong to set out with a pre-conceived narrative, surpress bits of info that don’t go along with it and manipulate what is left a historian does (and some have quite rightly ended up in copurt for trying it.)

I’d hope people can have a rational debate about this but fear that most have dug themselves in to such well-entrenched positions that this won’t make much difference now. The believers are just going to keep on believing anyway and the sceptics are going to read it as confirmation that it’s all a cosy conspiracy against them.

At the very least it ought to mean that scientific journals make damn sure than such articles are not reviewed by the author’s mates, though.

I don’t get it. Tuna are nearing extinction. TUNA. The oceans are a mess. The icecaps (both) are melting.

What about this don’t people get?

Tuna=over fishing

Did global warming make the duck-billed platypus extinct?

Even if a scientist does not know that it is wrong to set out with a pre-conceived narrative, surpress bits of info that don’t go along with it and manipulate what is left a historian does (and some have quite rightly ended up in copurt for trying it.)

Of course. The problem is that these emails do not prove any such thing.

What Andrew Adams said in his first post. None of this makes the slightest difference to the science, all it shows is some sloppy researchers, some possibly with an agenda, tinkering at the edges. IPCC reports are all edited by Governments before issue, in practice it means that conservative positions are taken, bearing in mind all the vested interests that don’t want the boat rocked.

Beware the use of the word “tricks” – they can be quite innocuous, meaning, for example, a mathematical short cut.

If I may summarise the science:

1 The climate system is extremely sensitive to forcing, be it caused by solar variations, volcanism or life. We know this from the fact that tiny differences in solar input caused by the Milankovic cycles are sufficient to cause the Ice Ages. In the past, life has caused major changes.

2 CO2 in now 30% higher then in pre-industrial times. The forcing this causes is more than that caused by the Milankovic cycles – we have stopped the next ice age.

3 No fewer than six climate subsystems are in observable positive feedback. These are detailed by James Lovelock in his book, The Revenge of Gaia

The climate system is chaotic, featuring many non-linear systems and positive feedbacks. The results of perturbations are only predictable in gross terms. For example, the El Nino Southern Oscillation appears to have entered a state not seen before.

Thank you for a restrained position on this issue. Elsewhere this debate has reached quite deranged proportions.

The duck-billed platypus isn’t extinct.

Of course. The problem is that these emails do not prove any such thing.

Well some of the extracts I’ve seen discuss data hiding, serious manipulation of figures, sexing-up reports for publication, talk of skirting arounf FOI and tax evasion.

I for one expect, above all else, truth from scientists. And I repeat, I’m not saying their overall conclusion is wrong – that’s not the point here.

Of course. The problem is that these emails do not prove any such thing.

Do you have a “scientific” proof for that statement?

Did global warming make the duck-billed platypus extinct?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm5l80aw4Uk

no

Not a single one of those emails contained anything which even remotely called the scientific basis for AGW into question.

Well, they do call into question the ludicrous hockey-stick.

However, saying that, let there be no doubt – temperatures are rising, and we shouldn’t ben putting so much crap into the atmosphere anyway.

I’m a working scientist– and after trawling through quotes for an hour or so I haven’t seen any evidence of conspiracy to mislead. They are just working guys who are talking informally. My mail with colleagues is far worse– bit I assure Cancer exists, we’re not making it up. The ridiculous idea is that these guys would be hiding evidence or results that are so readily and likely to be repeated by colleagues all around the world. It’s honestly such a load of bullshit.

Y2K anyone?

I don’t know which quotes you’ve been trawling through but try these and then repeat your post.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html

Well I have just looked at one single mail picked at random from Mad Mel’s links:

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

I cannot think of any academic context where that would not on its own trigger an investigation.

This would be hysterically funny, if millions of taxpayer dollars weren’t at stake.

Andrew -
Why the flippity flop would I care that … And there is plenty raw data available from the CRU website for anyone who wants it. … when the released e-mails show scientist discussing falsifying data?

Would you buy shares in any company run by Bernie Madoff? Would you buy any shares in any company run by Bernie Madoff if his website vouched for their value?

If no, why not? You’re telling us here to do just the same thing.

Consider …

Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series”…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.

Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.

Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible.

Citation:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html

Honest people will have to re-examine their attitude to man-made climate change in light of this revelation.

If all the evidence for man-made climate change had come from this one unit, I would agree. But it hasn’t.

Well, if the “cherrypicked” comments are about falsifying data, suppressing data and organizing skulduggery to ensure that your work is only referreed by your own close knit group of like-minded individuals, then it’s still utterly unacceptable. Doesn’t matter if it’s only a small proportion of the work overall. Sounds like saying it’s only a tiny little forgery.

Reading the online “cherrypicked” comments, they did include some which suggested that they knew the data suggested a Mediaeval Warming Period, and a set of contrary data about cooling rather than warming. Hence the consternation and the open commitment to making up or hiding the data to make it fit what they “knew” must be true. And the determination to destroy data rather than let it be released to independent researchers under the Freedom of Information Act.

This was not about nifty alternative ways of doing honest maths.

What I love is the Guardian (as opposed to Monbiot) coming on all indignant about the hacking and the criminal nature of this act. Didn’t notice the Graun taking that kind of moral stance on the many occasions when it was passed leaked secret government documents.

Do you have a “scientific” proof for that statement?

No, because a lot of it is a question of interpretation of the comments, allied to an understanding of the background to the issues of what they are discussing. But here’s a scientific explanation for one of the most quoted emails – the one about using a trick to hide a decline in warming shown by the data.
First of all, I don’t think the word “trick” is problematic at all – it just means using a clever method of working something out. As for hiding the decline in warming, well the email refers to a proxy temperature reconstruction using a particular set of tree ring data and it was already well known that for the period after 1960 this data did not correspond with the known increases in temperature (the “divergence problem”). A paper to this effect had already been published in Nature, so whatever he meant by “hide” he was hardly trying to conceal uncomfortable results of his work from the wider world.
So there is no evidence of dishonesty and, given the very narrow scope of the data, no relevance to the question of whether AGW is real.

Researchers who were sceptical of the claims of the AGW team, have complained for some time that the raw data, and computer algorithms used, were being withheld from them. And those messages do back up the allegation that this cover-up was deliberate, and longstanding. Other messages also indicate both bad faith, and a lamentable degree of incompetence.

There are no “wrong” answers in research, except for one: “I’m not telling you!”. You don’t have the legal right to say that unless you paid for the collection of all that data yourself. And they didn’t. You don’t have the moral right to hide data while your reports are being used to impose damaging restrictions on other peoples lives around the world.
And you don’t have any need to say that unless you know that you have something unpleasant to hide, and a strong vested interest in keeping it hidden.

This team have had a significant input to the whole AGW and IPCC bandwagon. It is high time they were subjected to an independant review panel at the very least.

Another aspect of this, it doesn’t look like a hacker did this. At first sight, it looks more like a leak from an insider.

AA, you seem to assume that someone attacking uae is anti agw, that’s not (always) the case, look at the bloody evidence, this is a corrupt club who have spent millions of our money (luckily they kept a spreadsheet so we all know), they are not scientists, they’re anti-science. This is why GM is so angry, he was on their side and they’ve let him, and me, and YOU down badly.

Just for balance, some internal communications that came to light due to discovery proceedings in a federal law suit in the USA. These are absolutely explicit; those promoting the sceptical line knew from the beginning that their arguments did not hold up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/science/earth/24deny.html?_r=1&hpw

sl, I don’t assume that – obviously Monbiot is not anti-agw and I don’t assume that all of the commenters here are either – I apologise if I’ve given that impression.

But clearly these emails have been released with the clear intention of discrediting CRU and those making the loudest noise (in general I mean, not here) are those who do have a clear anti-AGW agenda and whose arguments are often ignorant at best and dishonest at worst. I mean people here are citing Melanie Phillips FFS.

I wouldn’t say there is nothing at all troubling in these emails but I think people are making snap judgements based on the worst possible interpretation without borthering to consider that maybe there is a not so sinister explanation for much of the material.

sl: I cannot access any of the links on that webpage but the ones quoted above don’t really surprise me. Scientists moan amongst themselves all the time about journals, editors, colleagues and especially committees.

They also make a judgement about what the data is telling them and then try to present it in a convincing manner. They certainly do not mail colleagues about their evil plans to ‘trick’ the world. They certainly will mail colleagues about clever ‘tricks’ they have found for presenting or analysing data.

Anyway I can’t be sure as though Im a statistician/data analyst – this is not my field– and frankly I cannot be bothered reading back through the nature papers cited. I’m sure however this will all have to be audited– at end I will be amazed if data has been falsified or results manipulated.

I’ll repeat it again as I think it’s important. It’s impossible for these guys to get away with falsifying climate data as the climate is out there (ie not not in their lab cupboard). Every result they publish is readily falsifiable by groups all over the world who can collect their own data and analyse it in their own way.

Monbiot wasn’t “too trusting”: he was hysterically and deliberatly pushing something he understood (and still understands) very little about, for purely political reasons.

“Jobs, travel, development, children, meat.” Is that too long to be a slogan? To answer a chant of “What do we want?”

Those of us who have had to deal with Biblical criticism are no strangers to academic fields defined by predetermined, highly politicised conclusions which the fields are then constructed specifically in order to “prove”, to the exclusion of anything and anyone who might, by adopting a method which does not presuppose the approved conclusion, arrive at a different conclusion entirely.

At least more broadly, Marxists are the past masters of this. But they are very far from unique. “Free” market economics is another example. So is the thinking underlying the racist, misogynistic and class-oppressive population control movement. And so is that currently associated with the theory of anthropogenic global warming (although that is only the latest problem to which the same old solution is proposed), with its attack on proper jobs, on access to a full diet, on mass opportunities for travel, on the right of the poor or the non-white to procreate, and on economic development in the poorer parts of the world.

Of course, all of these are closely connected. And they are all as closed and as fundamentally fake as Marxist historiography or Biblical criticism, which are also, when put into practice, vicious enemies of the poor, the non-white and the female.

On Sunday, I heard Lord Puttnam in Durham Cathedral on the need to return to pre-Modern societies for the sake of the climate. How dare he come to the spiritual heart of an impoverished county still standing on vast reserves of coal, and come out with that!

We demand high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs, including as the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. We demand mass opportunities to travel. We demand universal access to the meat that is part of our natural diet. We demand economic development in the poorer parts of the world. We demand the unfettered right to reproduce on the part of working-class people, of non-white people, and of people in the developing world.

We demand chariots.

And we demand fire.

At the very least it ought to mean that scientific journals make damn sure than such articles are not reviewed by the author’s mates, though.

In some fields, there are 3 people in the entirely world who are qualified to read and understand a given paper, never mind review it.

In all honesty there is much that is troubling in these documents, and the point that I have been trying to make is the secret weapon in the anti camp has turned out to be these guys at uae.

The opening para from a bbc article posted a couple of minutes ago:

Next month, more than 60 leaders will travel to Copenhagen to seal a deal to cut emissions blamed for warming the climate.

In their briefcases, they may be carrying newspapers proclaiming skulduggery in the fine print of climate science.

We demand mass opportunities to travel.

The royal ‘we’, once again. Oh, dear.

Nobody has a god-given right to holiday in the Seychelles, and only airheads ‘demand’ this ‘right’.

