by Judith Curry
Two years ago on Thanksgiving, I was working on my Climategate essay An open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research. It was a topic of family discussion, and my 4 nieces and nephews (high school and college age) were all discussing and commenting on my essay. I was also involved in extensive e-discussions with Joe Rom and Andy Revkin, who were hosting my letter on their blogs.
Two years later, what is different? Well, since I mentioned Joe Romm, he now regards me as “the most debunked climate scientist on the planet.” The partisanship in the climate debate has become increasingly shrill. But there is a growing “middle” in the climate debate, that I think can be partly attributed to Climategate 1.0.
My reactions to this batch of emails? My first reaction was email fatigue. Then I was intrigued by several of the emails that were quoted, since they are of relevance to issues I have been writing or thinking about. My prediction is that the MSM won’t pay much attention to this, but that it will provide fodder for the climate blogosphere for quite a while.
Other comments on Climategate 2.0
While partisan bloggers on both sides are making the expected statements, this statement from Marc Morano is something that I can agree with: “The new emails further expose the upper echelon of the UN IPCC as being more interested in crafting a careful narrative than following the evidence.“
David Appel has a good post with some disturbing excerpts from the emails. I find this statement from Appel to particularly insightful: “Much of this is “inside baseball” stuff, but all of us eat that kind of stuff up and form powerful impressions from it. ”
Rob Mikolewski has another good article at the Capital Report New Mexico:
Right after I got my bachelor’s degree I worked at a university and saw how petty and vicious the squabbles can get among those in academia and Henry Kissinger once had a memorable quote about why that happens: “It’s because the stakes are so small.” But the stakes aren’t low here.
On a thread at collide-a-scape, Alexander Harvey has an insightful comment, some excerpts:
You can hear people being cautious, and sometimes downright rude, particularly concerning modelling. You even get people telling other people that they are flat out wrong (commonly statitistician criticising statistical approaches of others).
You will find the unspoken middle ground on display, This is the ground that the science community left largely publically undefended and where many of the sceptics are camped out. I think it quite shocking that this territory was largely left publically unoccupied by the science community. It is where the debate seems to take place internally, yet externally, in the public domain, the existence of that debate is denied or downplayed.
In the emails, you may find disagreements, but I think that there is more than that. Some, more, or many scientists are just plain sceptical about what can and cannot be determined.
The contrast between what they say to each other when it is just between themselves and the all seeing but forgotten videocam, and what those that choose to lead the debate say in public can be quite stark, in my opinion.
Keith, I really do think there is a story in this, that is not just interesting but in the public good. If you can persuade people that you wish to tell it, without sensationalising it, perhaps they would talk with you. People that have balanced views that might wish to express them.
If you can do this, don’t expect anyone “important” to thank you for it. Many would hate it. It amounts to muddying pools. Personally I think things need to get worse before they can get better, that there is a boil that needs to be lanced. Also that the current stasis is the time to get it out of the way. It is not like it could hamper policy decisions right now, as nobody seems to be planning on making any.
In terms of the science nothing much will actually change just its perception. Nothing much has actually changed for decades.
I think that there are some in the climate community that are trying to row back and express the greyness of much of the science. By grey I do not mean, whether the GHE exists, whether the temps are rising, or whether CO2 is a GHG, but what can and cannot be stated and with what confidence. Many dissidents get this, for which we should all be thankful, so do others. People that believe that treating people like adults is worth a try.
JC request to the hacker: Next time you release emails, please wait until AFTER thanksgiving (U.S. holiday).
I think Harvey’s post is interesting and profound.
The so far “silent majority” of middle ground scientists will have to gird their loins for a long hard and unrewarding struggle – back to the sunlit uplands of “pre-post-normal” science.
Certainly there’s no chance of the upholders of “the cause” doing it – they’ve burned their boats.
“The so far “silent majority” of middle ground scientists will have to gird their loins for a long hard and unrewarding struggle – back to the sunlit uplands of “pre-post-normal” science.”
And there will be a whole cohort of middle ground members of the public cheering them on.
But no middle ground activist groups. Furthermore, the middle ground science is a lot more subtle and complicated than the simple narratives coming from the extremes, so the media isn’t interested, either. Much easier to parrot talking points.
Very true – we are dichotomous creatures and we generate much of our energy by being so. The voices from the middle are quiet – the uncertainties great and the unknowns many. There is little in the way of fame and fortune to be made there. And how easy is it to slip to one side or the other!
Two years ago Professor Curry wrote an excellent open letter to graduate students and young scientists that identified the problem:
“What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values: the rigors of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking.”
Leaders of the scientific community failed to respond to her challenge and now face the more serious charge of having abandoned basis research values in favor of government research since 1971:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10640850/20110722_Climategate_Roots.pdf
Graduate students and young scientists are still waiting for an answer:
Can I have a creative career in science? Or must I sacrifice critical thinking and ignore observations that falsify government dogma?
P.E. – If you think the skeptics have staked out an extreme position, you simply are not paying attention. When the warmists claimed the über-green extreme position, the skeptics became skeptical, simply by taking the middle ground. Yes, compared to the warmists, that seems like the “Rent an Arguer” on Monty Python, the one who just says the opposite of whatever you say – but that was never, ever, the case. The skeptics simply kept asking, “But where is your evidence for this extreme position?” 90% of the time the warmists pointed to the models, as if models are anything more than representations. And the warmists kept ignoring the fact that those self-same models couldn’t even hind cast.
So, don’t paint the skeptics out as extremists. Alexander Harvey has it right about the warmists abandoning the middle ground. You have it wrong that the skeptics abandoned it, too.
What do sociologists say on the email hack?
interesting stuff:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,695301,00.html
That’s a pretty good summary. It’s true that both climate scientists and their foes play hardball. But when the climates scientist do it, they are accused of being unethical.
It’s simple: The public is being asked to trust these scientists. When they “play hardball”, meaning they appear biased and unfair, the public doesn’t trust them.
It seems that the whistleblower and those aligned with ‘the cause’ as Mann put it play the game differently. It’s strange that “playing hardball” you mean hiding the decline, uncertainty and downplaying the doubt and on the other side it’s precisely the opposite.
As an old poet once wrote:
“Time’s glory is to command contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.”
No, I mean since the hacker huggers approve of e-mail theft, they also likely will lie when lying is convenient, so what they say about their foes, the victims of e-mail theft, is suspect and makes them fair targets for hardball.
The opposite as in condoning e-mail theft?
I would never trust anyone who approves of e-mail theft and uses the stolen mail to malign the victims of the theft.
Those are some fantastic jumps in reasoning M. Carey. Beautiful to watch.
What jumps in reasoning?
Theft is theft. Most people consider theft unethical. Furthermore, if there was a noble aim behind this theft, there is no way whatsoever it could be served by sitting on the results for years.
Returning property to its rightful owners is not theft.
MC, “victims??????”
I thought scientists were supposed to be honest and truthful and most of all smart. I’ve known for a long time you don’t put anything in writing that you wouldn’t want to see on the front pages of the Newspaper because in the electronics age we are in, it probably will end up there.
When you resort to saying you wouldn’t trust anyone who approves of email theft you are showing just how pathetic a defense you are left with. Either the comments are noconsequential in which case it doesn’t make any difference, or they are consequential in which case you should applaud the truth getting out.
To M Cary –
Being a whistleblower always shows peoples’ true colors. The authoritarians all shout, “Thief! Thief!”, while the populists all shout, “At last we have the inside information!”
We might still be in Viet Nam if it wasn’t for Daniel Ellsburg.
Richard Nixon might not have resigned if not for Alexander Butterfield mentioning the White House tapes (a direct analog for the CRU emails).
If whistleblowers didn’t exist, there would be far fewer checks on hubris.
Dagfinn the public?
God, this is truly desperate stuff. LOL
Seemed a bit one sided to me. From 2010, and it is about 90% toward the cAGW side. According to the Spiegle article, those against cAGW are all funded by the oil industry.
Empty accusations. Red herrings, if you will. If you have evidence about funding by the oil industry, put up or shut up.
Notice that Spiegel’s spin back 18 months ago was blatant and continuous. I myself read Spiegel all the time, and agree with them on much – but not on this issue. That article was a hack job. I also hate the oil companies, just like greens and Spiegel do. But lying about warming and CO2 – I call that cheating, and in science you aren’t allowed to cheat. If you do, you WILL be caught, sooner or later.
It is the cheaters’ own words – in their own emails – that have brought down their house of cards. They owned the playing field, until the Climategate I files were released. And you know who was behind it? One guy, username “Foia.” No oil money, just one guy. And who gave him the courage to do it? Another lone statisitician-auditor named Steve McIntyre, plus another named Anthony Watts, a former weatherman – and not one of them is remotely connected to oil company payoffs.
Or do you know something no one else in the world knows? If you do, you have the World Wide Web to release it to! Go for it!
Oh, there’s plenty of evidence about funding from the oil industry. It’s all just against the cAGS supporters.
Well, I might agree with you – when you provide evidence of the skeptics trying to squelch publication of papers favorable to the premise of AGW.
I’m rather dismayed by one part of that article:
First, I’m confused as to how they conclude it was “a face-saving fudge,” not fraud. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed, in many cases, I’d expect them to overlap. I think it is debatable whether or not it qualifies as “fraud” in a legal sense, but it was certainly deceptive and unjustifiable.
Second, I hate how people keep saying the post-1960 data was “wrong” (or in this case, erroneous). How can data be wrong? It is what it is. The interpretation of data can be wrong, but not the data itself. Perhaps the data doesn’t measure what it was thought to measure, but that is solely an issue of interpreting the data. Even worse, if you say one segment of the data was wrong so it was “corrected,” you necessarily imply the segment which didn’t need to be corrected was right. There is no way to know that is true.
The “trick” to “hide the decline” was quite simple. A portion of a series gave results which were liked. It was kept. A portion of a series gave results which were not liked. It was covered up. That’s all.
A neat explanation. You say “it is debatable whether or not it qualifies as “fraud” in a legal sense”. But we’re talking about science here. It certainly looks like scientific fraud to me.
Scientific fraud has a legal meaning, and people can be prosecuted for it. Given that, I don’t like calling anything “scientific fraud” as I’m not interested in the legal aspect. If we could somehow erase the legal definition of the phrase from existence, I’d probably agree with you, but in the meantime, I think it’s best to find other phrasings.
Fully cognizant that “Scientific fraud has a legal meaning, and people can be prosecuted for it,” I take pains to stress the fact that what we have been seeing in the conduct of the C.R.U. correspondents who’ve gotten pantsed in the Climategate revelations is nothing less than “scientific fraud” which is actionable both in the criminal sense and in civil suits at law seeking massive compensatory and punitive damages.
I am most “interested in the legal aspect” of these violations of professional ethics, and will continue to use such “phrasings” without remit or remorse.
The only people interested in finding some way to “erase the legal definition of the phrase from existence” are those who wish to enable these arguably criminal malefactors to escape the consequences of their depredations, and that’s damnable in and of itself.
I want them impaled on sharpened stakes. Failing that, lifetime imprisonment combined with confiscation of all their material goods and a lien against every penny they’ll ever make in all the rest of their lives will have to do.
People can’t be prosecuted for scientific fraud unless it’s the cause of a statutory crime, such as falsely testifying under oath. Even violating the terms of a contract isn’t going to land someone in the pokey. There is no such general crime on the books.
Comments like Rich’s are part of the reason why the investigations failed. the looked for fraud to answer the wild rantings of skeptics.
consequently nobody talks about best practices
P.E., you may well be right about that. I’ve never looked very deeply into what the legal consequences of scientific fraud are, so I can’t say what they are. I assumed there would be some prosecutable offenses, but I could be wrong. It may just be a civil offense (so they could be sued, but little more).