If scientific research is your chosen vocation, then unless you have unlimited funds of your own, you will have paymasters making that research possible. A good sponsor simply wants you to get to the truth. I spent many years doing research contracts for people like that, and the last thing they want is a comfortable fiction.

But politicians make very bad paymasters, because their requirement tends to demand that you reach a conclusion of their own design. To folk like that, a negative result is not acceptable.

Another example. A peer-reviewed publication starts accepting highly dubious material, which its own editor confesses is due to a wish to promote alternative theories to AGW rather than the actual scientific merits of the material. One piece in particular is so poor that six members of the editorial board resign in protest.
Legitimate climate scientists consider that this is bad for climate science in general as such poor papers muddy the waters and give a false impression of the genuine state of research on the subject, especially as they are used by certain politicians with an anti-AGW agenda.
They therefore try to bring attention to this in order to discourage further deeply flawed research being given the spurious veneer of peer reviewed status.
For this they are accused of trying to silence any publication which disagrees with them.
You see, once you know the background things are not always as they seem.

Latest from CBS :

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/entry5761180.shtml

Any techies should be interested in the computer code stuff :

“In addition to e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named “Harry” — possibly the CRU’s Ian “Harry” Harris — was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic.”

There is nothing in the slightest to cast doubt on the current theories on global warming here. The most incriminating thing that anyone has come up with is that “Nature trick”, which has an entirely innoccuous explanation. As Real Climate say, these emails do not contain evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the evidence that humans are causing climate change is even more overwhelming than ever before as this report ahead of Copenhagen shows very clearly:

http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.com/

SOC – please read the CBS link with the stuff from the programmer and come back after.

Monty, why do politicians want to get a result of their own design?

Sophia:

I’m no expert, but I think that the dwindling stock of blue fin tuna has to do with overfishing more than climate change.

As a Canadian, I’m also aware of the melting of the ice cap being witnessed by our northern communities, but the question is whether the melting is solely the result of human activity or not.

I can’t speak for all the skeptics on climate change/global warning, but I do not see the lack of definite causal link as any excuse to continue overfishing, dumping toxic wastes into the natural environment or squandering any natural resources that are finite or otherwise threatened.

There is nothing in the slightest to cast doubt on the current theories on global warming here.

But as we all know that public perception matters (especially as climate change advocates will need to ask the public to change behaviours should they be right) there is however a real need for an investigation into this unit (whether they were on the fiddle or not)

Personally I am not convinced by their defenders falling back on linguistic interpretations.

Also, there is this constant thing about “not releasing data” by the climate change deniers, in fact, huge amounts of data has been released, but they deniers haven’t done anything whatsoever with it aside from a couple of corrections to a temperature series. There are two reasons for this:
1) The data is quite clear what it shows – that humans are causing the earth to warm and
2) The people asking for the data are only asking for it as a political point – they have no reason beyond that for asking for it

This goes a long way to explain the reticence in recent years of releasing data to FOI requests to these people as described in the emails.

soc, you’re cherrypicking is world class, ever thought of living in east anglia

Andrew Adams
24 November 2009, 10:08 pm

Monty, why do politicians want to get a result of their own design?
————–

Adams, I can’t believe you asked me that. If you don’t know the answer to that already, then you don’t have the wisdom you were born with.

Or are we seriously expected to believe that you have not noticed how many shady political shysters have jumped onto the AGW bandwagon? Or how many claims on western taxpayers are being submitted in “mitigation”?

“We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn’t make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven’t spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.”

US grant, oh dear, the GOP will want answers.

The entire collection of files can be downloaded from here:
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_emails%2C_data%2C_models%2C_1996-2009

The Zip file is 62 mb in size.

SOC:

“This goes a long way to explain the reticence in recent years of releasing data to FOI requests to these people as described in the emails.”

No it doesn’t. If you were releasing data and your critics weren’t doing anything with it, that would support your position, not damage it. So you would keep doing it.

And as I have said before on this site, raw data has only been released without it’s contextual information, making it extremely difficult for anyone else to work with it.

MMN,

I’m not qualified to comment myself but here’s a quote from Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA

Read the full transcript starting a page or five up. The issue he/she is working with is that different databases had different metadata and had been updated differently. He is then trying to reconcile the data as best he can with “reference to the good databases”. These things happen. The issue is whether he was able to fix this and reconcile the issues. Note too this is a reference to the CRU TS 3.0 dataset which is not the same as the more commonly used HadCRU data – it includes different stations, and does much more interpolation. Errors in databases are inevitable (try working with one over 30 years), but these work records indicate that there is a thorough and ongoing attempt to update and check them. What would you have them do instead?

Had to chuckle when I saw both newsnight and C4 news saying how it is wrong to take bits of emails out of context.

Lets see if they are so understanding when we get to all that drivel during the Iraq inquiry again….

Hey now, Monbiot is a dyed in the wool catastrophist and that post, even as he declares something is wrong and he should rethink, then duly goes on to explain how how won’t actually be rethinking anything. The man is an impenetrable fortress of dumb, an unscaleable wall of idiot.

Judy:

What I love is the Guardian (as opposed to Monbiot) coming on all indignant about the hacking and the criminal nature of this act. Didn’t notice the Graun taking that kind of moral stance on the many occasions when it was passed leaked secret government documents.

And there is of course The Graun’s take on the Gary McKinnon “hacking” case, which is totally at odds with its horror about the “hacking” at the climate centre.

Live long and keep exposing the truth.

Andrew -does that sound like a convincing fully comprehensive answer to you ?

Graham, yes obviously we will now need a cathartic investigation. This investigation will obviously have no bearing whatsoever on the science, but will probably result in a couple of scientists losing their jobs. Then the deniers can get on with their next thing.

I’m a working scientist

Just not a very good one.

The ridiculous idea is that these guys would be hiding evidence or results that are so readily and likely to be repeated by colleagues all around the world. It’s honestly such a load of bullshit.

Suggest you read up on Popper, cold fusion, Jan Hendrik Schön and these articles: 1 and 2.

You’re absolutely welcome.

I hope, I dearly hope, that this ends up in court and before several committees of the U.S. Congress.

In one of the documents, entitled
080214_SUNYA_draft.pdf
there is information on Wei-Chyung Wang, a professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York, who is accused of falsifying data that was included in two climate change papers:
One concerned “Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land,” published in Nature in 1990
and the other was entitled “Urban heat islands in China” and was published in Geophysical Research Letters, again in 1990.

He still works at Albany, so maybe the charges remain unproven:
http://asrc.albany.edu/people/faculty/wang/wang.html

However, the fraud allegations are already in the public domain:
http://www.informath.org/WCWF07a.pdf
http://www.informath.org/pubs/EnE07a.pdf

In 2007, Wei-Chyung Wang was granted $1.3 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to Study Impact of Greenhouse Gases on Regional Climate
http://www.albany.edu/campusnews/releases_245.htm

Three things you must know about climategate.

First, the scientists discuss manipulating data to get their preferred results.
….
Secondly, scientists on several occasions discussed methods of subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication.
……
Finally, the scientists worked to circumvent the Freedom of Information process of the United Kingdom.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/three-things-you-absolutely-must-know-about-climategate/

No it doesn’t. If you were releasing data and your critics weren’t doing anything with it, that would support your position, not damage it. So you would keep doing it.

But as the scientists concerned have said in the emails that were leaked, it’s very time consuming picking apart datasets consisting of combinations of free public information and proprietry information. And also from the emails (not too many of these have made it on to blog stories yet – wonder why) stories of being bombarded with requests for data.

So what does this all mean? It does not mean that there is no warming trend or that mankind has not been responsible for at least some of the warming. To claim that as result of these documents is clearly a step too far. However, it is clear that at least one branch of climate science — paleoclimatology — has become hopelessly politicized to the point of engaging in unethical and possibly illegal behavior.

To the extent that paleoclimatology is an important part of the scientific case for action regarding global warming, urgent reassessments need to be made. In the meantime, all those responsible for political action on global warming should stop the process pending the results of inquiries, investigations, and any criminal proceedings. What cannot happen is the process carrying on as if nothing has happened.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/three-things-you-absolutely-must-know-about-climategate/

Monty,

Well I can’t say I wasn’t expecting that reply but I thought it best to ask than just presume…

Or are we seriously expected to believe that you have not noticed how many shady political shysters have jumped onto the AGW bandwagon?

Well I’ve noticed how many politicians accept the reality of AGW and its possible consequences because, as we would expect, they take the advice of the experts in the relevant field and possibly even make an effort to understand the science themselves. Of course not all politicians have always done so – George Bush famously refused to accept AGW until near the end of his time in power. Funnily enough, during this time US scientists continued to support AGW despite the opposition of their government, indeed members of the Bush administration were reduced to doctoring scientific briefings to downplay the extent of climate change.

Or how many claims on western taxpayers are being submitted in “mitigation”?

Actually, what I’ve noticed is that politicians have been extremely timid in introducing measures to combat AGW which might be politically unpopular – green taxes cost votes.
What do you think is most likely to come out of Copenhagen – a strongly worded legally binding commitment to do whatever neccessary to combat AGW regardless of the pain it might cause the people they represent, or a compromise full of impressive sounding but unenforcable promises which may not look so convincing given closer scrutiny?

And of course the theory of AGW has been around since the late 19th century – before the current warming actually occurred. The current understanding of our climate has developed independently of the particular wishes of our politicians.

Oh come on SOC, all they had to do was put it all up on a website so that anyone could download it. Context and raw data and everything.

And they shouldn’t be picking apart data sets at all, because none of that data should be proprietary. The IPR should have been bought out using a tiny fraction of all that money they have had.

You don’t present the world with a set of conclusions and demand compliance with your reccomendations on the basis of data that can’t be given out because it’s someone elses IP and you just left it at that, conveniently.

MMN,

Andrew -does that sound like a convincing fully comprehensive answer to you ?

I’m honestly not qualified to answer, it sounds convincing enough to me but then I’ve argued against people making judgements if they don’t have sufficient expertise in the subject. But Schmidt is an expert in these things and I see no reason to distrust him.

Well Andrew it may well be we’re going to find out a lot more about Schmidt so lets see :

“CEI sought the following documents, among others. NASA’s failure to provide them within thirty days will prompt CEI to file suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia:
…
– Those relating to the content, importance, or propriety of workday-hour posts or entries by GISS/NASA employee Gavin A. Schmidt on the weblog or “blog” RealClimate, which is owned by the advocacy Environmental Media Services and was started as an effort to defend the debunked “Hockey Stick” that is so central to the CRU files. RealClimate.org is implicated in the leaked files and expressly offered as a tool to be used “in any way you think would be helpful” to a certain advocacy campaign, including an assertion of Schmidt’s active involvement in, e.g., delaying and/or screening out unhelpful input by “skeptics” attempting to comment on claims made on the website.”"

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/competitive-enterprise-institute-sues-nasa-in-wake-of-climategate-scandal/

To the extent that paleoclimatology is an important part of the scientific case for action regarding global warming, urgent reassessments need to be made. In the meantime, all those responsible for political action on global warming should stop the process pending the results of inquiries, investigations, and any criminal proceedings. What cannot happen is the process carrying on as if nothing has happened.

But the case for action regarding global warming does not really depend on paleoclimatology, important as it is to the overall study of climate. There are sufficient grounds based on the basic physics behind AGW and actual temperature measurements over the last century or so (as well as other supporting data) to continue taking action to tackle AGW.

But there’s a problem: as the worker researchers attempt to store each raw datum into the neat honeycomb hockey stick structure provided by the hive’s Alpha Grantwriter, they discover that few will fit. The infrared shows them growing cool with fear. This signals the climate researcher’s instinctive behavior to begin viciously beating, rolling and normalizing the data into submission. According to Dr. Nigel V.H. Oldham, professor emeritus at Oxford University’s Centre for Metascience, this violent data dance is what makes climate researchers unique among breeds of scientists.

Professor Nigel V.H. Oldham:

“Like other species in the order homo scientifica, the climate researcher gathers and organizes data to lure grant money to the hive. In contrast to those other species, however, the climate researcher has evolved a set of complex violent behaviors to insure any data leaving the hive is perfectly adapted to nature’s most lucrative and sweetest grants. It really is a marvel of natural selection, and explains why the climate researcher continues to thrive in any kind of weather condition.”

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/11/iowahawk-geographic-the-secret-life-of-climate-researchers.html

MMN,

Sorry, but that’s just a pathetic and totally contemptible attempt to smear Schmidt. BTW, I love the word “debunked” – no sign of an agenda there then.

I very much doubt that NASA is unaware of Schmidt’s involvement in Real Climate, or that he is spending large amounts of his work time on it without their permission. As for RC’s comments policy – they have strict moderation policy and are open abou the fact that some, but by no means all, dissenting comments are deleted if they have nothing to add to the debate in question. Furthermore, where they feel a comment requires a response it is delayed while a contributor can add the response to the comment before it is published. Personally I think it is helpful to those of us trying to follow the discussions there – there is less crap to wade through and if someone makes an interesting point you can see the response straight away.

Andrew Adams:
“Actually, what I’ve noticed is that politicians have been extremely timid in introducing measures to combat AGW which might be politically unpopular – green taxes cost votes.
What do you think is most likely to come out of Copenhagen – a strongly worded legally binding commitment to do whatever neccessary to combat AGW regardless of the pain it might cause the people they represent, or a compromise full of impressive sounding but unenforcable promises which may not look so convincing given closer scrutiny?”

Of course the latter. These people are politicians.

In our case we have an election in the offing. Manifestos will all contain glib references to AGW, and the putative need to reduce emissions. Then whoever gets in, will hit us with a carbon tax, which will raise revenue for the government shush fund, but in all probability will act as a tax on jobs, and be economically regressive.

I would like us to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels. I support the building and commissioning of nuclear power stations, and I want the energy they produce to be efficient and easily affordable. If I were a politician, I would profess absolute confidence in the AGW theory, and use it to press my agenda. It wouldn’t be true of course. The truth is, I want to unhook us from the stranglehold of the Arabs and the Russians. But AGW would get me what I want, without having to come out and say that.

I’m not a politician though.

Best comment on the web so far:

“Here comes the hockey stick, gentlemen. They did everything they could to make it fit, and so will we.” Jim Treacher

And a more in-depth report by the brilliant Iowahawk:

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/11/iowahawk-geographic-the-secret-life-of-climate-researchers.html

Interestingly, the entire temperature gain of the
20th century has been lost in the last 10 years.
But enough of boring facts.
There are simple questions which one can ask
a believer in AGW. If they answer in the
affirmative, they are sincere, & probably
amenable to argument. If they disagree, they
are subscribers to a selection of nasty political
beliefs, & should be treated accordingly.
1. You agree that we should work fast to build
more nuclear power stations.
2 Since we are the most overcrowded island in
the Western World, you agree that all immigration
should halt. Illegals & failed asylum seekers should
be removed quickly & recent immigrants encouraged
to return.
3. No child benefits should be payable after a second
child, except when multiple births occur in the second
pregnancy
4. All foreign aid should stop, unless tied to strong
campaigns for family limitation. In which case such aid
will only be needed for a generation.

all they had to do was put it all up on a website so that anyone could download it.

And obviously you are the expert in how easy that would be.

And they shouldn’t be picking apart data sets at all, because none of that data should be proprietary. The IPR should have been bought out using a tiny fraction of all that money they have had.

How do you know that was even an option?

You don’t present the world with a set of conclusions and demand compliance with your reccomendations on the basis of data that can’t be given out because it’s someone elses IP and you just left it at that, conveniently.

It’s amazing how often it happens. One of my private bugbears is experimental sections which don’t contain enough information to repeat the experiments. Climate science does in fact contain a huge amount of publicly available data, mainly because it’s publicly funded unlike my discipline, chemistry, which is more industry based. If you were to ask for my raw data which was used for my papers, you would get very short shrift. However, my results are consistent with existing theories and other independent datasets, and would most likely not be contradicted by any subsequent experiments you could do. This is also the case with climate science.

SOC:

Someone has just put 62 Megabytes of data up on a website, and we can all download that.

“If you were to ask for my raw data which was used for my papers, you would get very short shrift.” That’s because someone owns the IPR. Just like mine. But whoever owns it doesn’t have the right to withhold it if it is used to impose upon the whole world, by an agency with deep enough pockets to buy out their IPR.

Don’t be ridiculous Monty. You have no idea if this is feasible or even possible. Money is not the only issue – the data we are talking about is the IP of several different countries’ metereological agencies.

And if someone’s been bugging you and slagging you off for years then you’re not really going to bust your arse trying to help them are you?

I am a professional scientist.

Andrew Adams
“Sorry, but that’s just a pathetic and totally contemptible attempt to smear Schmidt.”

How can one smear Gavin Schmidt? He is part of the team and he set up RC to propagate the ‘teams’ message. He makes it clear that he will will screen all posts to make sure the ‘right’ message comes across.

Schmidt is involved in damage limitation but is still part of the same incestuous cabal that has for instance forced an Editor to resign, and publicly recant, for allowing an article on sensitivities to be published.

These people have brought science into disrepute and I want them all investigated and if shown to be knowing publishing untruthful material, jailed for misuse of public funds.

Anyone who works in a scientific areas involving any level of commercialization, as in the testing of possible drug compounds, knows these jerks have been skating on thin ice for years. Now they have fallen through.
The code, not the emails, is the key. They have been padding, bending, squeezing, fudging and faking data sets for a decade and now it is in the public domain.
Scientists who fake their data and use their influence to hold back real research are the lowest forms of life, I rank them with arsonists and pedophiles, and I want them jailed for life.

I don’t care who’s IPR it is, it can be bought. By the very same people who are pushing this agenda, and paying for all this to be imposed upon the public. And let us not forget that the public, through taxation, have contributed a major slice of all that money. Meteorological Agencies aren’t staffed with folk who work for nothing.

If any agency won’t sell up their IPR, their data shouldn’t be used in an international project with global repercussions.

And quite frankly, I don’t care who has been bugging who. Suck it up, and put the data in the public domain, with it’s contextual information, or shut the feck up. We are talking about a global initiative to deflect entire national economies, and you are making excuses because a bunch of raggy arsed scientists want to behave like prima donnas. Well good luck with that….

We are talking about a global initiative to deflect entire national economies

You are a conspiracy theorist. “the very same people who are pushing this agenda” – what people? NASA? The University of East Anglia? Do you realise how ridiculous you sound?

you are making excuses because a bunch of raggy arsed scientists want to behave like prima donnas

Did it ever cross your mind that “raggy arsed scientists” just want a bit of respect and not to be regarded as pawns in some kind of bizarre political conspiracy?

Short order cook

“One of my private bugbears is experimental sections which don’t contain enough information to repeat the experiments. Climate science does in fact contain a huge amount of publicly available data, mainly because it’s publicly funded unlike my discipline, chemistry, which is more industry based. If you were to ask for my raw data which was used for my papers, you would get very short shrift”

It has been 18 years since I got my Ph.D. During that time I have never refused a request for data; either data files that I had published or datasets that were unpublished.
I have one patent at the moment and am seeing the IP lady at 5:15 tomorrow for another. There is an absolute difference between providing data that is in the public domain and that which is/maybe commercially developed.
If work is published, it is in the public domain, and it is a scientists duty to aid all researcher, and lay members of the public, in their understanding.
The idea that a scientist would give “very short shrift” to a request for information is not only rude, it is against the whole scientific ethos of the free sharing of information.

SOC, I find your altitude and ethics highly questionable.

Where on Earth did you train and what ethic training have you had?

Bullshit by the bucketload. There is nothing in this so-called ClimateGate, apart from a few jobbing scientists being human. I guess that in their defence they could argue that the behaviour displayed is due to spending too much time trawling the climate-septic blogosphere.

No conspiracies – too much rivalry and insufficient collegial loyalty in the research world for that to be possible; no “hiding” of data; no tax evasion – just perfectly justifiable avoidance of dodgy state bureaucracy; no “manipulation” of data beyond what is necessary to actually do science, which necessarily involves manipulating data as part of the analysis.

As for skirting around freedom of information requests, good for the CRU. Some of these requests (or rather demands with menaces) have been frivolous, and clearly intended to prevent the scientists from doing their jobs. If you insist under pain of legal assault that scientists not only make their raw data and analysis code available, but also provide copious amounts metadata (and meta-metadata…?), then you are tying up their entire working lives servicing your agenda.

When it comes to politically-motivated FOI demands, the same thing has been happening in the US, and there it occurred with the tacit support of the climate denialist Bush administration. Across the Pond, as here in Europeland, serious FOI requests have always been given the attention they deserve. In this latest case, many of the data do not belong to the CRU, which is therefore not in a position to distribute them freely without specific permission from those who originally collected and provided them.

This is not a trivial matter, as some here appear to suggest. As any Principal-Investigator or Co-Investigator in a high-profile research programme will tell you, scientific data ownership and access rights are complex and highly sensitive issues on which the careers of individual researchers and survival of entire institutes depend. The rules may not be perfect, but no-one has yet come up with a better system through which research programmes can be managed, and in many cases years of personal and collective struggle rewarded.

The work of climate scientists is reviewed by their peers, and you cannot argue that the researchers are all part of some cosy, backscratching club. In the decade or so during which I worked as a research scientist in atmospheric and space physics, it was routine for people who enjoyed getting legless together at conferences, and in some case leg-overed, to tear each other to shreds in the peer-review process. That same culture applies within the climate science community. The climate consensus we hear so much about is real enough, but the process which led to the consensus left intellectual blood and guts in abundance on the floors and walls of meeting rooms and conference halls.

Phil Jones should not apologise for his use of the English language, and nor should any of the other scientists whose email correspondence and other files have been hacked and put into the public domain by individuals variously described as Russian “black hats”. We are talking here about the type of crooks who write computer viruses, trojans and so forth, and would like very much to get their hands on your credit card details and other personal data. Lovely people.

This will all end in tears, and they won’t be those of climate scientists at the “University of East Angeela” (© 2009 Glenn Beck).

There is one problem that has long bothered me. The Little Ice Age – when it was exceptionally cold – lasted from the 15th century until the early 19th century. Some have argued that this dip in temperature correlated with a shortage of sunspots, the so-called “Maunder Minimum”. But this period of minimal sunspot activity lasted only from 1645 until 1715.

Excessive frosts – as can be seen from tree ring data from the file named “Extreme2100.pdf” in the FOIA document folder (at the Wikileaks download) occurred in the mid-15th century and also at 1816, 1818, 1820 AD.