Rich Matarese, that is quite possibly the most absurd comment I’ve ever seen on this site. Suggesting bodily harm on people is not acceptable.
steven mosher writes that: “Comments like Rich’s are part of the reason why the investigations failed. the looked for fraud to answer the wild rantings of skeptics.”
First, the “investigations” cannot be said to have “failed” because no “investigations” have yet been conducted. You mean to say instead that the whitewashes conducted in lieu of investigations haven’t managed to do squat in the way of allaying the widespread and increasing public perception of the fraudulence that is the “science” of anthropogenic global warming.
Second, you must understand that my perceptions of the motives, comportment, and criminality of the AGW fraudsters are merely representative of that spreading and intensifying general hostility toward the junk science of the AGW catastrophists who have been directly complicit in the poverty and deaths of tens of thousands of people in the countries of the First World and the starvation, political instability, disease, and increased mortality hammering the countries of the Third World for the past several decades.
It might be reasonably argued that the recent “Arab Spring” uprisings were (and continue to be) triggered by increased costs of basic foodstuffs in the global grain markets directly attributable to First World government fuel ethanol policies implemented in the address of the wholly spurious “threat” of anthropogenic global warming.
Actions – including lies concerted by the alarmist “climate science” fraudsters exemplified by the C.R.U. e-mail correspondents – have consequences, and the liars most certainly have to be held responsible for the consequences of their mendacities and other defalcations.
As for Mr. Shollenberge,r Suggesting bodily harm on [these] people” – my personal desire to see them impaled on sharpened stakes, a la Vlad Țepeș – is simply an honest of my desire that they be treated with conspicuous brutality, “pour encourager les autres.”
Too damned many professional prevaricators masquerading as credentialed academics and “researchers” lie their ways throughout their lives, “fudging” this and “cooking” that, paying ghostwriters to craft their theses and dissertations for them, plagiarizing with snow-shovel scoops from the works of others, confident of tenure and the other perquisites of their academic union cards.
Now in the promulgation of the AGW fraud we have seen real material damages done to (and against) the lives of millions of living – and dead – human beings.
And Mr. Shollenberger whines about a desire for retribution expressed in comments on an Internet blog.
What an unspeakable priss.
Rich. you still dont get than mann and Jones escaped because of rhetoric like yours.
No Steve, they escaped because the people we paid to investigate the climateers did as bad a job of assessing evidence as the climateers we paid to assess the climate.
They all scoff from the same trough and piss in the same pot.
“We could approach Ron Oxburgh to do the PR”
Please.
To quote someone. My head is exploding. Hide the decline was a failure to calibrate. Nothing more and nothing less. One instrument (tree rings) failed calibration against another instrument (mercury in a capilary tube). One is widely accepted as a measure of temperature, one is not. If the one that is not a widely accepted measure of temperature cannot calibrate against the one that is a widely accepted measure of temperature, then, barring very, very strong evidence to the contrary, one of these two must be discarded as a measure of temperature. I leave it to the reader to decide whether tree rings are more reliable than the coefficient of thermal expansion of mercury. To claim that a tree ring is sometimes better, sometimes not is . . . what? Honest mistake? Bit of a problem to be dealt with later? To intentionally and knowingly withhold the fact that the “instrument” had failed calibration is . . . what? Please explain how that is NOT fraud.
This is a difficult conundrum. On the one hand, instituting criminal penalties for erroneous scientific results or hypotheses would stifle research and snuff many a beneficial flame aborning. On the other, as Rich so emotionally conveys, these particular investigators have had a real, tangible, and widely harmful impact. Which is a nice way of saying, yes, a great many people have died, and productive employment of resources has been tragically diverted.
I would submit that the problem lies in our institutions. In a world of, for lack of a better descriptive, grown-ups, a rigorous and impartial process for examining and evaluating the competing claims would have been instituted and results judged based on rigorous and objective criteria over a period of (at least) decades before arriving at a conclusion.
Perhaps such a world exists somewhere in the Cosmos, and not just in the innocent mind of my long lost youth. Maybe, as a result of this fiasco, some people will give some thought to moving in that direction. But, I’m not going to hold my breath.
Bart:
The problem is that the period of tenure as head of *insert name of August Institution here* is such that ambitious characters like Michael Mann with a strong self belief think short cuts to stardom are necessary and reasonable. Add in the top down agenda of the funding entity (government) and you have a recipe for a ‘movement’ which inevitably departs from the straight and narrow of adherence to what the scientific method should be.
As the people who stump up the cash for this game, we should take on the role of executive director and sack the management.
Fraud is a legal issue independent of academic conduct or freedom. From
Cuccinelli II, Kenneth T., Wesley G. Russell, Jr., Stephen R. McCullough, Charles E. James, Jr., and E. Duncan Getchell, Jr. 2010. Brief In Opposition To Petition. Office of the Attorney General, Virginia, July 13. http://www.oag.state.va.us/PRESS_RELEASES/Cuccinelli/Brief%20in%20Opp%207-13-10.pdf
All we need is a whistleblower with inside knowledge of Penn State’s grant applications.
Each and every one of the Hockey Team signed multiple declarations when they received US federal grant funds. Lying on those declarations is a crime too.
Now that Penn State has set an example of how to empanel a truly independent investigation of its corruption, there’s hope that they will do the same for climate funding.
It is a crime to make false statements or submit false claims in applying for, justifying, or accounting for government grants.
http://www.falseclaimsact.com/common_frauds_research.php
“COMMON TYPES OF FRAUD: RESEARCH FRAUD
The federal government’s massive spending on research and development has been a frequent target for fraudulent and false claims. Many of the most prestigious academic and private research facilities have been accused of research fraud. Some of the common forms of research grant fraud include:
•Falsifying a grant application in order to secure a grant
•Falsifying research data and results
•Over-charging time, costs and other expenses associated with the grant
•Falsifying purchase orders for equipment and materials
•Using grant money for other unrelated research
•Using grant money for personal expenses
•Improper conflicts of interest by the principal investigators
•Falsifying progress reports and other documentation
•Failing to comply with applicable government safety and other regulations ”
http://www.grants.gov/assets/GrantFraud.pdf
“Grant Fraud Statutes
Federal grant dollars are susceptible to several
forms of financial theft, most commonly in the
form of specific federal violations, including:
1. Embezzlement
2. Theft or Bribery concerning programs receiving Federal funds
3. False Statements
4. False Claims
5. Mail Fraud and Wire Fraud
Each of these violations of law are subject to
criminal prosecution, fines, restitution, and civil
penalties.”
There is excellent agreement between the tree ring proxies and direct temperature measurements up to the 1960s, and a divergence thereafter. Now, we are pretty sure that the thermometers are not wrong; but we do know that the 1960s onwards was a time of industrialization in the Soviet union and Eastern Europe, with all the medium range pollution – acid rain,etc – that this implies. So there is a perfectly plausible explanation for why the series should diverge.
Andrew Dodds –
When a proxy is not accurate, it is not reliable and should not be used – period.
If any, industrialization with higher CO2 levels should have brought higher rates of tree growth, not less. (and Acid rain is a myth )
Your reasoning has no scientific background, and until it is – this proxy should not be used, especially for life changing decisions like the greens are demanding.
This is not science, this is politics.
The proxies in question do appear accurate prior to 1960, so – given that we should include as much evidence as possible and budgets for this research are not limitless – they should be kept. I’m sure you’d prefer climate science generally to have sufficient budgets to be able to do paleoclimatic research from scratch, but that would appear to be a pipe dream.
Increasing CO2 will only increase growth rates where it is a limiting factor, which is unlikely to be the case in the high Arctic. And acid rain is a reality, I’m not sure what makes you so keen on dismissing it.
In any case, there are reasons why a given proxy may be reliable in one part of a series and less so in another, which is why the field is a tricky one.
Andrew Dodds on November 25, 2011 at 11:20 am writes:
How about “Because the acid rain panic is (and always was) baloney“?
In 1987, the preliminary assessment of the half-a-billion-dollar National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP) reported the following four conclusions:
Nothing’s changed since then.
Mr. Dodds, do you have anything to support your contention that “acid rain is a reality” worth the costs imposed upon human beings thus far in the name of this purely political science-free rent-seeking “Liberal” fascist Watermelon horsepuckey?
Andrew, so over the time period over which we have actual temperature measurements, there are 110 years of agreement and 60 years of non-agreement. Hardly confidence-inspiring for the accuracy of paleo reconstructions.
if there are good explanations for the divergence then they should have made them, rather than splicing real temperatures without saying to, in order to hide the decline.
Andrew Dodds said “The proxies in question do appear accurate prior to 1960, so – given that we should include as much evidence as possible and budgets for this research are not limitless – they should be kept.”
Eyal Porat and The Iconoclast have explained it well, but I’ll put it even more simply: That’s cherry-picking. You can’t just keep the bits you like.
Mike, TI,
To use a favourite metaphor of mine, the 1960 divergence/”decline” ought to have come like the thirteenth stroke of a clock – casting doubt not merely on its subsequent pronouncements (as AD and the Proxymorons would have it), but on all its earlier pronouncements, too.
But don’t worry, you’ll never convince a Believer.
Tree ring growth is affected by at least 3-4 things, possible more. Trees such as the bristlecones that don’t have a circular tree ring seem to be problematic. So using them as a proxy for temperature is always a bit dodgy since you don’t know the amount of rainfall, sunlight, or CO2 they had as they were growing or things like how crowded they were, what were the levels of N and P over time, etc. However, it is an interesting thing to look at, it just has large error bars.
A ‘perfectly plausible’ reason is one thing. We call it a ‘hypothesis’. But it ain’t anywhere near proof that it actually occurred.
What other evidence was looked for to see if this idea even got to first base. Could you see similar changes in other countries as they industrialised…in England in the early 1800s? In the USA in the late 1800s early 1900s? In China in recent years? Could anybody propose an actual mechanism? ‘Pollution’ is a great phrase designed to frighten the horses..but what sort of pollution is believed to have caused this? Can we find places where that particular pollutant has declined (eg as parts of Eastern Europe have cleaned up their act a bit) and shown that the trees recover?
Just saying you have a ‘plausible explanation’ is not much good without a lot of further actual work.
Andrew,
I tried to comment to Nick Stokes on another blog about this issue over an email in which Mann was expressing a lot of angst as to the fact that he and others had often explained why the proxy data was in error post 1960.
“Different context, but once again we arrive at one of the mainstays of the philosophy of Modern Science [as distinct from empirical science]. And in this, Mann is doing no more nor less than a whole lot of other “scientific” fields. For Mann, the ability to interpret data or its divergence only requires a sufficient plausible explanation.
There is no requirement or expectation that these hypotheses need to be rigorously tested before being adopted. It is merely sufficient to be able to imagine them. This is that awesome gift of human imagination taking the place of actual knowledge again. And as I say, its not unique to Climate Science, which is probably why Mann and others are wondering what the fuss is about.
In this case though, it really and truly begs the question. I can calibrate temperature to selected tree rings for a short period of time, but after that it diverges. My imagination can fill in the details as to why it is possible that this only occurs in recent time – but why turn my imagination off just there. It could also find numerous reasons why the proxy is unreliable prior to that nice period where it lines up.
You should be able to see that we are no longer in the realm of science, but in the domain of advocacy for a pre-established position.”
Now I could add to that, that if you have been following this issue over a long time at Climate Audit you will realise that there are numbers of other tree records, often in the same area, that are also rejected by the team because they show up a Medieval Warm Period. You would have also learned about teleconnection – so that the trees they did eventually settle on using diverged from the local temperature record in order to conform to the global average temperature record. Have you ever thought about what kind of superstition is involved in the proposition that a tree can ignore its local temperature conditions and connect with a value which is averaged over the entire earth, but which is in itself without physical meaning?
Yes, the operative term in that passage is “clearly erroneous.”
Clearly erroneous meant that they couldn’t explain it, so it MUST BE WRONG, since it didn’t agree with the rest of what they were doing. But two points:
1. If it was wrong in their favor – giving an even STEEPER slope, would they have used it? You’re darn tooting! And would they have even LOOKED to see if it was an error? Not a chance.
2. Real scientists, if they saw that the >1960 tree rings didn’t jibe with the thermometers would have asked this question:
“Are the <1960 tree rings reliable proxies, then?"
If they only agree for part of the instrument period, then diverge for an extended period, then OBVIOUSLY there is something they don't understand. With these top level climatologists, what were they waiting for – for someone else to come along and do their work for them? If they SAW a divergence, why have they not researched it and found a solution? And preferably BEFORE they fake a spaghetti graph with "Mike's trick" to hide the decline (divergence).
I honestly can't imagine objective scientists seeing that divergence and still using tree rings as temperature proxies without mentioning it to everyone who reads their papers.
Judith talks all about communicating the uncertainty. Well, there may not BE a bigger uncertainty in climate science than the divergence problem.
The Der Spiegel article is very misleading, but it is typical of how AGW believers are going to rationalize away the failure of the predictions regarding the cliamte and ethical collapse of so many in climate science by saying they both did it.
Yeah, it was a hack job, from the leader on.
[Speigel]”…Late last year, climate researchers were accused of exaggerating study results.”
Nooooo. Skeptics have been saying ALL ALONG that the scientists have been exaggerating the results.
What happened “late last year” was that evidence from the horse’s mouth came out that this exaggerating had actually been happening for years.
C’mon. Spiegel, at least get your skeptics characterizations and history straight! A 10th grade school news editor would have caught that one.
Harvey’s claim that the science has not changed in decades is pretty outrageous, given the many billions spent on climate science during that period. What is true is that people whose AGW minds were made up decades ago have not changed. In the meantime science discovered natural variability on the dec-cen scale.
In the meantime science discovered natural variability on the dec-cen scale.
Science has always known about natural variability. What they don’t know is how to quantify it giving the quality of the long term data sets. The ‘Old Farmers Alamanac’ weather predictions are based on ‘natural cycles’. It’s been around for 200+ years.
Harry, the Almanac aside, mainstream climate science assumed climate was naturally stable until the late 1990’s. The IPCC SAR considers then dismisses even direct solar variability, for example, much less indirect forcing, and the models were all equillibrium models. The beginning of the turning of the tide can be seen in the NAS dec-cen variability report, which was around 1998. But the issue only became seriously considered in the last few years, with the protracted lack of warming.
Consider the ‘go for broke’ push at Copenhagen compared to anything of the ‘cimate conventions’ previously or since.
In my tin foil mind they all knew the ‘natural upswing’ might be about to change which made it ‘treaty now or never’ time.
Just look at the mean temperature for Alaska(Climate change is supposed to be amplified in the arctic)
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ResearchProjects/pages/AKpaper10.html
Abstract-
The 1976 Pacific climate shift is examined and its manifestations and significance in Alaskan climatology during the last half-century are demonstrated. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation Index shifted in 1976 from dominantly negative values for the 25-year time period 1951-1975 to dominantly positive values for the period 1977-2001.
I don’t find it credible that the worlds best and brightest climate scientists were unaware of the 1976 Pacific Climate shift, the Middle Ages Warm Period or the Roman Warm period.
David, I don’t think that’s quite true. I think the null hypothesis was always that there is natural variability going on in the background, until the MBH hockey stick attempted to create the fiction of a perfectly stable climate over the millennial time scale. This fiction is only as old as the hockey stick.
David , with the PDO only having been discovered in 1997 and almost nothing known about it for the first five years, the 1998 variability report seems like it could not have had anything but ENSO in it.
The naturally stable assumption has never been proven – because every one of the possible forcings would have to have had as study for this very purpose. Since PDO was not even known until the late 1990s, all such studies would have become invalid, upon the discovery of the PDO, not to mention the AMO and the other oscillations that are still turning up.
So, the assumption was flat WRONG, and any conclusions (such as CO2 is the devil, but only human-created CO2) about natural variability being naturally stable (as in variation being non-existent) should have been thrown out with the bathwater. Since we no KNOW that there are HUGE oscillations, that assumption should be laughed at.
Which I do, every day.
Why it has any credence still, I have no idea. But now knowing of the variable cycles, why has Anthropogenic CO2 not been reassessed? (It IS, after all, a very minor (1/25th of 1%) component of the atmosphere.)
Why not? Because too many careers are built around it and billions invested in it.
There’s another way of reading that comment, and that is that even after all of the work over the past two or three decades, we’re not much closer to the truth than before. Talking points notwithstanding, we certainly haven’t closed the uncertainty gap much. One of the big problems for the OMG!!! chorus is that while paper after paper after paper have been published, the earth hasn’t cooperated. If you recall, it was supposed to be a lot hotter now than 15 years ago. And high tide lapping at the streets of Manhattan, etc., etc. Didn’t happen. If it did, I think we’d be looking at a very different assessment of “the science”.
We’d probably have a bunch of infrastructure engineering projects to do in line with the predictions.
Strangely many of the actual projects have been related to temperatures dropping and snow removal / ice mitigation equipment and procedures in places not accustomed to this sort of thing.
We’ve spent north of $100 billion on ‘climate research’ and know very little more now than we did 30 years ago. By any criteria it has been a spectacularly bad investment of public funds. Pouring it down the bog would have been just as useful
Unless you view it as a job creation scheme for 3rd rate ‘scientists’ who failed their Excel training and so were given one of the world’s premier datasets to look after as a consolation prize. For whom it has been a path to fame and influence beyond their wildest dreams.
When the history of this exercise in complete futility comes to be written, future generations will marvel that we collectively could have been so profoundly stupid for so long.
But slowly slowly, sanity is returning. CG1 set us back on the right path. It is a long walk to normality, but CG2 has moved us a long way in that direction
Not billions. Trillions.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/24/world-bank-global-warming-journals-and-cru/
Trillions of dollars are going into climbing oil prices as the effects of a diminishing supply of high quality crude is hitting us at the same time that the burgeoning economies of China, India, and elsewhere have started to make their mark. China does not care about AGW, whatever you may think.
This stuff is so obvious to everyone other than those people that are in a lather over cattiness among climate scientists.
Fine, yes, OK, agreed, you have made your point, nobody is arguing with you, you’ve spent years on your hobby and its a very nice website. Oil prices are going up because it is getting scarcer.
But endless repetition of this simple unchallenged assertion that seems pretty self-evident to all is much like the guy with the Iron Sun theory.
Climate is only part of the global system after all.
OK, but the world doesn’t revolve around you, so tough luck.
All that is called reality. It is the place where the Royal Society said all scientific studies should be done – in the empirical world. Robert Hooke would get livid at people who had theories and who didn’t bring in some experiment to show the theory to have value. It was all about empirical proof.
15 years of no warming is a pretty sizable falsification, though not conclusive. Trenberth et al are quaking in their boots and praying to every god of disaster they can think of.
David
The stated aims of the IPCC are to assess scientific information relevant to:
Human-induced climate change,
The impacts of human-induced climate change,
Options for adaptation and mitigation.
Do you see any mention of understanding the root cause of climate change in the above mission statement ?
Anything here that would encourage the participants to look for a reason to dismiss the human input and “discover natural variability on the dec-cen scale” ?
No.
However, the massive temptation to discover ever more ludicrous human induced causes in return for massive grants and fame (for some) and a job for life was too much to ignore.
Sprinkle in a few left wing politicians to guide the summary wordings
and some religiously guided eco-nuts ( My work is as Director of the national centre for climate change research, a job which requires me to translate my Christian belief about stewardship of God’s planet into research and action. M.Hulme) and the ball is rolling.
They never wanted natural variability to feature and used every means to factor it out and the e-mails only reveal the misgivings some of those involved had about bending the truth to follow ‘the message’.
Others however, and we know who you are , were active in the deception
and pressured others to comply. It is they who must face justice.
Thanks for the lead-in…
What climatological or meteorological scientist actually discovered the first “dec-cen” scale variability? If you guess ANY of them you are wrong. The answer is that BIOLOGIST Steven R. Hare, working for the International Halibut Commission discovered (and even named) the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, in 1997.
I will here actually report that a real climatologist (Oregon’s then State Climatologist George Taylor) communicated to me (in a personal email in about 2005) that he had actually discovered the PDO before Hare, but did nothing with it. He gladly gives Hare the credit. Taylor, BTW, was a climate skeptic himself, and it eventually cost him his job in über green Oregon. They had drawn and quartered him several times over before finally finding a way to oust him, pretty much ala the CRU method: sneaky underhanded methods. Please don’t tell George I told all of you this. He’s a bit on the modest side.
What is true about the change in climate science is that they accused ACO2 (anthropogenic CO2) back in Villach in 1980, though they admitted then the attribution was still too uncertain. A second Villach conference, in 1985, was where the pressure was put on people to accept the ACO2 equals future disaster scenario.
So, where did the evidence – IN 1985 – about ACO2 come from and what was the proof that no other factors were involved? You know – in science, you can’t say that A causes B, not until you’ve eliminated C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, and L. Where was that evidence? Where were those falsifying papers that said C through L were off the hook? (C through L being things like natural variability, solar cycles,solar insolation, cosmic rays, Milankovich cycles, low level clouds, high level clouds – as well as urban heat islands and land use changes – and certainly not to overlook water vapor, which is still far, far from being understood).
In all that time C through L have not been proven to not be contributors. Why not? It wasn’t necessary. Why not? Because in 1980-1985, Hansen had concluded that ALL of the natural factors, as a combined group, were A MATHEMATICAL CONSTANT, something like Pi or Phi. And since they were a constant, the ONLY possible source of change was ACO2,
They have been going with that assumption ever since. All except the skeptics. And the reason skeptics are skeptics is that they do not accept Hansen’s assumption – that none of the others ever changes (or that their changes always exactly cancel each other out).
A more stupid scientific assumption I never heard of, but that is what they accept as Hansen’s Word from God Himself. And they are still stuck in that paradigm of Hansen’s – and refuse to consider anything else. (Why not? It funds everything they are doing. If governments didn’t have ACO2 to demonize, the IPCC wouldn’t even exist and none of these blogs would, either.)
BTW, I know those studies falsifying C through L don’t exist, because as my first entry into this issue, I went looking for them in 1998, after I saw Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick and knew he had screwed up royally, because he’d somehow (intentionally or accidentally) lost the MWP and LIA, and I wanted to know where he’d hid them. I distinctly recall asking “WTF?” when his graph showed them missing. BTW, I am still looking for those studies and can still report that they don’t exist. There are assertions that each one isn’t a forcing – but where is each study? And where is the combinatory study that puts the coup de grace on them all? If you’ve seen it, PLEASE say so, and point me to it – and I will switch sides!
So, give me a WTF and a puzzle, and I can be a bulldog. When the real truth of our climate comes out, I will know it. It has to pass my B.S-O-Meter, for one thing. So far, no luck, but with some honest research by the researchers I am still hopeful. But I am not holding my breath – maybe if the CRU people are all replaced by skeptics – as in middle grounders – some real science can start soon.
I agree with Alex Harvey. These e-mails between scientists show where the disagreements are (hurricanes, tree rings) and don’t show any questions about the basics (CO2, GHGs). The science is not all settled, and the grey area exists. Where the e-mails don’t seem to show a debate (not even a hidden one) is in the sensitivity estimates of 2-4.5 degrees per CO2 doubling. For tree rings, one well publicized criticism by Bradley, saying Mann and Jones should not have been published in GRL, is good to highlight the ongoing debate about the last 1000 years of climate. Bradley has been a co-author with Mann on previous related papers, so is very much an insider. The skeptics need to see where the debates are within the science community, so this release helps from that perspective.
It was a debate about the last 2,000 years, not the last 1,000 years.