This cold period occurred at about the same time that the Thames Frost Fairs took place – with the last Frost Fair taking place in 1814:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A970733

However, this tree ring data (using Siberian larch) does not always accurately reflect periods of great cold. In 250 AD, the Thames is said to have frozen solid for nine weeks in London, but this year shows no peaks in the data.

Additionally, the northern hemisphere was getting colder from the early 14th century. The Vikings had colonised Greenland but by the early 14th they abandoned their colonies as it had become too cold. They had named Greenland “Vinland” – a reference to how they used to grow vines there.

So there are some very odd questions about climate. Why did the world get cooler? There are no sunspot records before Galileo. But using the theories that are currently being put forward by scientists, the period two hundred years after the Black Death (arrived in Sicily 1347) when populations were expanding, forests were being cleared across Europe and burning of fuel would have increased – these should have influenced the rising of temperatures. Or did they merely offset an even bigger frosty period, a cold period whose origins have not been conclusively explained?

Scientists have not been able to accurately explain why the climate got colder and only started to warm again c. 1850. Did the Industrial Revolution influence this?

Scientists can only accurately give information based upon what evidence they can find, and on the issue of climate change predictions, too much of what is presented to us is based upon computer generated models – and I am sorry but an iterated projection is only as good as the parameters put into the program in the first place.

There are equally feasible theories that cosmic rays affect cloud cover (we know that the 11 and 22 -year sunspot cycles have an affect on crops) but when global warming computer models are produced, they do not factor in cosmic radiation.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/07/020731080631.htm

The only reason for following the scientists’ predictions is because we gamble. If the predictions are wrong, and global warming is not going to increase exponentially due to our CO2 output, we will lose far less than we will lose if they are right.

But when one is dealing with global and atmospheric systems, with so many variables, there is also room for error in computer-generated extrapolations.

Dust and vulcanism also have an affect upon climate – after Krakatoa (1883), dust circled for a decade around the planet making fabulous sunsets. Similarly, after Mt St Helens exploded (1980), dust went into the upper atmosphere and swirled about. The Tyrolean iceman (Oetze) was only discovered in 1991 because this dust on the glacier above him had settled and affected its albedo, causing it to absorb sunlight warmth and recede. Mount Pinatubo (1991) would have cast a similar addition of dust into the upper atmosphere.

Francis Sedgemore, you state your case very plainly. To give credit, even for a moment, to the possibility that climate changes, such as they are, are only very minimally, if at all, affected by human economic activity is to abase oneself to the unspeakable level of “the climate denialist Bush administration” and, almost as bad, of
“the type of crooks who write computer viruses, trojans and so forth, and would like very much to get their hands on your credit card details and other personal data.”

A most convincing argument.

Sedgemore:

“There is nothing in this so-called ClimateGate, apart from a few jobbing scientists being human.”

A few jobbing scientists lying, cheating, hiding evidence, and accidentally on purpose destroying evidence in the time honoured “dog ate my homework” manner while doing their best to smear and silence their critics.

When you manipulate data, you should be open and honest about how and why you applied those coefficients. Same thing goes for the data you discard.

And I am sick to death of people telling me that it is OK to use private data to support public policy, and you can re-jig the whole world without making that database available. If you can’t share the raw data, go away and shut up. If AGW is so bloody urgent, you would get this sorted out.

This is not just some ordinary research project. It hasn’t been that for a very long time. It is an international political battering ram now, with a significant impact on other people’s welfare.

Your problem is this. Some researchers said you were lying, or shady. And now there is supporting evidence from another source.

And you still want everything all your own way. You want us all to bow down to your superior knowledge base. The science is settled and all the people who matter, are in complete agreement. There is no dissent. We have always been at war wi…..

Adrian Morgan

Vinland was the Norse name for the area of North America they visited.

Veenland as in wine land is probably an etymological error of the middle ages as in Old Norse Vinland (as in tinland) would mean pasture or meadow land.

Yes the climate was cooling by the 14thc considerably though as this was not global but northern hemispheric it seems to have correlated to a cooling and slowing of the gulf stream as a result of geothermal shifts in Atlantic currents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazel_tov

Thanks mettaculture – but the point I am trying to make is still unanswered. There are many variables – the fairly recently-identified conveyor belt of circulating water channels under the ocean, and making predictions is always dodgy.

But as we do have this period of excessive cold, it needs to be explained. It happened, it should have left traces. A suitably accurate climate model – using the same parameters/variables that are now used for predictions – should be able to accurately reproduce this cooling period, but as far as I know this has not been done.

Therefore – I think that climate predictions are only a form of futurology.

True science relies upon the principle of repeatable experiment. A hypothesis may lead to the experiment, but then the affects of the experiment can be mimicked accurately by other scientists. Through these “baby-steps” proving little things at a time, science has grown, basing itself upon known and provable facts.

We cannot put a planetary atmosphere into a laboratory, and though scientists can collate data and make informed decisions, this is an area that is still open for debate.

Yes, the climate is changing. But how much of a CO2 cause and effect has been established?

I still want to know why the Little Ice Age happened, and if it could be predicted by current climate models.

Adrian: “There is one problem that has long bothered me. The Little Ice Age – when it was exceptionally cold – lasted from the 15th century until the early 19th century. Some have argued that this dip in temperature correlated with a shortage of sunspots, the so-called “Maunder Minimum”. But this period of minimal sunspot activity lasted only from 1645 until 1715.”

The 15th century cooling period coincides with the Sporer Minimum.

For convenience there’s a graph at :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon14_with_activity_labels.svg

The Medieval Warm period coincides with the Medieval Maximum, and the modern period of ‘global warming’ coincides with the Modern Maximum, which is shown by the 14C paleo-record to be unprecedented for the last 8000 years ( http://gcmd.nasa.gov/records/GCMD_NOAA_NCDC_PALEO_2005-015.html ).

It’s difficult to avoid the fact that solar activity is the main driver of climate, but the IPCC managed it, with help of orgs like CRU and GISS, which has also refused for 3 years to accede to FOIA requests to release data.

The IPCC says that the solar influence on modern climate change is negligble (0.2 W/m2 forcing since 1750, according to them, only a 0.06 C contribution over 250 years), which is clearly ridiculous, given the unprecedented increase in solar activity since 1750, particularly in the 20th century, and the now-proven links of solar magnetic activity with the Earth’s albedo eg. the latest observational confirmation of Svensmarks GCR-cloud link theory (“Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds” Svensmark, Bondo, Svensmark 2009, GRL).

Andrew Adams: “Not a single one of those emails contained anything which even remotely called the scientific basis for AGW into question.”

There’s also computer code and data, confirming that they’ve adjusted data to be closer to real temperatures, as referred to in the emails as well.

The divergence means that their proxy data is not a good temperature record, so hiding the divergence is hiding this fact.

A huge deal, obviously, as faking data is scientific fraud.

Thanks to all who point out that tuna is becoming extinct due to overfishing.

I know that. What it points out however is a pattern of abuse by humans of the planet and its resources.

Similarly, we are polluting air, ground and water and it seems to me that a certain group of people simply do not want to accept this, period. All of the problems regarding overfishing, pollution etc are due to magic apparently.

G*d forbid they should have to change and think about something other than their own profits and/or creature comforts.

As far as I can tell, it’s just some pissed-off scientists having to deal with politically motivated climate change deniers undermining their work and trying to corrupt the peer review process by buying up journals and a few scientists. The main crux of the “expose” seems to be “OMG they’re so NASTY!!!”

You would be nasty and pissed off too if you had to deal with a well-financed, well-orchestrated campaign to screw you over because your research went against the interests of big business (of which the hacking is a part).

This was targeted! It’s a witch hunt, a number – like the scene in V where the aliens start framing up all the scientists because they could expose their Dastardly Plan. AGW is as well established as the law of gravity.

Er, no, the main crux isn’t that they’re nasty.

The main crux that these men have betrayed the heart of science :
- Falsification of data
- Refusal to release data for verification and replication of work
- Attempts to to quash publication of scientific papers contrary to the AGW hypothesis

It’s hard for me to sort out whether there in any substance to the charges against these particular scientists, but I want to point out something about the bigger picture. In a poll of U.S. scientists (http://people-press.org/report/528/)

84% of U.S. scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming,
87% of U.S. scientists believe in evolution (I’m surprised the latter figure is that low)

Thus, it seems to me that roughly 3% of scientists take an intellectually respectable anti-AGW position, 84% take an intellectually respectable pro-AGW position, and 13% are religious fundamentalists whose views should be discounted (when I was at MIT, I know one such person who was studying whether life could evolve on the Saturnian moon Titan while rejecting the idea that life had evolved on Earth!)

Not being inclined to dig into all the details of the science, or the leaked emails, I feel I should defer to the 19 out of 20 evolution-believing scientists who also believe in human-caused global warming.

There are a few sincere sceptics, but it appears to me that most of the “scepticism” is faith-based rather than data-based.

If I were a scientist relying on public largesse to fund my avocation, I wouldn’t be as smug as Heller above. But I am not, let it all come down.

84% of U.S. scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming — Hellar

The key word there is “believe.” Which of course is the right word…..it aint science.

The divergence means that their proxy data is not a good temperature record, so hiding the divergence is hiding this fact

If you’re trying to hide something then publishing it in Nature probably isn’t a good idea.

I linked to this above, but it’s worth repeating – anyone honestly wanting to know about global warming should read this:

http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.com/

It explains in fairly simple terms why CO2 warms the Earth, how we know it is CO2 and not the sun causing the current warming etc etc. You only need to read the first few pages, most of the rest is taken up by melting ice, deforestation and so on.

It’s a rather long read, but the posting below shows unambiguous intent by Jones et al. to circumvent the FOIA, even before a single FOI request had been made of them.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/24/the-people-vs-the-cru-freedom-of-information-my-okole…/

This is at best unethical – the whole of science rests upon the principle of replication – and at worst illegal.

Though the weirdest of Jones’s emails was the one which contained this gem:

“If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the
science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.”

There is no conspiracy , but there is a global warming delusion which has all the classic characteristics of the great popular delusions of history, as well as of such things as the recent always-rising-home-price delusion.

And along with such delusions, institutional and personal interests always arise which create incentives to keep the delusion going – clear evidence of which we see emerging.

The emails are only part of the story. The real damage may yet be done by the code files which have been leaked, which appear to paint a picture of total and utter chaos on the one hand, and bodged (biased) results on the other.

And there is plenty raw data available from the CRU website for anyone who wants it.

Do you know what you are talking about?

That is not the raw data.

Those are the results – derived from the unreleased raw data through some unreleased statistical models.

It is the raw data and models which are being withheld.

What do you make of this Jones gem:

We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. …

Bad science. Bad bad bad.

Solar activity was certainly a factor in the warming in the early part of the 20th Century but there has been no increase in the level of activity which could account for the warming in the latter part.