The hockey stick controversy is illuminating, precisely because it’s a side show. It’s not part of the greenhouse theory, and it’s not really part of the claim about 20th century warming. What it was was a preemptive strike against the natural variation argument. It was an attempt to suggest that, counter to all history and common sense, that there were no decadal scale ups and downs, no MWP, and the dramatic blade of the hockey stick was a clear anthropogenic fingerprint. It was also an attempt to imply that current global average temperatures are at record levels.
This is quite aside from the mainstream science. It was just a little too convenient, and too dramatic, and attracted the attention of skeptics and auditors for no other reason that it didn’t smell right. Aside from Mann’s clique and claque, nobody really wanted to go out on a limb to defend it.
The climate sensitivity estimate was always resistant to accurate science, and in recent years (remember most of even this second release is pretty old) there have been some attempts to arrive at it through different methods, but this is all still pretty muddy. There’s a difference between muddy science and dodgy science. Climate sensitivity is muddy, the hockey stick was dodgy. Climate sensitivity is also a much more central issue, because the hockey stick was always a side show as far as scientists were concerned. It’s primary value was always as propaganda..
I am sorry but ‘Joe public’ non scientists like me read about Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ and wonder why this man is not in jail much less allowed to continue in his job. The latest email release casts further unfavourable doubts upon Mann’s professional behaviour. Billions of dollars have been directed into funding in Mann’s field partially on the back of the hockey stick. The end does not justify the means. The circumstances of Mann’s hockey stick is a clear matter of ethics (or lack thereof).
Jason, do you seriously think Michael Mann should be in jail? I’m a harsh critic of him, but I cannot think of anything he’s done which would warrant a jail sentence.
If a person is placed in a public position of trust and authority, there are serious public financial consequences, and it can be shown that those errors have been made willfully and deliberately to advance a certain agenda, then they really should spend some thoughtful time in the state pen.
It should be interesting to see what comes of the lawsuit between Mann and Tim Ball and what the opinion of the court will be.
But someone doing paleoclimatology is simply not “in a public position of trust and authority, [with] serious public financial consequences…” At most Mann is guilty of activism, which is not a crime, or we would all be in jail.
David Wojick on November 24, 2011 at 3:44 pm say: But someone doing paleoclimatology is simply not “in a public position of trust and authority, [with] serious public financial consequences…” At most Mann is guilty of activism, which is not a crime, or we would all be in jail.
Nonsense. Michael Mann perpetrated his fraudulent works as an employee of state government (first that of the Commonwealth of Virginia, more recently that of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) and with federal government funding in the form of research grants.
Dr. Mann acted as an officer of government and therefore in the public expectation of probity at standards of conduct (and prospects of punitive action) different from – and arguably superior to – those prevailing in the private sector.
Michael Man was in fact functioning “in a public position of trust and authority [with] serious public financial consequences…,” and you’d better get that firmly fixed in whatever substance deadens the echoes between your ears.
David,
So are you saying that Mann’s work had no impact whatsoever on the IPCC AR3 and AR4 reports with respect to attribution. And that the impact on his work with respect to anthropogenic attribution had no impact whatsoever on US energy policy?
If so, considering that this work was done with public money, then you could state that he’s in a public position of trust and authority.
Whether or not the Penn State inquiry results that found “there was no credible evidence Mann suppressed or falsified data, destroyed emails, information and/or data related to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, or misused privileged or confidential information.” will hold up in (strangely enough, Canadian) court remains to be seen.
There’s an interesting topic on bioethics.net Using Criminalization and Due Process to Reduce Scientific Misconduct. An except:
“The seriousness of the potential consequences of misconduct suggests the need for external sanctions. Yet current penalties for misconduct are disproportional to the harm such actions may cause. For example, during the past decade, only two criminal legal regulations have been used to prosecute misconduct. The False Statements Statute, 18. U.S.C. 1001, punishes making false statements in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States. The penalty is a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment not more than five years. The Mail Fraud Statute, 18. U.S.C. 1341, prohibits the use of mails in any attempt to defraud or obtain money or property by means of false pretenses”
Thanks Brandon
It is comments like rich’s that really force people to take their eye off the ball. Claiming Mann or Jones is guilty of fraud ALLOWS mann and jones to get away with the lessor offenses. Primarily because fraud isnt the crime
Mr. mosher, when alleged “scientists” like Dr. Mann and Prof. Jones seek and accept government funding for their “research” under deliberate and knowing misrepresentation of the facts, your “lessor offenses” maundering is bonkers.
He’s committed fraud, which is theft of value by virtue of intentional duplicity. Criminal mens rea all to hellangone over the place.
When a private sector contractor enters into a government-funded program, there are contractual as well as regulatory expectations of performance according to explicit and implicit standards of conduct. Deviation from compliance with those standards can result – and quite frequently has resulted – in both successful criminal prosecution and the levy of “civil money penalties.”
Those of us who have engaged as Medicare “health care providers” with HCFA (now CMS) are familiar with the ways in which we render ourselves liable to the federal government as the third-party payor in our professional relationships with patients who are Medicare clients.
Have you ever taken note of the perpetual noise spouted by National Socialist politicians about “Medicare fraud”? What they’re yammering about is almost entirely inadvertent failures of regulatory compliance, none of which rises to the “criminal” level, but is instead hammered by the imposition of “civil money penalties” under the usages of administrative rather than criminal law.
Not “fraud” in any real sense, meaning that “health care providers” so punished haven’t even recourse to the protections accorded a defendant in a criminal proceeding, but it is called fraud to maximize the impact on the voters.
At the very least, we’ve got the same damned thing applicable to Dr. Mann – and now for Prof. Jones, too, inasmuch as Climategate 2.0 makes public his direct fiduciary relationship with agencies of the U.S. federal government.
They’re crooks as well as liars. What possible benefit is there in weaseling about it?
If an American physician can accused by the politicians of “Medicare fraud” for using an inadvertently unjustified CPT-4 code on his billing statement, just what the hell gives you to think that Michael Mann – who gives every appearance of flagrant peculation – should be treated with a temporizing tenderness when in fact he warrants tenacious and implacable pursuit and destruction?
So Rich Matarese are all these other people guilty of fraud too?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/recon_lj_with_others.png
lolwot on November 24, 2011 at 7:12 pm idiotically posts a link to a graphic image representing the global temperature rebound from the Little Ice Age (beginning in 1700 AD) and snarks: So Rich Matarese are all these other people guilty of fraud too?”
Have you something resembling a point, putzie, or did you just screw up the URL you’d actually intended to provide?
Brandon:
You said:
“Jason, do you seriously think Michael Mann should be in jail? I’m a harsh critic of him, but I cannot think of anything he’s done which would warrant a jail sentence.”
It is a function of money spent and lost as a result of his actions and more importantly, the consequences of his actions. I believe that Mann is much worse than Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff and Enron (Enron is particularly appropriate). Certainly he has committed worse crimes than Martha Stewart. Mann’s fraud, particularly his “Nature Trick” has caused more grief and misery than anything Martha did (she did go to jail). If his crusade is successful, who knows how many will be condemned to poverty and early death. And the evidence is very VERY clear. Yes. Mike Mann should be put on trial.
John Eggert, while you may be able to argue Michael Mann’s actions were bad enough to warrant jail on some moral level, I don’t think there is any legal basis for saying Mann should be in jail. To me, that’s what matters. We can talk about what we think would be “fair,” but that doesn’t address the reality of what the laws are.
Of course, if there is actually a law Mann broke which could carry jail time, that would change my response. I just haven’t seen any evidence there is such a law.
I agree he should not be in jail. It is a sign of how twisted the field is that he suffered no professional consequences or demands for a mia culpa and that he seems to have become something of a hero to the pseudo political climate change financial backers. His suing other people for libel should subject him to some kind of sanction if he loses. In short, he is a hypocrit and a very self-righteous individual who should apologize.
Brandon,
From the amount of effort Mann is putting into avoiding compliance with legitimate inquiries from appropriate government authorities as well as FOIA information requests, we can only conclude that there are things he wants hidden for very selfish reasons.
If you reflect on his demonstrated behavior in the e-mails and in public, it would not be unreasonable to think his noble cause corruption could be part of a larger and deeper failing on his part.
hunter, I’m not sure why you would address that comment to me. I think (and have stated many times) Michael Mann has done plenty of wrong things. And by “wrong,” I don’t just mean “mistaken.” I mean things like he has intentionally sought to deceive people for selfish reasons. My opinion of him is he is completely untrustworthy and a bad scientist.
I just don’t think he has broken any laws which could land him in jail.
The Piltdown Mann is in something worse than jail. He’s trapped in eternity like a fly in amber.
=========
John Eggert, while you may be able to argue Michael Mann’s actions were bad enough to warrant jail on some moral level, I don’t think there is any legal basis for saying Mann should be in jail. To me, that’s what matters. We can talk about what we think would be “fair,” but that doesn’t address the reality of what the laws are.
What we have is “probable cause” for a search warrant. If a prosecutor ran the evidence by a grand jury, there might be enough for an indictment. But there is surely enough for a search warrant.
MattStat, if you mean that metaphorically, I definitely agree. If you mean that literally, I don’t. I’m not aware of any laws which Michael Mann has broken which would justify a search warrant/indictment.
P.E. said, “Mosh is right. David’s wrong. Go get a book on op amps. Nonlinearity can’t reverse the sign of gain. In fact, high amounts of feedback tend to linearize nonlinear systems. That’s why it’s used in audio amps. You give up gain in exchange for linearity (low harmonic distortion).
A “feedforward” amp would be all kinds of wonderfulness, but the transistor isn’t that linear.”
That is true. My question would be if the system is properly described for the feedbacks? A glacial response would not be negative, but it would be lower than the system as it is described. I’ve had an issue with that for some time. To me it is nonsense to not include the entire know range of the system. So zero as it is used for climate sensitivity is actually a reduced voltage not ground. If you are doing the op amp thing, use two power supplies, one for glacial and one for interglacial. So there is more bass than treble.
Brandon Schollenberger: I’m not aware of any laws which Michael Mann has broken which would justify a search warrant/indictment.
You don’t have to be guilty of a crime to have search warrant issued. All they need is a probable cause to think you have something that might be evidence in a criminal case.
Billions of dollars have been directed into funding in Mann’s field
Billions? really?
Yep. Billions, ” and “trillions to come.”
Thanks, Mr. adams. Couldn’t ask for a better straight man.
By itself, the USA burns nearly 3/4 billion gallons of oil per day. Largely because of the worldwide scarcity of oil, prices have risen over the last several years. Worldwide, a few trillion dollars have covered this price increase.
Conventional oil production as it currently stands is clearly not sustainable and that money is partly intended to move us toward alternatives. However much you want to claim it is due to some sort of AGW conspiracy, someone certainly has you fooled.
“Billions in the Name of “Climate”
In total, over the last 20 years, by the end of fiscal year 2009, the US government will have poured in $32 billion
for climate research—and another $36 billion for development of climate-related technologies. These are actual dollars, obtained from government reports,and not adjusted for inflation.”
There aren’t including everything. This wouldn’t include all the money spent ob ethanol. And only reason “ethanol” is justified is as green energy [it suppose to cause less emissions of CO2 [but it actually causes more] and suppose provide another source gasoline [and it costs 1/4 in fuel costs to make 1 gallon and 1 gallon of ethanol give less miles per mile- so it’s burning gasoline to make gasoline].
So ethanol doesn’t do what it promises, but without the hype of needing “greener solutions” tax payer wouldn’t spent hundreds of billions of dollar on this government corruption.
And I would guess they not including the cost of satellite for climate relate
study. Not that I oppose these satellite, just saying those aren’t included.
What seems to be included mostly the idiot stuff- the pie in sky research which will not lead anywhere. And all the fluff funded directly in this category. And I would guess just federal dollars. So lots programs have stuff related to green initivative, both in Federal and State.