Benestad 2009: “Our analysis shows that the most likely contribution from solar forcing a global warming is 7 ± 1% for the 20th century and is negligible for warming since 1980.”
Lockwood 2008: “It is shown that the contribution of solar variability to the temperature trend since 1987 is small and downward; the best estimate is −1.3% and the 2σ confidence level sets the uncertainty range of −0.7 to −1.9%.”
Lockwood 2008: “The conclusions of our previous paper, that solar forcing has declined over the past 20 years while surface air temperatures have continued to rise, are shown to apply for the full range of potential time constants for the climate response to the variations in the solar forcings.”
Ammann 2007: “Although solar and volcanic effects appear to dominate most of the slow climate variations within the past thousand years, the impacts of greenhouse gases have dominated since the second half of the last century.”
Lockwood 2007: “The observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanism is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified.”
Foukal 2006: “The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years.”
Scafetta 2006: “since 1975 global warming has occurred much faster than could be reasonably expected from the sun alone.”
Usoskin 2005: “during these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source.”
Haigh 2003: “Observational data suggest that the Sun has influenced temperatures on decadal, centennial and millennial time-scales, but radiative forcing considerations and the results of energy-balance models and general circulation models suggest that the warming during the latter part of the 20th century cannot be ascribed entirely to solar effects.”
Stott 2003: increased climate model sensitivity to solar forcing and still found “most warming over the last 50 yr is likely to have been caused by increases in greenhouse gases.”
Solanki 2003: “the Sun has contributed less than 30% of the global warming since 1970″.
Lean 1999:”it is unlikely that Sun–climate relationships can account for much of the warming since 1970″.
Waple 1999:”little evidence to suggest that changes in irradiance are having a large impact on the current warming trend.”
Frolich 1998: “solar radiative output trends contributed little of the 0.2°C increase in the global mean surface temperature in the past decade”

Wow. If there’s one thing all the above proves, its that Warmism really is a religion. The lengths its starey-eyed cultists will go to to delude themselves would be laughable if not for the fact that their beliefs are wrecking the economic wellbeing of billions of people.

You bastards.

“They”, own the language the stadium and the scoreboard. “We” do not stand a chance! The BBC can China go green? China is buiding so called eco cities, from the greenies. People who travelled extensivley in China and not just queued up in thes ultry heat to see the Ming tombs, will tell you China has reached the tipping point not because of climate change but because of over population! its amazing biodiversityis all but finished, climate chang e or no climate change.

Sophia: ‘G*d forbid they should have to change and think about something other than their own profits and/or creature comforts.’ One can be unconvinced by (not denying) man-made global warming without any selfish motives at all. It makes perfect sense to me to stop accumulating and wasting and polluting, even if this makes no difference to the climate at all. I just like to know I am not being lied to. It is absurd the way skeptics are immediately classed either as crazed free marketeers or religious heretics.

Rick Heller, your handling of percentages is, to say the least, clumsy. On what basis do you assume that the “84% of U.S. scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming” are all included within the set of the “87% of U.S. scientists believe in evolution”?

The basic point of this is, contra Francis Sedgemore’s bizzare outburst is that, regardless of whither AGW is happening or not (and IIRC Steve McIntyre is convinced that it is, btw), Phil Jones, the CRU and the “team” acted unethically and contrary to the norms and spirit of science.

What’s even worse is the way that red politically-motivated pressure groups (e.g. Greenpeace) have been shown to be deeply involved in manipulating things (not a surprise to those of us in the know, but still).

My own field is Astrophysics, of which I’m hoping to start post-graduate study within a year, and even now, it has been drummed into our heads repeatedly that you do NOT behave in the way that Phil Jones et al have been behaving

Sophia, you are still pretending to be extremely stupid.

What’s even worse is the way that red politically-motivated pressure groups (e.g. Greenpeace) have been shown to be deeply involved in manipulating things (not a surprise to those of us in the know, but still).

But they’re not the only ones who have been manipulating things are they? Where is your righteous indignation against companies like Exxon who have been far more involved in this and have far more money to splash around doing it?

Andrew: “If you’re trying to hide something then publishing it in Nature probably isn’t a good idea.”

That’s like saying, if a thief doesn’t want to be caught, then why does he steal?

re: solar variability
Your list of papers on solar variability all ignore the possibility of the solar magnetic-GCR-cloud link, now completely confirmed by Svensmark 2009.

If this mechanism for changing cloud cover is acknowledged, most of papers you list would have to change their conclusions.

But they’re not the only ones who have been manipulating things are they? Where is your righteous indignation against companies like Exxon who have been far more involved in this and have far more money to splash around doing it?

A green urban myth, that.

SoC, oil companies have been pumping vast sums of money into the pro-AGW side of things.

Furthermore, let’s examine the motivations of Exxon and Greenpeace. Exxon – to make more money. Greenpace – to introduce green fascism, with themselves wearing the boots.

Yes, let’s all go with the green fascists, shall we?

A quote from the Independent on CRU at UAE:

“”

Finger trouble.

No, they haven’t moved to the United Arab Emirates.

Greenpeace are trying overthrow the Government and institute a worldwide fascist state, while Exxon are seekers of truth and defenders of the enlightenment? Forgive me if I don’t buy that interpretation. Exxon have been trying to sow confusion by funding thinktanks to dispute global warming for years.

On the cosmic ray hypothesis, the main problem with it is that while there are cycles in the cosmic ray flux, there is no trend in the cycles, thus they can’t be an alternate explanation for the recent warming.

Greenpeace primarily exists now to ensure Greenpeace continues. So they have to be alarmist in encourage membership levels. I don’t have a problem with activist groups getting a bit heated to push something they beleive in.

I do have problem with scientists who act like activists, even when they have the broad sweep of evidence on their side. Totally unnecessary and totally counterproductive. Monbiot can see this.

Following SOC’s comment on the cosmic ray hypothesis…

I was a colleague of Henrik Svensmark during my time in Copenhagen. Leaving aside the questionable wisdom of his popular science book collaboration with the vituperative climate change denier Nigel Calder, I have a great deal of respect for Henrik, a fine scientist who is asking pertinent questions about solar-terrestrial influences on the Earth’s lower atmosphere.

What we have so far from Henrik is an incomplete hypothesis, and a purported trend in cosmic ray flux that is statistically insignificant. The basic physics of cosmic ray modulation of cloud formation is interesting, but the hypothesis is as yet untested, and there remain a number of unanswered questions.

I find it interesting how sceptics and deniers praise Henrik’s work, citing the physicist’s peer-reviewed papers, yet are quick to denounce the peer-reviewed work of other climate scientists, even to the extent of denouncing the entire peer-review system as a cosy club of mates working to advance each others’ careers and a nefarious political agenda. Funny, that, innit?

Related to this is the work of Mike Lockwood, with whom I collaborated on auroral microphysics during my postdoc years in Southampton. Mike is a highly experienced space physicist with a broad range of research interests, and few in the UK know more than him about solar variability, especially when it comes to the interplanetary magnetic field. Mike’s work (as cited above by Andrew Adams) shows convincingly that solar variability cannot explain atmospheric trends in the latter part of the 20th century. Yet Fred Singer is quick to pop up on news bulletins, all sage-like in his dotage, stating confidently that climate change is due overwhelmingly to natural variations. Which begs the question, what does this emeritus know that hundreds of research active climate scientists don’t?

SOC: “On the cosmic ray hypothesis, the main problem with it is that while there are cycles in the cosmic ray flux, there is no trend in the cycles, thus they can’t be an alternate explanation for the recent warming.”

Actually, there is a powerful trend – decreasing GCR (and increasing solar activity) since 1700 (with some fluctuations) and a strong strong decrease since 1900. See http://www.phys.uu.nl/~nvdelden/Svensmark.pdf .

It’s true that, considered in isolation, the last few decades don’t show a trend (and that’s if we ignore the sudden reversal in the last couple of years – there’s been space-age record of cosmic rays flux, coinciding with the currently century-class solar minimum – this is well-documented by NASA, as it affects spacecraft and crew).

The last few decades may not have fluctuated much compared to the GCR decreases of the last few centuries, but the fact that they had until recently remained at unprecedently high levels means that they’d been pushing the earth into a new temperature equilibrium (by decreasing cloud cover and increasing solar intensity).

Andrew: “If you’re trying to hide something then publishing it in Nature probably isn’t a good idea.”

That’s like saying, if a thief doesn’t want to be caught, then why does he steal?

I don’t get your point here. They are accused of trying to conceal the divergence problem in their data, but they have always been open about the existence of this problem and published a paper in Nature which described it.

Francis Sedgemore: “What we have so far from Henrik is an incomplete hypothesis, and a purported trend in cosmic ray flux that is statistically insignificant. The basic physics of cosmic ray modulation of cloud formation is interesting, but the hypothesis is as yet untested, and there remain a number of unanswered questions.”

His hypothesis has met all tests so far (including challenges about Forbrush events and the apparent one-time breakdown in correlation post-1994 (caused by a recalibration of a satellite’s data) – so I’m curious as to what your reservations are ?

The Svensmark et al 2009 paper demonstrates the cosmic ray effect on clouds and aerosols quite clearly, from detailed satellite observations. The work of Shaviv and others shows the solar-cosmic ray-climate link across other larger time scales.

This must completely change all calculations of climate sensitivity carried out by the IPCC and others.

Francis Sedgemore: “Mike’s work (as cited above by Andrew Adams) shows convincingly that solar variability cannot explain atmospheric trends in the latter part of the 20th century.”

Actually, Mike Lockwood’s work has been replied to convincingly, and it’s not quite as careful as you may be making out. He ignores any solar influence on air temperature, something that’s contradicted by the scientific literature. He also ignores the fact that, according to satellite measurements, received solar radiation has increased by about 3 W/m2 since 1985 (Pinker et al. 2005, Science).
This reconfirms the solar impact on climate, even in the last few decades of the 20th century, and effectively refutes Mike’s conclusion.

Andrew Adams, re: “Mike’s Nature trick”

The graph they’re talking about is on the front cover of World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Statement on the Status of the Global Climate: http://www.wmo.ch/pages/prog/wcp/wcdmp/statemnt/wmo913.pdf

Phil Jones has made an effective confession about this, posted yesterday on the UEA website, so there’s not much point trying to defend it. See http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepagenews/CRUupdate , where both graphs are shown , the published WMO one with the divergence hidden, and an updated version showing the divergence.

The divergence casts doubt on the suitability of their proxy data as carriers of a temperature signal, and hiding the divergence as they did is an extremely dubious act. This is a clear-cut issue. (Please spare me any quotes from Jones or CRU spinning this straightforward case of scientific malpractice).

Wow. If there’s one thing all the above proves, its that Warmism really is a religion. The lengths its starey-eyed cultists will go to to delude themselves would be laughable if not for the fact that their beliefs are wrecking the economic wellbeing of billions of people.

So we have two competing arguments, one of which is backed by the overwhelming majority of published scientific research and one which, er, isn’t. And which one are we supposed to consider a “religion”.

From Frances Sedgewick’s website, on Climategate: “For far too long have climate scientists been reacting defensively to the lunatics who populate the blogosphere and more right-field sections of the media. Unlike wanky newspaper columnists and underemployed bloggers sitting at home in their jim-jams, climate scientists have a job to do. If they are to continue doing this job effectively, they will need now to go on the offensive.”

Frances, you’re suggesting that, instead of being open and transparent with their data and methods, as they should have been all along, which would have allowed other scientists to do their job effectively too, they should instead “go on the offensive” ie. more media spin and PR, more bluster and deceit, more efforts to avoid transparency, more quashing of unwanted evidence and pressure on scientific journals to toe the AGW line – but this has been Mann and Schmidt’s anti-scientific mode of operation all along.

Anyone interested in a closer look at how Phil Jones, Michael Mann et al. went about ensuring that their work and data remained non-transparent may wish to read the guest post at WUWT by one of the individuals who’s been requesting information from CRU via the FOIA :

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/24/the-people-vs-the-cru-freedom-of-information-my-okole%E2%80%A6/

He ends the article with this thought : “Without replication, science cannot move forwards. And when you only give data to friends of yours, and not to people who actually might take a critical look at it, you know what you end up with? A “consensus” …”

oneuniverse,

The divergence casts doubt on the suitability of their proxy data as carriers of a temperature signal, and hiding the divergence as they did is an extremely dubious act.

The divergence only occurs for the period 1960 onwards – before that the proxy data is considered to be reliable, although this does of course still leave the question of why the divergence occurred (acid rain is one theory) and whether it does have wider implications for the use of tree rings as proxies in general. We know this because they published their findings and as a result there has been much debate on the subject, so you cannot possible claim that they have kept it a secret.
When it came to producing the graph for the WMO report they used the proxy measurements up until the point where they became unreliable and at that point substituted the instrumental records, which were known to be correct. They are not “hiding” a cooling trend because we know there was no actual cooling trend during that time. If they had used the full proxy reconstruction it would have created an extremely misleading impression because it would have appeared that late 20th Century warming, which we know to be a fact, did not actually occur.
Given that the purpose of the graph was to illustrate our best understanding of temperature changes over the period 1000-1999 this is hardly misleading.
Maybe this should have been explicitly mentioned in the WMO report, but it referenced the original research, where the divergence problem was well known, so anyone fairly knowlegable on the subject would have realised what they’d done.

Sorry, should be “Francis Sedgemore”, not “Frances Sedgewick” in previous post .. apologies, Francis.

Chris Mooney, in his book, The Republican War on Science, describes a convergence between anti-evolutionists and anti-AGWists in the Republican Party in the U.S.. In general, our political climate here is polarized, so that one can often predict someone’s position on one issue from their position on another. For instance, someone who is pro-choice on abortion is much more likely to believe in evolution and AGW than someone is pro-life. So if there are any Americans who reject evolution but believe in AGW, it’s a very small number, and I haven’t come across them.

Indeed, if you think that elite scientists have been carrying out a conspiracy for 150 years to fool the public to believe in evolution, it’s intuitively obvious that those godforsaken scientists are up to their old tricks promoting “global warmism.”

It is a sloppy, back of the envelope calculation, but I believe it’s roughly accurate to say that the AGW skeptics in the U.S. are made up of a base of a huge number of evolution-skeptics (like Sarah Palin) and a small number of business-allied libertarians.

Andrew: “The divergence only occurs for the period 1960 onwards – before that the proxy data is considered to be reliable [..]”

It’s not just post-1960. If you look at the graph which hasn’t hidden the divergence, you can see that the period 1870-1910 had falling temperatures according to instrumental measurements, but rising or flat temperatures according to the various proxy data.

So that’s another 40 year period out of the 150-year instrumental temperature record in which their proxy data doesn’t represent temperature. It’s also a period in which there was significantly less human industrial activity.

There’s no reason to believe that the proxy data suddenly becomes reliable as we go further into the past. Tree-ring widths are a notoriously unreliable proxy for temperatures because their growth is covariant on so many factors other than CO2.

The divergence shouldn’t have been hidden because it calls loudly into question the validity of the pre-instrumental temperature reconstruction, which is most of the graph.

Edit to my previous comment:

“.. is covariant on so many factors other than CO2.”
should be
“.. is covariant on so many factors other than temperature.”

(Although CO2 is one of the factors).

The outstanding issues with the cosmic ray hypothesis have to do with the microphysics, which have not yet been properly tested in laboratory conditions. There are plans to do this, but the preliminary SKY experiment conducted by Henrik and his Danish colleagues has been subject to extensive critical discussion by Rasmus Benestad and others.

Many of the criticisms of Lockwood and Fröhlich are bizarre, and have the effect of putting these two scientists into an impossible situation in which they cannot defend their work. If you are interested in detecting secular trends, then you must employ whatever analysis techniques are available to remove periodic and quasi-periodic changes, including those due to the (~11 year) solar cycle, and test for residual variations. The statistical techniques used are well established and understood. What’s more problematic is the kind of filtering used by Henrik and his former postdoc Nigel Marsh to extract their trends.

Being the media tart that he is, Mike would have generated more column inches if as a solar-terrestrial physicist he had sided with the climate sceptics. The man may be a journal paper machine, but in this case he cannot be accused of sloppiness.

We can and should ask what effect solar variations have on air temperature, and Mike is one of those scientists asking the question. That solar variations have an effect is not disputed, but the level of their influence in relation to observed temperature variations certainly is.

Where Mike and his colleague erred is in not properly acknowledging the work of lower atmosphere physicists, which actually reinforces the basic argument. The response to the Lockwood and Fröhlich paper by Henrik and my old boss Eigil Friis-Christensen (”Here we rebut their argument comprehensively”) displays a staggering degree of hubris, and the critics have been called on this by their peers.

We also need to be careful when it comes to correlation and causation, and this warning applies to AGW consensus and sceptic scientists alike. The ~11-year solar cycle is actually a quasi-periodic phenomenon, and has over the years been correlated with all sorts of stuff. You could even link it with political revolutions on terra firma, should you be so perverse.

Pinker et al.’s trend is quite unconvincing. Fitting a second-order curve to the data instead of a straight line, for example, shows a switch in sign during the period in question. This doesn’t inspire confidence in the stated conclusions.

While there may have been increases in a few particular solar indices in the past four decades or so (a few of many indices, and some would argue against any real rises), there has been no overall increase in solar radiation that can explain what we see in the atmospheric temperature record.

The level of vigorous discussion among climate scientists on the RealClimate and other blogs, as well as in the peer-reviewed literature, is testament to the level of detail into which they have investigated the various claims.

As for “go on the offensive”, this means climate scientists suffering fools less gladly, being more robust in response to political critics, and getting on with the job of doing climate science. These men and women have my utmost respect. I’m just glad that I don’t have to put up with all the crap thrown at them on a daily basis.

The outstanding issues with the cosmic ray hypothesis have to do with the microphysics, which have not yet been properly tested in laboratory conditions.

No problems with that notion, Francis, but it looks like Ed Begley Jr would disagree. This thespian proponent of the “science of global warming” says (at 1.37) says that he wants to hear information from a “climate scientist” and not a “physicist”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bn-YHcIqeI

Very funny.

AGW, the University of East Anglia, the Freedom of Information Act and evidence of BBC bias. This is heady news. The debate on climate change will never be the same again.

By a strange and highly relevant coincidence the BBC was obliged just this week to respond under the FOI Act to a request for a disclosure of policy on climate change. This is the first publication of exactly what response was forthcoming.

The initial response has been with regard to the BBC Trust, the governing body. No reply has yet been obtained covering the Executive, but the statement of BBC policy at the top level is highly revealing. What are asserted to be the only words on file within the Trust addressing AGW are few in number and contained within just a few paragraphs.

Since these words are so critical it is important that we are precise in establishing definitions. AGW or Anthropogenic Global Warming as a proposition embodies two statements, each addressed separately in the BBC statement of policy. GW , the global warming component, asserts that there has been an increase in global mean temperature, but that would be a meaningless statement if not quantified. The accepted level at which temperature rise becomes GW, that is an increase demanding political countermeasures, has been set for the purposes of the Copenhagen meeting as a rate of not less that 2 degrees C per century. The factual climate change issue is whether or not that level has been exceeded.

The second component, A, makes a statement about causation. The 26 word IPCC conclusion is that ‘most’ of GW is ‘very likely’ due to A, that is an increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. In plain English it has got warmer and its CO2 wot done it. For the purposes of Copenhagen however the ‘most’ and ‘very likely’ have been dropped so that the only issue of the agenda is how to limit CO2 emissions.
In the light of this understanding of the AGW issue we can usefully look at the stated BBC stance. It appears as a paragraph in the document setting out the BBC approach to impartiality, “Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: safeguarding impartiality in the 21st century”, http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/other/century21.shtml
Although the FOI response contained the following wording, this cannot be held to apply to the wording of the above document already in the public domain. They are in any case strange words to append to a response under the provisions of the FOI Act.
“Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately.”
We may therefore reasonably consider what was cited as the only material relevant to the information request which was worded as follows:-

“Is there, or has there been, within the BBC Trust any document dealing with editorial policy on matters relating to climate change?”

The relevant paragraphs are quoted below:-

“There may be now a broad scientific consensus that climate change is definitely happening, and that it is at least predominantly man-made. But the second part of that consensus still has some intelligent and articulate opponents, even if a small minority. “

The first sentence addresses the GW issue but according to the wording of the second sentence is not considered to have even a small minority of intelligent and articulate opponents. It is therefore accorded the status of fact establishing that, in words commonly used by the government, ‘the issue is settled’. It is unsurprising that under the dictates of this policy no airtime is given to those who dispute the GW proposition.

The second sentence addresses the A issue, accepting that there is an opposing case but relegating it to that of a small minority. It is on this assessment that the next paragraph is deemed to be applicable.

“The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to
the opponents of the consensus. But these dissenters (or even sceptics) will still be heard, as they should, because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate.”

On the A issue therefore, that of human attribution, debate on the BBC airwaves is authorized but the proportionality is restricted to that determined by the judgment that this is a small minority. This is reflected in the very limited exposure given to views contesting the A thesis.

What is also revealed is that the ‘small minority’ assessment is derived from a seminar of scientific experts. If the selection criteria were in line with those used by the IPCC then this conclusion was inevitable. What is now evident is that it is dramatically out of line with public opinion, where the most recent survey indicates that more dispute the AGW proposition than support it. The case for an open debate in which the proportionality of airtime allocated reflects the public perception is unanswerable.

On the first issue however it is clear that the BBC is plain wrong. The actuality of GW is NOT settled. The figures produced by Hadley, the University of East Anglia unit, show temperature gains over the last ten years at no more than one third of the 2 degree rate of gain that qualifies as a GW occurrence. The satellite figures, both more recent and more reliable, indicate a level barely one tenth of qualification as GW and with a margin of statistical error that rule it improper to assert definitively that there is now any temperature gain at all.

We now have a situation where it has been disclosed that the Hadley figures on which so much reliance is placed to assert the occurrence of GW have been manipulated. It is in the reporting of that sensational revelation that the BBC bias is put to its most significant test.

There are two items of news contained in the information now divulged. The first is that information internal to Hadley has been made public, either by hacking or whisteblowing release. Since Hadley do not handle security nor defence data, and the material contains no breach of personal data of a confidential nature, this is a very minor story of only localized interest.

The second factor however, the revelation that the crucial Hadley statisitics appear to have been overtly and deliberately manipulated to deceive, is very big news indeed.
The BBC, as we can now see observing the dictates of the official BBC Trust policy, reported the first item and withheld information on the second. Why that should have been the position is very clear from a reading of the policy statement, now revealed under the FOI as the ONLY guidance issued on this matter by the BBC’s governing body.

This is a serious matter. The BBC is owned by us, the licence payers, not the members of the government nor the experts of the scientific community. We are entitled to some answers, and to a very substantial and publicly declared change of policy.