The total bill is actually much higher- 10 to 100 times higher.
Yes, there have been billions spent on climate science, rightly so given its importance. “Mann’s field” which the OP referred to is only a small part of that and has received only tiny fraction of those billions.
Billions. About $2.5 billion per annum just from the US Government
As a founder of and contributor to a little-known or viewed website called ‘real climate’, Mann has appointed himself as a spokesman for the whole of climatology.
Reading between the lines of the CG2 mails, it is apparent that not everybody working with him is delighted by this development, nor by his combative and arrogant approach to the slightest criticism.
Sadly, he does not appear to have benefited at all from his early attendance at Charm School. But it may be too late to claim a refund…..
So Mann is a part of a group of scientists trying to educate and inform the public about climate science, good for him. That doesn’t make it true that billions of dollars have been spent on paleoclimatology.
As for his personal qualities, well I am in no position to judge but from what I have read of the history of science there is no particular correlation between being a good scientist and being and having an affable personality.
Sorry Andrew, Mann doesn’t so easily get the pass that you are trying to give him.
One of the main reasons that climatology has had such a firehose of money thrown at it is because of his notorious/infamous hockey stick. It is safe to guess assert that there would have been a lot less cash if he had not published that particular effort at that particular time.
It has also given him something approaching ‘guru’ status (at leas in his own mind) among those who benefit by the grants, jobs and freebies that come as a direct consequence of such funding. You may wish to recall the outrageous assertion from Pennsylvania State university that Mann produces a lot of grant income therefore his science must be above board.
I have no doubt that gullible investors left Bernie Madoff’s office saying to themselves that this guy has sharp suits and swanky premises in NYC therefore he must be the real deal. Like Penn State they failed to see the logical hoe in that argument.
And we must thank Steve McIntyre for his tireless investigation that showed Mann’s hockey stick paper to be built nothing other than a lot of wonky statistics and shedloads of wishful thinking (I am casting the most benign interpretation I can on this affair). It is interesting also to note that it took an outsider to point out the errors. The insiders who benefited so much from its existence had no interest in checking the work. Any more than the True Believers did when jesus apparently rose again from the dead. Unquestioning belief in the narrative and complete suspension of common sense or curiosity. They too are complicit in their failure as scientists to retain any shred of scepticism when faced with loads and loads of money
Latimer,
One of the main reasons that climatology has had such a firehose of money thrown at it is because of his notorious/infamous hockey stick. It is safe to guess assert that there would have been a lot less cash if he had not published that particular effort at that particular time.
Do you have any evidence to support this? Was there for example a significant increase in the amount of funding for climate science after the publication of TAR? AIUI by far the single biggest area of expenditure on climate science is satellites, and we certainly didn’t just start sending these up after the HS was published. As I have pointed out before there was sufficient certainty about the threat posed by AGW for Kyoto to be signed before the HS had even been published, it was certainly not a game change in the way to like to suggest.
You may wish to recall the outrageous assertion from Pennsylvania State university that Mann produces a lot of grant income therefore his science must be above board.
Can you provide a link to where they said this?
“Do you have any evidence to support this? Was there for example a significant increase in the amount of funding for climate science after the publication of TAR?”
I think the slogan was the science is settled.
But how much did it cost to have all those school children see Gore’s movie.
Did give the movie free including shipping costs, somehow it seems
unlikely. Maybe it was over the internet at low costs. I don’t know.
And what about various costs of the promotional brainwashing.
The ads. The glossy brochures. And all costs to bring the “good news”, changing textbooks, etc.
http://www.research.psu.edu/news/2010/michael-mann-decision
See the Final Investigation report, p16.
@andrew adams
I’ll type it out again to make it clear for all to see:
‘This level of success in proposing research, and obtaining funding to conduct it, clearly places Dr.Mann among the most respected scientists in his filed. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing research’
Simply put – he must be a top guy – he brings in loadsamoney
In the same document you can read that he must be a top guy coz he’s got lots of awards and plaques and things on his wall…But absolutely nothing about the ‘science’ that he does.
Read it – its wonderful document – revealing far more about the ways that senior academics ‘think’ to protect their turf than about Dr Mann’s machinations.
Andrew
Read this and weep.
And this is just the US.
http://jer-skepticscorner.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-much-of-your-money-wasted-on.html
Latimer,
They said the amount of funding he brought in means that “he met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing research” – I’m not sure exactly what that means but I think the point of mentioning that and whatever plaques and awards he has is to show the kind of standing he has in the scientific community. That doesn’t directly prove anything about the quality of his science but I would presume that they don’t give out these awards for nothing ot make a habit of giving out funding to scientists whose work is considered to be suspect. Anyway, Penn State and the NSF didn’t exonerate Mann because of the amount of funding he gets or because of his awards – they did so becasue the allegations of wrongdoing were unsubstantiated.
gbaikie,
I don’t know how much it cost to show AIT in schools, but I’ll bet it was not much in the overall scheme of things, and anyway surely that comes out of the education budget – it is not money spent on climate research.
jazznick
Well I certainly wept when I read this
carbon dioxide is increasing at a rate of .5% per year. Since human activity adds 3% of the carbon dioxide that gets into the air each year, the human component of the increase in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year is 3 % of .5%, or just .015%
You haven’t made any case for Mann to answer.
He’s a world-class paeloclimatologist whose work is in all the textbooks.
You and other deniers have humiliated yourself with years of damp squib attacks on Mann, precisely because his science, quite without meaning too, renders your whole anti-science crusade totally absurd.
Deniers who have attacked Mann have all lost. You’ve been at it for years. What have you accomplished? Absolutely nothing. You haven’t laid a glove on him.
Obviously deniers need to answer for the incredible mess of liars, plagiarists, and general all-around incompetents they have embraced for their “skepticism” — people like Wegman, Monckton, Watts, McIntyre and Spencer. That’s the real ethical problem in climate science, and projecting your dishonesty onto other is not getting you any close to repairing your credibility.
“Green” technology is shorthand for mitigation of both oil depletion (i.e. Peak Oil) concerns and combating AGW.
If you don’t believe that as a premise and you think Green serves only as an AGW mitigation, the situation is hopeless.
Robert, You are so wrong. McShane and Wyner in Annals of Statistics finally I think dispatched the Mann doctrine. So much so that an AR4 lead author (Tol) says that there is little statistical significance in paleoclimate proxies. See the other thread on this. Mann has lost the argument to superior rigor and to statisticians who occassionally really prove something.
P.E. you say “The hockey stick controversy is illuminating, precisely because it’s a side show. It’s not part of the greenhouse theory, and it’s not really part of the claim about 20th century warming. What it was was a preemptive strike against the natural variation argument.”.
I think it was a bit more than that. It was to cover up the fact that the climate models, based as they were on CO2, could not reproduce the MWP, LIA, etc. For the models to survive, it was necessary for the MWP and LIA not to have happened.
No. you have this 100% wrong.
Mike is 100% right. Quit trying to save your precious CO2 theory. You look dumb.
Mosher is right
The MWP, LIA being reproduced depends on forcing times sensitivity
The models could reproduce both if the forcings and sensitivity were known.
Notably with higher sensitivity it’s easier to explain very warm MWP and very cold LIA while requiring less forcing.
lolwot,
“Notably with higher sensitivity it’s easier to explain very warm MWP and very cold LIA while requiring less forcing.”
Yeah that would force them to fit better. Then realizing that the NH sensitivity is not the same as the SH which is not the same as the tropics, would provide more realistic results.
But then that would require admitting that the original estimates were wrong, because the temperature dependance of the effective radiant layer was never properly considered. Since that has a considerable impact on the emission spectrum, it could get embarrassing.
Kinda like a rock and a hard place. Now who would get thrown under the bus? You ever see the T versus T/2 spectra comparison? Pretty impressive really.
Steve, would you accept “obtaining professional and/or pecuniary advantage by deception”?
Bruce:
You said:
“Mike is 100% right. Quit trying to save your precious CO2 theory. You look dumb.”
I would advise caution in disparaging Steve Mosher. He is neutral and well versed in the arguments on both sides. If you want to get into a gunfight with Steve, don’t bring a water pistol.
For instance. If you doubt the “CO2 theory”, please explain how to properly perform the heat balance of a blast furnace. That too relies on the “CO2 theory”. If the “CO2 theory” was wrong, one would need more coal to make steel. I can design a blast furnace that will produce steel with extremely tight tolerances on the contained carbon. If the “CO2 theory” was wrong, these designs would not work. But they do. These things are not new, nor are they unique to climate. If you do not understand why a blast furnace is relevant to the climate debate, you need to git some learnin. Heat seaking missiles are also important to the debate. Do you know why?
Cheers
JE
Dallas said:
Instead of a rock and a hard place, I refer to the sensitivity problem as a “trick box” that climate skeptics have to extricate themselves from. If the sensitivity of climate changes to subtle forcing functions is high then the skeptics can always reference MWP and LIA (because some sort of feedback has to cause those temperature changes). But then they also have to admit that CO2 may have a more significant effect due to this same sensitivity, i.e. metastability and the effects of potential positive feedbacks. That is the trick box they find themselves in, and understandably, they never want to talk about this.
The climate scientists don’t think of it as a trick box. They just deal with the science and see where it leads them.
“They just deal with the science and see where it leads them.”
Good one, Web. ROFLMAO!
Oh… you were serious? Did you, perhaps, post this on the wrong thread?
Steven, it is clear that the CO2 centric version of cliamte is not working.
For Web,
Actually we are dealing with a trick box of sorts. Once you finish with the GRIP cores you will notice that NH, tropics and SH all have different responses to CO2 change due to the temperature and available energy. It is not rocket science, er.. well maybe?
You should be able to fairly easily determine that the radiant CO2 impact not adjusted for the average source temperature is simplistic. Regional data shows all this quite well. Even Mann has noted that regional impact is much greater.
If you extend your ice core analysis to alpine glaciars, you will find that the temperature variation in the tropics between Glacial and interglacial is close to .75 to 1.5 C, the Antarctic more change and the Arctic the most change. Three basic climate sensitivities. The trick box.
In the NH, the gulf stream provides the energy and the snow cover the Albedo. Land use in the NH has reduced albedo change allowing for higher CO2 radiant impact.
It is the balance that matters. Confucius was pretty observant.
lolwot
Thank you. Since many idiots ( such as Bruce ) do not understand this I will be a bit more explicit.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-6-13.html
Given current reconstructions neither the LIA nor the MWP are effective in constraining the estimate of the ECR. Simply put, they dont matter to the core arguments over sensitivity. It’s a given that increased GHGs will cause warming. Monkton, Watts, Eschenback, Spencer, Christy, Lindzen all accept that proposition. The question is how much? That depends upon the sensitivity of the climate to ANY external forcing. The LIA and the MWP have little to say about the ECR. That is why they don’t matter.
They have been turned into icons which is why people fight over them. But as far as the science goes, they don’t matter much.
Notably with higher sensitivity it’s easier to explain very warm MWP and very cold LIA while requiring less forcing.
If we were still in the 18th century the argument might hold water eg Hookes however it is well understood that the climate has never been or will be in equilibrium Ghil 2008.
The mathematical constraints in far from equilibrium systems are poorly understood and quasi periodicity is a problem of the first order.
The first non trivial problem is that systems may ” exhibit historical behaviour in a perisitant fashion without being recurrent’ Ruelle 1999.
An argument well known in the CS community is almost transitivty eg Lorenz 1968.
http://www.astr.ucl.ac.be/users/hgs/Lorenz-E_GarpPubl-10-06.pdf
Steven: I can’t understand how you can continue to say things like “It’s a given that increased GHGs will cause warming. ” Given the nonlinear feedbacks it is physically possible that doubling CO2 might actually cause cooling. Clearly you do not undersand this.