There is significant and demonstrable distortion in the evidence advanced to support the view that warming is occurring at a level that demands political action.

In the same week we have seen the opening of the Chilcot Enquiry and the revelations about the University of East Anglia and the alleged distortion of climate change statistics.
There is a connection.

Chilcot is reviewing the issue of distortion of evidence of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) advanced to justify the declaration of war on Iraq. The issue is one of amplitude. If the WMD available to Saddam Hussain was capablE of only local and low level deployment then there was no case for war. If delivery by ICBM to devastate areas of London was a serious risk then the need for action could be made. The dividing line between the point at which wmd (low-threat) became WMD (serious and actionable) was not precisely defined although it clearly existed.

The climate change issue hinges on the reality of GW (Global Warming). This is in practice quantified as GWC or Global Warming occurring over the period of a Century. It has also been assigned a specific value at which it is deemed to become critical so that major action on an international scale is justified. That level of GWC has been set at 2 degrees C, so that beyond that point gwc (low-threat warming) becomes GWC and action needs to be instituted or reinforced. That is what the Copenhagen meeting is for.

In both cases much depends on the validity of the assessment of the defined value and the determination of when the amplitude reaches the critical level.

Can that assessment be subject to major distortion without departing from reliance upon the truth? In other words is it possible for there to be substantial deception without provable lying?

To answer that let us consider a relevant analogy.

We have in the past formed a company, the Secure Consolidated Automated Machine company or SCAM Ltd. It has traded successfully for two years producing profits of £1m in each year. It has now come unstuck, and shows a loss of £0.5 million in the third year. We need to effect a sale quickly but the ability to do so depends on a critical number. That number is the AP or Annual Profit.

The solution lies in a measure of statistical manipulation. This requires no departure from the truth. What we report is average AP. Over the three years this is £0.5 million per year. Without lying we can therefore conceal that the current reality is a loss of half a million and convey the impression of a profit of that amount.

We can however do better than that. Profit commonly relates to turnover. We have seen the combination of some expansion and inflation yield a 10% growth in revenue in each of the three relevant years. If we therefore make a projection based on these correctly stated facts we can now show a PAP (Projected Annual Profit) ten or so years ahead at the level of £1m. That should make the sale.

We will have avoided any lie but soundly cheated any buyer.
Now let us apply this model to the Climate Change issue. The objective is yield a PGWC figure (projected warming over a century) that exceeds the 2 degree C threshold.

In 1998 that is easy. In the first two decades, or more precisely between 1976 and 1998, there was a measured 0.5 degree C warming. This is the equivalent of our first two years trading at SCAM Ltd. The GWC figure is correctly stated as 2.2 degrees C and exceeds the threshold.

However in the third decade, as in the third year of trading for SCAM Ltd, there is a dramatic downturn. Actual temperature gain as measured by the ground stations recorded by Hadley is only 0.7 of a degree C, or one third of the required level to qualify as GWC rather than gwc. Moreover the more reliable satellite figures show less than half that amount of gain.

We can however tackle the issue as did SCAM Ltd, that is by some manipulation that at no point departs from the truth. The 32 year gain has been 0.57 degrees C and can therefore legitimately be represented as an average GWC over that period of 1.7 degrees C,

This is close to the required 2 degrees C but is capable of further extension by quoting a projected level, as was done in the SCAM prospectus. As gain is associated with CO2 concentration and that has been rising at 2 p.p.m each year we can project a doubling in the century and on that basis double the value we compute as the PGWC figure or projected gain over the century.

This therefore becomes 3.4 degrees C and comfortably exceeds the 2 degree C threshold.

It is of course in one sense a ‘true’ figure, in that it does not depend upon any misstatement of fact, just as the SCAM prospectus adhered to factual data. With current losses of £0.5, SCAM could declare a projected £1m profit. With current warming of less than 0.7 degrees C, the IPCC, based on Hadley representations, can assert a level in excess of 3 degrees C.

It is however a gross distortion of the truth, fully comparable with that which parlayed wmd into WMD and took the world to war on a substantial deception.

Manipulation of data really does matter. We are being offered a false prospectus. This time we should not wait for a Chilcot Enquiry well after the damage is done. Let us insist on the real truth now.

For instance, someone who is pro-choice on abortion is much more likely to believe in evolution and AGW than someone is pro-life.

Rick, I’m British, but I have written anti-creationist articles, am pro-choice and slightly skeptical of the alarmist AGW position (i.e. it is probably happening, but Al Gore is a scaremongering fuckwit).

Francis, I’m really pleased that your BFF with some of these guys ‘n’ all but the facts are simple: they have not published the data, therefore it’s not science.

Rick, you appear under the misapprehension that truth is a matter of consensus.

Francis, I’m really pleased that you’re BFF with some of these guys ‘n’ all but the facts are simple: they have not published the data, therefore it’s not science.

Rick, you appear under the misapprehension that truth is a matter of consensus.

It’s a rather long read, but the posting below shows unambiguous intent by Jones et al. to circumvent the FOIA, even before a single FOI request had been made of them.

“OOH Look how Nasty the nasty scientists are!”

Maybe they’re sick of fucking denierscum fucking them around and fear they will slow their work up with endless spurious FOI requests. That would be why local FOI laws world wide are not considered to apply to the IPCC’s work – too much scope for retards like Tim Ball to spend the rest of their fucking lives demanding their laundry list, the price of tea in the office canteen, etc, etc, etc.

M*o*r*g*o*t*h

Good for you, and we’re probably not that far apart. When I first heard about the possibility of global warming in the 1980s, I was skeptical, and also aware that environmental groups often overhyped problems to get attention and donations. However, over time, I think the GW position has grown stronger, and the position of a rational, prudent conservative is to accept that it may possibly be happening, and that it is worth devoting some resources to insure against the risk.

I never heard of the CRU until this week, so I have no compulsion to defend them or their ethics. But I do defend the scientific establishment against the charge that this is the tip of the iceberg of some massive fraud.

PassingThru,

I don’t like the use of the word consensus applied to GW, because it implies unanimity, and 84% is not 100%. I do feel that Al Gore is being a bit pushy in using that word. I prefer “preponderance of informed opinion.” While it is possible for the majority of experts to be wrong, they didn’t get to be experts if they were wrong most of the time.

By the way, I like cars, so I would be pleased if GW was false. I just think the evidence favors the hypothesis.

Of course even if a plausible case can be made for cosmic rays causing the current warming that doesn’t make AGW suddenly go away, the stuff we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere won’t disappear. AGW isn’t just an idea plucked out of the air as a convenient way to explain the current warming – it was first predicted in the late 19th century before warming even began and is predicated on the known physical properties of CO2 and the large amount of research into the sensitivity of the climate to increases in CO2 levels.
There is strong science which predicts AGW given the observed increases in CO2 levels in the atmosphere so it is not enough to find a “proof” that cosmic rays are causing global warming, it is also neccessary to show why CO2 emissions are not.

Rick, don’t be afraid of the word “consensus”. It means more than just “84% of U.S. scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming” – that’s an opinion poll not a consensus.

This explains it well

http://axismundi.hostzi.com/0/007.php

There have been points at which the very notion of a “scientific consensus” has come under attack, and no doubt there will be in the future. Typically, such attacks will rely upon an equivocation between appealing to a scientific consensus and “appeal to the majority,” or alternatively, assume that an appeal to the scientific consensus is an appeal that is independent of the actual evidence upon which a decision should be based.

However, the scientific consensus is a consensus of experts, each acting as an expert alongside other experts in his or her own field. These experts are gathering evidence, generating theories, forming hypotheses, making predictions – and testing theories – and their views become relevant to and incorporated into the consensus on a given issue only to the extent that their area of expertise is relevant to that conclusion. As such, the scientific consensus is evidence-based.

It is not simply a form of an “appeal to the majority.” It is, in essence, an appeal to a congress of individuals who are acknowledged and tested experts in their respective fields – where the weight given to any voice is a matter of the relevance of the expertise.

Francis, the details of the mechanism connecting clouds, ionisation and cosmic rays haven’t been worked out, but the evidence linking them is now well established.

The solar-GCR-cloud link completely changes the picture. Climate sensitivity estimates need to be redone, as they’d relied on there being no other forcings.

(By the way, I shouldn’t need to point out to you that Pinker et al. 2005 is not the only paper finding that received solar irradiance has increased.)

–
badnewswade: “Maybe they’re sick of fucking denierscum fucking them around and fear they will slow their work up with endless spurious FOI requests.”

What’s spurious about asking for open access to the data and methods? This is work carried out on behalf of the public, paid for by the public. Surely you wouldn’t want politicians given the same leeway.

With respect to your usage of the word “denierscum”, I suggest you reconsider. Perhaps it’s you who’s in denial, about the scientific case and the nature of the ‘opposition’.

Rick Heller:

“I never heard of the CRU until this week, so I have no compulsion to defend them or their ethics. But I do defend the scientific establishment against the charge that this is the tip of the iceberg of some massive fraud.”

Actually I don’t think the leak affects any other establishments at this stage. But CRU has been a major player in the AGW drive. Their results have figured to a significant degree in the IPCC reports. And their attitude stinks.

We are being asked to believe a string of postulates, none of which are entirely convincing.

1. The planet is heating up.

2. That is entirely or mainly to do with human activity.

3. A tipping point will be reached, in which the climate will fall into a catastrophic positive feedback mode.

4. When that point is reached, global heating will escalate, with no chance of any mitigation.

I have issues with all of that. And I most especially have issues with the notion that proposed panic measures to drastically cut back our emissions are justifiable. You can’t support sixty million lives in the UK if you do that.

Your BBC Overseas Service is all systems go-go for climate change. Climategate has never disturbed these people in their parallel time zones!

Andrew Adams – “The divergence only occurs for the period 1960 onwards – before that the proxy data is considered to be reliable, although this does of course still leave the question of why the divergence occurred (acid rain is one theory) and whether it does have wider implications for the use of tree rings as proxies in general.”

So in short, when tested against reliable instruments, post-1960s, the proxies are useless. When such reliable measurements do not exist and the proxies cannot be tested, you would have us believe they are reliable? Why? If they diverge from the instruments when we have instruments, surely the assumption about their behaviour in the past is wrong? That is, whatever assumptions are made about the relation between the proxy and the real temperature *must* be true after 1960 if they are to be true before 1960.

“When it came to producing the graph for the WMO report they used the proxy measurements up until the point where they became unreliable and at that point substituted the instrumental records, which were known to be correct.”

No. That is exactly backwards. The proxies became reliable after 1960 because we can check them against the instrument record. If the assumptions of the scientists show that they differ from the instruments, then the scientists are wrong. Think of it this way, if they assume that so many millimetres of tree ring means so many degrees of temperature, and yet after 1960 they notice that in fact the instrument record shows that tree rings grow faster, then their assumption is wrong. Hence the past reconstruction is wrong.

“If they had used the full proxy reconstruction it would have created an extremely misleading impression because it would have appeared that late 20th Century warming, which we know to be a fact, did not actually occur.”

Sorry? You mean the late 20th century was not warming? Have you misplaced a “not”? You have become a Denier? If they had adjusted their assumptions about the proxies, they would not have cooled the present – the proxies *must* agree with the instruments – they would have warmed the past. That is precisely what they did not want to do. So they ignored the fact that their assumptions were wrong and fudged the data. Like any cheating first year student.