David,
There is no evidence whatsoever that nonlinear feedbacks would cause a cooling. We are talking about the system response to any positive external forcing. Ghg forcing is positive. You might well imagine otherwise, but that is your imagination. There is no evidence that Warrants your supposition.
( see epistemic warrants ). If you want to imagine things that might be the case that is fine. People write fiction all the time
Mosh is right. David’s wrong. Go get a book on op amps. Nonlinearity can’t reverse the sign of gain. In fact, high amounts of feedback tend to linearize nonlinear systems. That’s why it’s used in audio amps. You give up gain in exchange for linearity (low harmonic distortion).
A “feedforward” amp would be all kinds of wonderfulness, but the transistor isn’t that linear.
Steven: The evidence is in the math. Give me a grant and I can prove it. For example, I bet I can get the CO2 increase to increase the cloudiness enough to cause cooling. But that is just one of a dozen loops.
David,
To get a grant to prove something that is physically impossible would probably be illegal. So good luck on that.
PE, I don’t know what an op amp is, as I am a mathematician. What is the form and range of the strange attractor?
David, here’s what I’m saying. Climate feedback, in it’s most basic form, is really pretty simple. It works the same way DC feedback in an op amp circuit works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_amplifier
Look at the equations for a feedback amp, and you’ll agree that it’s pretty simple. This is what I call static feedback. When you have dynamics to consider, it gets uglier in a hurry, and you have to bring calculus and Laplace or Fourier transforms into the analysis, and you get into all the complex phase space analysis that Richard was talking about.
Now I understand that nonlinear dynamics of the sort that result in fluid turbulence are a whole different kettle of fish. But if you can show the world how you can get from feedback theory through nonlinear dynamics to a sign reversal of gain, you have a breakthrough in climate science on your hands. Seriously, if you think you can do this, do it. But all my experience with control systems tells me it can’t be done. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong.
P.E. I hope this comment ends up somewhere near where I am shooting for, but here is my take,
If the system is described properly there would be no chance of negative sensitivity. It could only vary from the minimum state up.
Climate sensitivity is based only on up by definition and the ground state is assumed to be the Holecene. The real sensitivity of climate would be from the minimum state in the glacial periods to the maximum state in the interglacial, any interglacial, not just the Holecene. So Climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling could not go below the zero or ground stated defined which is not the true ground state defined by the glacial periods.
In terms of Chaos theory, if memory serves, there are two main strange attractors, the interglacial and the glacial attractors. So David is correct that temperatures could go below the zero used to define sensitivity to CO2. They are two different animals, real – glacial and imaginary – CO2 Doubling sensitivity.
The definition of climate sensitivity and the use of control theory that assumes that there is a true zero in the Holocene has been an issue of mine for a long time. The system is not consistently defined nor are the forcings so the imaginary zero boundary for poorly defined feed backs is basically a farce as a result of a definition not a function of the system.
steven – I don’t find that a very helpful reply,as it has no supporting information or argument.
However, looking at your later comments on this part of the thread, you say “Given current reconstructions neither the LIA nor the MWP are effective in constraining the estimate of the ECR. Simply put, they dont matter to the core arguments over sensitivity. It’s a given that increased GHGs will cause warming. Monkton, Watts, Eschenback, Spencer, Christy, Lindzen all accept that proposition. The question is how much? That depends upon the sensitivity of the climate to ANY external forcing. The LIA and the MWP have little to say about the ECR. That is why they don’t matter.”.
With all due respect, that is nonsense. For a start, you can add my name to the list of people who agree that increased GHG’s will cause warming – not that it is worth much. But to my simple mind, you have a logic problem. You say that ‘how much’ depends on the sensitivity of the climate to ANY external forcing – but since you don’t know what external forcings (or internal for that matter) caused the MWP and the LIA you cannot tell what the sensitivity is. But that does not mean they (the MWP and LIA) don’t matter. They do, and the reason they matter is very simple: the climate models do not have in them any forcings that can give a MWP or LIA of the required magnitude, ie. that can match their reasonably well known actual magnitude. That means that the models are quite simply unusable for any kind of climate prediction. If we don’t know what caused the MWP and LIA then we don’t know what factors are operating on the climate now. So it’s not the MWP and LIA that ‘don’t matter’, it’s the estimate of climate sensitivity that doesn’t matter.
The diagram you gave a link to http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-6-13.html shows your problem clearly. The MWP is way below today’s part of the graph, yet there is plenty of evidence that it was warmer than today. Globally. It’s the fact that the known forcings don’t match the MWP properly that tells us that something is missing.
—–
andrew adams – you say “The problem with that [get rid of the MWP] email is there is not a shred of evidence it ever existed”
There is evidence, at 1:08 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1rj00BoItw (in text from here: http://www.epw.senate.gov/hearing_statements.cfm?id=266543)
So we do at least have a shred. We also know who the supposed email was to. There was speculation that the email was from Jonathan Overpeck.
There is some more supporting evidence for that, in the form of an email from JO indicating that he indeed did want to get rid of the MWP: http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/08/dealing-a-mortal-blow-to-the-mwp/
It would be very helpful if Dr David Deming could produce the email for all to see, thus turning the evidence into proof. For the meantime, we’ll have to be content with evidence.
Mike Jonas, did you decide that solar variations could not explain the MWP and LIA despite the solar proxy evidence that correlates with them?
Solar variation in the last 60 years cannot explain the recent warming. I would agree with that part.
Jim D – http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/24/emails/#comment-143066 – you ask “Mike Jonas, did you decide that solar variations could not explain the MWP and LIA despite the solar proxy evidence that correlates with them?
Solar variation in the last 60 years cannot explain the recent warming. I would agree with that part.”
I didn’t decide that (re MWP, LIA), but I suspect that it was decided for the computer models by limiting consideration of solar influence to irradiation only. It is probably as a consequence of this that the models are unable to match the MWP and LIA.
Regarding the recent warming : since we don’t yet know what other direct or indirect solar influences there are, and since we don’t know if they apply linearly and we don’t know if they apply conditionally and we don’t know if they have a timelag and there are lots of other things we don’t know about them because we don’t even know for sure what they are, we are not yet in a position to use them to explain anything including the recent warming.
However, since the computer models cannot match the MWP and LIA, and since as you say there is a correlation between those events and solar activity, I would suggest that it is very likely that there is something important that the models are missing wrt the sun.
Mike Jonas, if you look at the link from Steven Mosher you will see that the solar forcing does include MWP and LIA anomalies, which are obviously crude estimates, but do allow the models to follow those events. If there is a better way to do this, I am sure they would like to know, but observations in the MWP are scarce. Realistic solar variations can account for these events, however, as far as they are known, with big error bars both in temperature and forcing.
Mike Jonas,
Sorry, I only just saw your reply. So basically what we have is Demming claiming that this email existed but not able to provide a shred of evidence to back it up.
As for the mail from Overpeck you linked to, what he wants to do is stop the skeptiks from using the MWP as the basis for bogus arguments about current warming. Amen to that.
Andrew Adams – As I said, there’s evidence but not proof. Bear in mind that this was evidence given to a US Senate committee (yes, some people do tell lies there) in 2006, well before Climategate and any focus on emails, and that the alleged email “would seem to go back many years, maybe even to around the TAR [2001]” {http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=1206628118.txt – Phil Jones}. It would be nice if Dr Deming could produce the email, but (a) I haven’t seen anyone asking him to, and (b) as it was from maybe 10 years ago he may well have deleted it from his inbox.
There were some other things you could have cited to improve your case. For example, Jonathan Overpeck said “I have no memory of emailing w/ him, nor any record of doing so (I need to do an exhaustive search I guess), nor any memory of him period. I assume it is possible that I emailed w/ him long ago, and that he’s taking the quote out of context, since know I would never have said what he’s saying I would have, at least in the context he is implying. … It is bogus.“. [http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=1206628118.txt]
If Jonathan Overpeck wasn’t keen to get rid of the MWP, then his statement is curious, because surely he would have made a simpler statement and not mentioned context.
Dr Deming’s evidence was pretty explicit “He said, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”“, and it’s a bit difficult to see how context could change its meaning by much. Maybe Dr Deming misunderstood, but Jonathan Overpeck’s own colleagues thought he [JO] could be perceived to be trying to “get rid of” the MWP [http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=1121721126.txt “there are intonations in some of Peck’s previous messages that he wishes to “nail” the MWP – i.e. this could be interpreted as trying to say there was no such thing” – Keith Briffa Jul 2005]. And let’s face it, the climate scientists had in fact been trying for some time to get rid of the MWP : “In 1999, Michael Mann and his colleagues published a reconstruction of past temperature in which the MWP simply vanished.” [Dr Deming’s senate evidence].
On the evidence, I would suggest that the existence of the email as stated is probable but not proven, and it would be unwise to rely on its existence or non-existence.
steven mosher | November 25, 2011 at 5:12 pm |
“To get a grant to prove something that is physically impossible would probably be illegal. So good luck on that.”
Coming into the conversation a little late but, David is quite right. I will give you an example. Many of us who grew up before car engines were computerized can probably remember showing off trying to beat another vehicle off the mark at, e.g., a traffic light when the light turned green. To get maximum acceleration, you had to hit the sweet spot on the accelerator which would optimize the fuel-air mixture going in. If you pressed the accelerator beyond that point, the engine would bog down, and you would lose, rather than gain, power, even though you were pumping more gas into the engine.
Not saying this is happening with CO2 and the climate, merely pointing out that it is, indeed, within the realm of possibilities of general system responses.
This is a complex issue and I don’t think climate science has it figured out. Basically, we don’t know the forcings, especially solar forcings including indirect ones, we don’t understand how changes in distributions of the forcings work, and we don’t know the climate sensitivity. There may be many sensitivities depending on the forcing and its distribution. We don’t know the feedbacks with any degree of certainty. I do think that historical accounts of climate are probably some of the best sources we have. Paleoclimate through proxies is highly quesitonable and probably has little statistical significance.
However, I do disagree with Mosher. Climate science leaders did talk about “removing the Mideval Optimum” as an important goal for research and viewed it as having great importance for the “cause” because with the MO, attribution in the 20th century becomes a lot more difficult.
Mann et al became very prominant for doing so (or seeming to do so) and was richly rewarded for his dishonesty.
I also disagree with Moolton that paleoclimate is a peripheral area. It is central because of the claim that paleoclimate is the “real” evidence for high sensitivity. Moolton talks about simple energy balance with such authority. That is really just bunk. The distribution of forcing can have big effects. And then there is the issue of feedbacks which are critical to sensitivity. It’s all tied together in a very complex system that needs more rigor and more honesty in the science.
By the way Fred, I have done a lot of reading in the climate literature and I find its level of rigor to be low. The problem is that most of the data is so noisy that sophisticated statistical analysis is required and often the significance levels are low, at least when the methods are not designed to achieve a desired result as seems to have been the case with Mann. It is actually worse than medicine where most of the literature is looking at small effects that are very difficult to measure with significance.
One problem for the general public is that we are told so often that catastrophe is right around the corner, generally by people who stand to gain when money is spent to prevent the catastrophe. The emails make clear that climate science is no exception.
Well stated. But, the problem with the statistical analysis route is that standard procedures are based on standard problems, with standard assumptions of behavior built in. For example, we can ask, what is the statistical significance of a 30 year trend based on a linear-in-time model and independent measurement noise? But, what if the actual process is an approximately 60 year quasi-cyclic one? And, the measurement noise is non-stationary?
“Climate science leaders did talk about “removing the Mideval Optimum” as an important goal for research and viewed it as having great importance for the “cause” because with the MO, attribution in the 20th century becomes a lot more difficult”
Do you have any evidence that they did that?
Yea, its elsewhere on this thread or the previous one.
The problem with that email is there is not a shred of evidence it ever existed
“Yea, its elsewhere on this thread or the previous one.”
I agree with Andrew. I don’t believe there is any evidence that that happened.