Maybe they’re sick of fucking denierscum fucking them around and fear they will slow their work up with endless spurious FOI requests.

Fucking denierscum?

Well maybe they are but, sorry about this, the law still has to be followed.

Just to repeat, the FOI requests in question, at least as far as McIntyre (Climate Audit) is concerned, relate to the raw data and models associated with results which have already been published. That should not interfere with any ongoing research at all. So that those results can be replicated and/or challenged. You know, in line with the scientific method.
Hell – that is the scientific method.

But then as Jones said:
“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”

Yes, perhaps a bad man.
But certainly bad, very bad, science.

And surely there can be nothing wrong with the data, can there?
Because the science is “settled”, isn’t it?
So there is nothing to hide, is there?

Francis, the details of the mechanism connecting clouds, ionisation and cosmic rays haven’t been worked out, but the evidence linking them is now well established.”

The devil is in the detail, as the deniers and sceptics continually complain to their “warmist” bogeymen.

A mechanism linking clouds, ionisation and cosmic rays may be established, but only in the sense that there exist a small number of peer-reviewed papers based on the cosmic rays and clouds hypothesis. The problem is that you’d be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of scientists who are competent to comment on the details, and who don’t have serious problems with Henrik’s approach. It’s a huge stretch to say that the “the solar-GCR-cloud link completely changes the picture”. That sounds to me like wishful thinking, and not a statement based on evidence.

As far as I can see, the various solar irradiance increase papers are all dependent on statistically insignificant trend fitting. I have to agree with Benestad on this issue.

There certainly seem to have been several recent studies which refute the notion of cosmic rays causing warming.

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/05/01/cosmic-rays-too-wimpy-to-influence-climate/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080403083932.htm

(I could link to more but will probably fall into the black hole of moderation).

I’m a moderate skeptic about AGW. I sort of bought into it for a while but started to think ‘isn’t his all a llittle hysterical’ and started to form my own point of view. The environmentalists and their political supporters have got hysterical and have become semi detached from reality.

The fact that pro AGW people on here are referring to those who question the AGW hypothesis as ‘fucking denierscum’ just shows to me just how far some environmentalists have moved from a responsible scientific and rational point of view to a quasi religious one.

Saying ‘fucking denierscum’ is like shouting ‘fucking heretic’ was a few hundred years ago.

No. That is exactly backwards. The proxies became reliable after 1960 because we can check them against the instrument record. If the assumptions of the scientists show that they differ from the instruments, then the scientists are wrong. Think of it this way, if they assume that so many millimetres of tree ring means so many degrees of temperature, and yet after 1960 they notice that in fact the instrument record shows that tree rings grow faster, then their assumption is wrong. Hence the past reconstruction is wrong.

But the tree rings showed no warming at all for the previous 40 years when the instrumental records showed pronounced warming, but they did show warming for the first part of the 20th century in line with the instrumental records. It’s not just about assuming n degrees of warming for a certain width of tree ring, it’s about the trend – if the trend is wrong you can’t get round it by assuming a diffent value for n and you can’t get away from the fact that in this case there was an anomaly in the data. Therefore there are only two possible conclusions – either the whole science of dendrochronology is invalid, unlikely given it has a sound scientific basis and temperature reconstructions for past centuries broadly match those using different proxies, or there was something odd about the behaviour of those particular trees over the previous 40 years, possibly due to some external factor.

Sorry? You mean the late 20th century was not warming? You have become a Denier?

Er, no, I’m not sure how you came to that conclusion.

Have you misplaced a “not”? If they had adjusted their assumptions about the proxies, they would not have cooled the present – the proxies *must* agree with the instruments – they would have warmed the past. That is precisely what they did not want to do. So they ignored the fact that their assumptions were wrong and fudged the data. Like any cheating first year student.

Not at all. For a start, when they published their initial findings they did not “fudge” anything – they were perfectly open about the fact that the data showed an anomalous lack of warming in recent years. When it came to compiling the graph for the WMO, they used the data which was known to be most accurate – the proxy records for past centuries and the instrumental records for recent years. The point of the graph was to give as accurate a representation as possible of gloal temperatures over the last 1,000 years and that’s what it did – there was no deception, no “fudging”, no dishonesty.

Andrew Adams: “When it came to compiling the graph for the WMO, they used the data which was known to be most accurate – the proxy records for past centuries and the instrumental records for recent years.”

How can the tree-ring proxy records be known to be accurate for the past centuries, when they weren’t accurate for the modern instrumental period, including 1870-1910 before human activity was at significant levels. There’s no reason to think that they become more accurate in the past.

Why would they want to hide the decline, Andrew?

re: cosmic rays

Andrew, one of your two links was to a model study, which isn’t that helpful – real-world observations are more interesting and relevant, because they trump model results, they’re needed to confirm the usefulness of models, and they’re the only thing that can prove or disprove the GCR-climate hypothesis.

The other paper, by Sloan and Wolfendale, is flawed because they studied the wrong type of cosmic rays (low energy ones) – Svensmark theory is about higher energy cosmic rays. They also failed to consider the lag-time.

They failed to find the Forbush decreases because they made the wrong assumptions, and so looked in the wrong place for the wrong predictions.

Svensmark et al. 2009 interpreted the hypothesis correctly, knew what to look for, and found results confirming the hypothesis : observations from 4 independent satellites show the effects of Forbush decreases on clouds and aerosols, after ~5 day lag.
“Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and
clouds” (Svensmark et al 2009)
Please see the graph of results on page 15
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/svensmark-forebush.pdf

There’s far more evidence for the GCR-climate link in the peer-reviewed literature than there is against it. The criticisms have generally been well-answered, by gathering of more observational evidence confirming the GCR-climate hypothesis, and by pointing out the flaws in the criticising papers.

Francis Sedgemore: “A mechanism linking clouds, ionisation and cosmic rays may be established, but only in the sense that there exist a small number of peer-reviewed papers based on the cosmic rays and clouds hypothesis.”
[..]
“It’s a huge stretch to say that the “the solar-GCR-cloud link completely changes the picture”. That sounds to me like wishful thinking, and not a statement based on evidence.”

Francis, it sounds like you haven’t kept up with the science. It’s not just a hypothesis anymore, it’s been repeatedly confirmed by real-world measurements. The GCR-climate link is also visible in the paleo-record. The criticisms of the theory have been, as Shaviv described it, “toothless”.

“Francis, it sounds like you haven’t kept up with the science.”

I would say that I’ve kept up pretty well with the science, considering that I no longer work as a research geophysicist, and have to concentrate on industrially relevant research in my work as a science journalist. I keep an eye on the literature, and also online chatter among climate scientists.

The GCR-climate link has failed to convince more than a very small number of people. The work passes muster when it comes to the peer-review process, but the science is weak, and the statistics of marginal significance.

Regarding Henrik and his latest paper on Forbush decreases, this work has been thoroughly deconstructed by specialists who understand atmospheric chemistry. Henrik clearly doesn’t. The timing is all wrong, for one thing.

Also, many researchers have expressed unease with Henrik’s failure to cite in his 2009 paper a number of highly relevant studies that impact directly on his hypothesis. Another criticism concerns Henrik’s choice of aerosols used in his study.

The point is that Henrik has done his work, and the science has been subject to intense, detailed, open and civilised discussion. It’s way beyond the scope of a knockabout political blog to repeat that detail here, but if readers are interested, they can easily find the online discussion with the aid of a suitable search engine.

Henrik is not the only researcher working in this area, yet owing to the political sensitivity of the subject, it would seem that just one paper with Henrik’s name on it has more public impact than a dozen by researchers who have spent their entire professional lives attempting to solve complex problems in lower atmosphere chemistry and physics. I can understand their frustration with this lamentable state of affairs.

Andrew Adams – “But the tree rings showed no warming at all for the previous 40 years when the instrumental records showed pronounced warming, but they did show warming for the first part of the 20th century in line with the instrumental records.”

I don’t think that is quite what the proxies did. Because we don’t have a good instrument record for the first part of the 20th century, especially for much of the non-First-World. We do have better and better records for the post-1960s world.

The proxies do not show warming. They show tree ring growth or the like. That has to be calibrated against a known, reliable, instrument record. The modern period is the obvious period to use as a base line. If the proxies disagree with the modern satellite data, there is something wrong with the assumptions about the proxies. There can be no other conclusion.

“It’s not just about assuming n degrees of warming for a certain width of tree ring, it’s about the trend – if the trend is wrong you can’t get round it by assuming a diffent value for n and you can’t get away from the fact that in this case there was an anomaly in the data.”

Then the proxies are rubbish and need to be thrown out. Do you have a reference for the problem with the trend anyway?

“Therefore there are only two possible conclusions – either the whole science of dendrochronology is invalid, unlikely given it has a sound scientific basis and temperature reconstructions for past centuries broadly match those using different proxies”

Actually it is perfectly likely. Tree growth is influenced by a lot of different factors. Temperature is just one. Soil quality for instance. Water availability. Even CO2 levels in some parts of the world. So it needs to be used with caution.

“or there was something odd about the behaviour of those particular trees over the previous 40 years, possibly due to some external factor.”

Or, even if everything you say is true – and it does not apply to trees in Siberia or outside of Europe – there is something wrong with the first forty years.

“When it came to compiling the graph for the WMO, they used the data which was known to be most accurate – the proxy records for past centuries and the instrumental records for recent years.”

Except if the proxies are not accurate for the period with modern instruments and especially satellites you cannot know they are accurate for the past either. Especially as proxies are, obviously, proxies. They do not give temperatures. They may be the only data they have, but that does not make them accurate. Why calibrate them against the 40 years before 1960 rather than the 40 years after?

“The point of the graph was to give as accurate a representation as possible of gloal temperatures over the last 1,000 years and that’s what it did – there was no deception, no “fudging”, no dishonesty.”

Except it is clear from their computer code that there was fudging from the start and it was dishonest of them to pretend otherwise. Mike Mann did not, by the way, use instrument data from the post-1960s period. He used adjusted and selected data. I wonder how long that will stand up to scrutiny once it is openly released.

Francis: “Also, many researchers have expressed unease with Henrik’s failure to cite in his 2009 paper a number of highly relevant studies that impact directly on his hypothesis. Another criticism concerns Henrik’s choice of aerosols used in his study.”

The only real attempt at criticism of the paper I’ve found is in a blog post at RealClimate by Rasmus Benestad. Personally I found the criticisms scattered and lacking substance, although I still have some reading to do before I’ve verified that to at least my own satisfaction. Benestad also seems to make an accusation of cherry-picking data (”If one looks long enough at a large set of data, it is often possible to discern patterns just by chance. “).

The paper stands unchallenged in the peer-reviewed literature. Presumably the proper scientific criticism is still being formulated or finding its way through the peer-review process.

On this note, you may be interested to read Nicola Scafetta’s reply to Benestad and Schmidt 2009. It’ll be a few months before it’s published in a journal, but it’s been posted at http://climatesci.org/2009/08/03/nicola-scafetta-comments-on-solar-trends-and-global-warming-by-benestad-and-schmidt/

I respect your site, but the conclusion of the posting is utter BS.

Read the code comments and the poor Harry’s comments about data missing or weather station data coming from an airport decades before it was built.

All this data and the databases he complains about is what the IPCC relies so heavily upon.

But by all means keep ‘hiding the decline’