David,
The peripheral field Fred’s talking about is not paleoclimate as a whole but temperature reconstructions of the past 1,000-2,000 years. These are very rarely used for climate sensitivity studies because the forcings are very uncertain and the temperature changes relatively small.
Climate sensitivity studies using paleoclimate data usually look at changes from the last glacial maximum (LGM) or glacial cycles as a whole, which mainly involves low frequency proxies such as ocean sediments and ice cores rather than the tree rings which dominate discussion in the emails.
James Annan has written a couple of interesting posts about a newly published paper on this topic here and here
Second link doesn’t seem to be playing: http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-on-schmittner.html
from David Young:
“I also disagree with Moolton that paleoclimate is a peripheral area. It is central because of the claim that paleoclimate is the “real” evidence for high sensitivity. Moolton talks about simple energy balance with such authority. That is really just bunk. The distribution of forcing can have big effects. And then there is the issue of feedbacks which are critical to sensitivity”>.
There are quite a few errors here, but I wouldn’t respond except that my name was brought into it. The “paleoclimate” error was addressed by Paul S – see his comments. Paleoclimatologic studies overall are critically important, while the Hockey Stick estimates of the past one to two thousand years are not. It seems to me that if David had some familiarity with the climate literature, he would not have made this mistake.
The comment on energy balance models also involves some misconceptions. Readers interested in their use for TCR estimates should visit the thread on “Probabilistic Estimates of Transient Climate Sensitivity”, where the topic is addressed in detail. Here, I only want to point out that one of the most valuable attributes of these approaches is that they don’t need to estimate feedbacks, because climate sensitivity is a relationship between forcing and temperature change, and if that can be estimated directly from the observational data, the need to calculate feedbacks as a way of estimating it indirectly is obviated.
Dr. Fred Moolton, by the evidence of the emails, were the writers acting in accordance with your vision of scientific ethics? Yes or no?
================
Fred, You point to a few minor points in my previous post.
In any case, the paleoclimate estimates of sensitivity vary a lot. There is apparently a new paper on this subject that claims to rule out sensitivities greater then 3K and has significant probability of 1-2K with a median estimate of 2.3K. If its correct, it’s a very important result, because it means the catastrophic consequences are very unlikely and there is a lot of time to get this right. I believe that the authors point out that sensitivity can be different for different baseline climate states too. This result is in fact rather close to the 2006 Forster and Gregory estimate (with the corrent prior).
I guess the question is whether sediment cores and ice cores are more reliable than the proxies used by Mann et al. I believe their later work did use sediment cores too. It is odd Fred, that you seem to think that we can estimate temperature and forcings 23,000 years ago but we can’t estimate them for the 20th century or for the last 2000 years. I don’t want to recapitulate previous discussions on this topic, except to say that the estimate of forcings is critical to all these things. But distributions of the forcings is not taken into account.
David – With all due respect, your errors weren’t minor, they were serious, which is why I find it hard to credit your claim of familiarity with the climate science literature. I don’t see how anyone who knows the literature would confuse the Hockey Stick with paleoclimatologic estimates of climate sensitivity.
The new paper you refer to by Schmittner et al doesn’t quite say what you are reporting from second hand sources. It does exclude ECS values much above 3 K, but its 90% lower limit is 1.4 K, similar to the 1.5 K that is often quoted. It finds 75% of its probability values to lie between 2 and 3 K, which is almost the same as IPCC AR4 WG1 Chapter 9, which also finds most estimates between 2 and 3 K, even though a median value of 3 K is often quoted. The paper uses a model of intermediate complexity, combined with a Bayesian approach, reconstructed SST data from multiple sources, pollen data to estimate LGM land surface air temperature, and a set of assumptions on prior probabilities to arrive at its estimated median of 2.3 K. The value is lower than the average in WG1 Chapter 9, but quite a few of the studies reported there cited values equally low or lower, so it was well within the range of cited studies. Adding it to the average changes the average estimate very little.
The authors were careful to point out uncertainties and possible errors in their estimate, concluding that “Our uncertainty analysis is not complete and does not explicitly consider uncertainties in radiative forcing due to ice sheet extent or different vegetation distributions. Our limited model ensemble does not scan the full parameter range, neglecting, for example, possible variations in shortwave radiation due to clouds. Non-linear cloud feedbacks in different complex models make the relation between LGM and 2×CO2 derived climate sensitivity more ambiguous than apparent in our simplified model ensemble”.
Their study is a useful contribution to the dozens of others in the literature, but has been misrepresented in some blogs and media as implying a major change in our understanding of climate responses to CO2 or other long term forcings. To me, it’s an example first of how climate data should responsibly be reported by scientists themselves, and second, why individuals wanting a rational discussion of the subject should familiarize themselves with the information first hand rather than repeating what someone else has reported.
Not to belabor the point, but all the LGM estimates reflect difficulties involving the particular application of models that are averted by some of the TCR estimates I’ve referred to above and in other threads. This is one reason why a single approach to climate sensitivity is much less reliable than multiple independent approaches.
It’s all tied together in a very complex system that needs more rigor and more honesty in the science.
I think I may have just the man for you: http://seaice.apl.washington.edu/
You have to admit, that’s one incredible name.
Fred, With all due respect, my mistake was not reading carefully enough your previous post. I apologize for mistaking your statement that I assume was about the hockey stick for a statement about paleoclimate in general.
Annan says that the interesting thing about the Schmittner paper is the lower uncertainty than in other studies. And he says that the merchants of doubt will do their best when it is cited in AR5. I’m assuming he is talking about the rest of the climate science community who want to hold open the possibility of catastrophe just as they wanted in AR3 to eliminate the Mideval climate optimum. Or is he talking about the skeptics? It appears that the skeptics aren’t attacking it yet. Your attempt to make it look like it fits within the parameters of previous work is what I expect. And that is the problem with you Fred, as a man who has invested a great deal of his life in reading the literature, you defend it and ignore inconsistencies, or the progress that comes over time from sceptical people doing independent and rigorous analysis, for example on debunking tree ring proxies and Mann’s corpus of work. Schmittner’s work has reasonable probabilities for numbers lower than 2K and that is I think something that is interesting. Science progresses through the Nic Lewis’s and Steve McIntyre’s and McShane’s of the world. That’s why I’m more interested in their work than in that of Mann or Schmidt.
In any case, you haven’t responded to the meat of my previous post concerning rigor and the level of noise in the data. The thing I find interesting here is that it does seem that whenever people with a rigorous background in statistics get involved, climate science does not seem to hold up very well. The 13 year long ordeal with Mann’s proxies is a salient example.
So, if climate sensitivity is indeed in the 1K-3K range, its not as bad as we’ve been led to believe many times including by Hansen in 1988. By the way Fred, would you have believed Hansen in 1988 just because his work was peer reviewed? I am not sure I believe Schmittner either, but it does agree with Forster and Gregory 2006 when Nic Lewis’s prior is used. And it gets a lot higher sea surface temperatures for the LGM than previous studies. So that’s interesting because it shows that there is a need for further work in this area.
I do find it interesting by the way that Dessler uses the simple energy balance models with feedbacks instead of paleoclimate to give credibility to the model sensitivity estimates.
David – You’ve scattered a number of different points into your comment. I can’t respond to all, but I’ll point out that Gregory and Forster updated and increased their climate sensitivity estimate based on later data, and also that Schmittner et al don’t cite their ECS range as 1 to 3 C. Their 90% lower bound is 1.4 C, not too dissimilar from widely cited values of 1.5 C. They do, as you point out, substantially reduce the estimated probabilities of an ECS value exceeding 3.2 C. A value of 3 C remains within their 90% range.
Is that reasonable? I don’t know. Although there have been few recent attempts similar to Schmittner et al to derive ECS estimates from LGM data using intermediate complexity models, one relevant effort is the 2010 Climate Dynamics paper by Holden et al, which is worth reading for a sense of the complexity involved in estimating relevant parameters. I’m not conversant enough with the methods to judge the relative merits of Schmittner et al as opposed to the somewhat more sophisticated Holden et al approach, although Schmittner et al’s reduced estimate of LGM cooling is difficult to reconcile with evidence for a 120 meter difference in sea level. In any case, the differing estimates between the two papers indicate that the most likely range appears not to have narrowed substantially since the 2007 AR4 Report. This is part of the “noise” you refer to.
Whether a realistic upper bound for ECS is 3.2 C or 4.5 C, I agree with you and others that the much higher “fat tail” probabilities are unrealistic, barring some abrupt tipping point scenario not derivable from climate responses to CO2 alone and its expected feedbacks. The question remains as to the consequences to be expected if the correct true value of ECS is 3 C and/or between 2 and 3 C. It looks like we will have to work with values at about this level for the foreseeable future.
I know Forster and Gregory “updated” their work. I’m just pointing out that their 2006 estimate is pretty close to Schmittner et al. In the same line of reasoning that you use, that would seem to add credibility to the lower estimates.
I’m looking at Figure 3 in the Schmittner paper and see that the sensitivities from various forcing assumptions seem reasonably symmetric about 2K with some scenarios yielding between 1 and 2. This is in some sense hair splitting because of the uncertainty involved in the forcings.
This tells me that further work is indeed needed. You know Annan I believe also says that the 20th century estimates of sensitivity are questionable because of the assumed aerosol forcings. If the forcings were lower, it would imply a lower sensitivity. I just think that given the history of this thing, lower sensitivity cannot be ruled out.
Anyway, you still didn’t respond to the main point of my original post about noisy data and lack of rigor generally nor about the fact that climate science seems to fare poorly whenever statisticians apply rigorous analysis. They are both very important points.
Finally, Fred, I would love to see you start doing some rigorous work to help us here, along the lines of the other climate auditors out there. I would but I still have a day job. The most I can do is try to relate what I see to what I know of mathematics and my experience. I also don’t want to just wade into the literature. I prefer to look to people who are honest as guides just as Muller does. Given a contest between a statistician and a climate scientist, I’d take the statistician any day.
Just to clarify one point. I meant to say, if the aerosol forcings are lower, then the temperature response to the CO2 forcing would imply a lower clilmate sensitivity from the 20th century data, possibly a much lower sensitivity.
Phrenology … climate science. Con artists.
What are three things climate deniers wish they had the skills to perform competently?
Robert
Well Phil Jones wants:
1. to learn Excel
2 not to be wrong
3 to be loved by all
P.E., you DO know that the McIntyre/McKitrick 2003 paper eviscerated Mann’s Hockey Stick, don’t you?
http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/mcintyre.mckitrick.2003.pdf
P.S. Why do you think Mann hates Steve M so much?
Steve M, the career statistics auditor showed Mann up as the rookie he was, and for a bully that is not allowed.
Jim D: Sensitivity estimates are beliefs, not measurements, and certainly not basic science, so yes they have not changed among the believers. New data is irrelevant to these fixed beliefs. But happily the science has changed a lot.
Absolutely correct, David. There is an assumption, or something, that one can estimate no-feedback climate sensitivity by ONLY looking at radiation effects. I cannot find why this is true, nor have I seen any reference that proves it to be true. And you cannot estimate total climate sensitivity without first estimating no-feedback sensitivity. There is no evidence that when you double the CO2 concentration, that there will be any significant rise in global surface temperature at all.
Jim, this kind of abstraction is the standard method of physics, going back 400 years. Solve each vector separtely, as it were. It is simply invaid in strong feedback cases.
Sorry, David, you have lost me. If it is known that all the factors interact with each other, then surely one needs to justify why it is valid to deal with them one at a time.
Jim, not if it is part of the paradigm of science itself. The paradigm does not need to be justified (this was Kuhn’s basic discovery); it is the framework that defines good science. Nonlinear dynamics is still a fringe approach to science. The standard way of doing physics is to use the simplest model then work “outward” from there, adding complexities if one can and ignoring them if one can’t.
“The standard way of doing physics is to use the simplest model then work “outward” from there, adding complexities if one can and ignoring them if one can’t.”
Like that relativity thing, you can almost always ignore that in Earth Sciences. Kinda surprising that when there are petaJoules/s moving around in temperatures from over 300C to less than -90C that it could be ignored without generating some noticeable anomalies. Oh wait, the Antarctic, I plumb forgot :)
Re the actual history of CO2 levels, have you seen the Jawaworski paper, entitled “Climate Change: Incorrect information on pre-industrial CO2”?
Read it at http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/
He argues that 19th century levels have been misrepresented as being much lower than the real numbers show. Literally, he accuses Callendar of cherry picking, giving a value of 292 ppm vs what he arrives at, 335 ppm, by leaving out higher values arbitrarily.
So, was Jawaworski himself playing loose with the data? I went to all the papers he listed, and the arguments he makes hold true. And in fact others of the time ALMOST accused Callendar of cherry picking, but backed off. But they let his papers stand, for some reason.
Jawaworski’s number – 335 ppm – looks to be much more likely, as it is based on the entire data available from the 19th century.
If we start from 335, then the rise since the 19th century isn’t 385-292 = 93 ppm, but is actually only 385-335 = 50 ppm. And what does this do to all the other “definitive” papers, based on Callendar? I don’t think Jawaworski gives a hoot. He would think they are all wrong, too, I imagine.
The surface temperature record is already inconsistent with low sensitivity. You don’t need a model to show it.
Not this again! The surface temperature record is consistent with any sensitivity, because the forcings are qualitatively and quantitatively NOT ascertained. Not even close.
Jim D
Of course “the e-mails don’t…show a debate” [on sensitivity estimates]. (Duh! Why should they?)
Of course there IS a debate [on sensitivity estimates]
And, of course, “the science [on sensitivity estimates] is NOT settled”.
Max
My impression is that many of e-mails are simply academic squabbling, but the disturbing thread that runs through them is that a small number of people have decided what the political message of the science will be and that anyone who dissents will get hammered. Taken as a whole, it is hard to see what credibility is left to the CRU/Mann team and one wonders if they should be let anywhere near the IPCC.
They reveal a blind spot of self criticism, without which any proper research work will simply descend into group-think, inflated by the delusion that the members of the group are cleverer researchers than anyone else.
I cannot imagine what PhD supervision can be like at the UEA. It is difficult to believe that it fosters “independent and critical thought”.
“a small number of people have decided what the political message of the science will be”
No what you see is that the scientists in the emails are convinced human CO2 emissions are a threat and are willing to take the flack by warning the public and politicians about it. Rather than sitting on their asses remaining silent about a threat while political think-tanks misinform the public that there is no threat at all.
“human CO2 emissions are a threat”
lolwot,
Of course they are a “threat”. If they could actually be shown to be a problem, they would be shown that way. But they’re not. So the PR machine says “threat”.
Andrew
Activism in the guise of (pseudo)science.
You, Mann, Jones, IPCC and your ilk have successfully faciliated the introduction of a carbon tax in Australia. Thanks a lot folks! Given the relevant raw numbers any competent high school student can prove beyond doubt that such ‘intervention’ in Australia cannot possibly have ANY significant impact on any climate parameters. Moreover, commonsense manifestly reveals how economically damaging this action will be for Australia – it will increase the cost of everything – energy, transport, food, manufacturing etc. Moreover, the increased costs of manufacturing will ensure that Australian jobs are exported overseas to places like China and Indonesia where the same products will be manufactured but with CO2 emissions much higher because of lower regulatory standards.
The mantra/imperative “we must do something” should immediately be met with “primum non nocere” – first do no harm.
BTW anyone who seriously thinks that “other nations will follow Australia’s lead” must have rocks in their head.
THIS is the crime which should be punished!
I think Australia should create jobs by out polluting China, so Australians could .. COUGH … GASP… enjoy a higher standard of … CHOKE … wheeezz …. living.
You post is a logical fallacy. The AGW advocates’ arguments are rife with them.
No, it’s true. Standard of living is a function of fossil fuel consumption. The more fuel you burn, the higher you live on the hog. Reduce your fuel consumption, and you will reduce your standard of living. That’s why I never bother to turn off lights.
M. Carey,
You usually don’t post such transparently stupid stuff.
China outperformed the rest of the world long before it began building new coal burning stations.
It’s not outperformance China wants or needs — it can get plenty of that just by continuing what it’s always done.
Also, Australia’s like the 23rd jurisdiction to implement similar measures. This could hardly be termed “the lead”.
It’s more middle-of-the pack.
And I wasn’t aware either the bikini-filling or dingo-poaching industries were in particular growth cycles in China or Indonesia.
lolwot,
In normal language, ‘taking the flak; is not part of lying.
Why does AGW corrupt, like a spreading cancer, language?
What I see are fear-mongers who create panic and sit by while newspapers like The Guardian say that if we don’t do something in the next 5 years, we are doomed. This is not science, and with the recent slow down in temperature increases, there is no reason for the cAGW fanatics to be pushing this version and not correcting things that show up in the popular press/main stream media. There is plenty of time to continue to study for 15 more years and narrow the error bars on all the various measurements.
RC, this might suggest an answer your question:
“Next time you release emails, please wait until AFTER thanksgiving (U.S. holiday).”
1. Happy Thanksgiving, Dr. Curry, and thank you for your blogging efforts.
2. The timing of the release is persuasive evidence IMHO that FOIA is not an American.
Regards,
MK
“JC request to the hacker: Next time you release emails, please wait until AFTER thanksgiving (U.S. holiday).”
Hey, it is something to do while my not traditional prime rib and spaghetti squash are roasting on the grill while the pumpkin pie tortillas cool :)
The lack of change thing really bothers me. So much data and so little vision.
Sorry, but it shows the science,and many of the scientists involved, stink.
Many scientists are publicly lying about the quality of their work, and they are doing so arrogantly, if not cynically.They are manipulating journalists into hyping the fear and vastly over stating the risk and certainty of their work.
And they are misleading those who control the purse stings- the big science funding institutions, the foundations, endowments, political leaders, their employers at the Universities and NASA and NOAA- in ways that just happen to get them huge funding grants.
Skeptics need to keep pounding the table and pointing out that AGW- the idea that CO2 is causing a climate catastrophe that requires huge changes prescribed by AGW promoters- is junk.
Ain’t that the Truth, Brother
“Skeptics need to keep pounding the table and pointing out that AGW- the idea that CO2 is causing a climate catastrophe that requires huge changes prescribed by AGW promoters- is junk.”
That’s a strawman. CO2 is very likely going to cause huge changes to the climate that may have catastrophic consequences. Of course both statements involve an element of liklihood, climate scientists have weighed this and concluded the threat is too big to ignore.
“CO2 is very likely going to cause huge changes to the climate that may have catastrophic consequences.”
Very likely, may… Want to put anymore wiggle words in there? Sounds more like religion than science to me.
If you think science is about nothing but definite statements you don’t have a clue about science.
Also if you think Religion uses words like “maybe” and “very likely” you don’t have a clue about religion either.
Guess I should send my PhD back then. Oh well.
Why are you so eager that someone take actions that we know will cause deaths today in order to prevent something that may happen in the future?
Why should I take you seriously? You just did the equivalent of on being told an asteroid was likely to hit the Earth and maybe it will hit a populated area and kill people, focusing on the words “likely” and “maybe” to write the whole idea of the asteroid being a threat as religion.
K Scott is right. When the scriptures were translated some words got left out.
For example, “thou shall not commit adultery” originally was “maybe thou shall not commit adultery.”
Why are you so eager that someone take actions that we know will cause deaths today…
Bulsh*t.
aa,
AGW policies and laws are hurting people today.
Deal with it.
hunter,
What policies are causing deaths as claimed by K Scott Denison
@andrew adams
Everytime a pensioner has to choose whether they can heat their house or not this winter because of the enormous fuel bills…and dies of hypothermia as a result, some part of that decision is becasuse of successive governments obsessions with f…g wind farms .. and the increase in bills we all pay because nobody in their right mind would erect such a thing without a f…g great bribe.
That’s which policies.
Latimer,
The level of excess deaths amongst the elderly during winter in the UK is a scandal and has been for many years, it’s not something that has just started happening and the numbers are much smaller than they used to be. Fuel prices have obviously gone up sharply in recent years for a number of reasons, emissions policies are only a part of it. Government policies can have an impact on the cost of various essential items, not just electricity and gas – that doesn’t necessary mean such policies wrong, but where such costs are increased it’s the responsibility of governments to protect the most vulnerable and ensure than no one is at risk because they can’t afford to feed, cloth or heat themselves.
Thanks Andrew
Gald that you admit that government policies re responsible for fuel price rises and that old people’s deaths result therefrom.
The rest of your post is just distraction from this central and essential point..
Government policies lead to old people dying of cold. In the UK. In 2011.
Or put it another way:
The government would rather their existing people die of cold now than that some potential future generations a hundred or more years away might find that sea level is a foot or so higher.
I find this to be a scandalous disgraceful and immoral position for them to take. Perhaps you don’t?
AGW researchers have to acknowledge the idea that fossil fuel depletion and the accompanying scarcity is real and does not in any way diminish their findings in any way. These all reinforce the strategy for moving gradually to other alternative or renewable forms of energy. The majority of price increases have to do with the natural finite nature of our fossil fuel resources. Get it, this is “natural” so it must be real.
I find it heinous that commenters are blaming millions of deaths on AGW research. Please consider placing some of the blame on Peak Oil, as that places the blame right back on to the consumer. We can take it, because it is all of us and there is no one left to blame.
Religion and climatology share the common requirement of Faith and Belief to be admitted into their cults.
lolwot,
Wrong as usual from one of the resident Catastrophe! Catastrophe! The End Is Near! crowd here.
A scientist is someone who follows the Scientific Method. That requires allowing independent verification of one’s work by making the raw data, computer codes, algorithms, etc., available to anyone who wants to know if the claims made are accurate. “Climate scientists” keep their data and methods secret as POLICY – they are not scientists.
Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit for years – even before Climategate – exposed this policy by the leading lights of the CAGW movement: Michael Mann and the Hockey Team, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Lonnie Thompson, and all the core IPCC “lead authors”.
The reason for the policy of secret data and methods has become clear when they are discovered (like Mann’s “CENSORED” ftp directory) or forced out (like Briffa’s Yamal data by a Royal Society publication) – the raw data is cherry picked, then massaged with phony statistical methods, or just literally turned upside down. Phrases like ‘short-centered PCA’, ‘Yamal’, and ‘Upside Down Tijlander’ are infamous among those who have dared take an honest look behind the “climate science” curtain.
Try again.
Yes, and everyone listened to Chicken Little, right? You DO know that was a children’;s tale, don’t you? Try growing up and thinking for yourself.
DO, please tell us, when is this “asteroid” going to hit? If it is a “maybe” or a “likely” – which are much higher than “once in 10,000 years” or “once in 30,000 years” – you need to be over at CosmicTusk.com and inform people of this wanderer of the skies. And do you know its NAME or designation? That would help, too.
Glad that you admit that government policies re responsible for fuel price rises and that old people’s deaths result therefrom.
No, government policies have an impact of fuel prices, they are not responsible for them – there are many other factors in play. If you want to claim a direct cause and effect you are going to have to provide some actual evidence to back it up.
Government policies lead to old people dying of cold. In the UK. In 2011.
There are a whole raft of government policies which have an effect on the welfare of pensioners, to single out one particular policy as the cause of these deaths is ridiculous. Particularly since people have been dying of cold in winter for years, long before that policy was introduced. As I pointed out, the numbers of excess deaths has been steadily coming down over the years, and they continued to do so after the introduction of this policy, and in part that is due to government policy.
The government would rather their existing people die of cold now than that some potential future generations a hundred or more years away might find that sea level is a foot or so higher.
You really think that? All I can say is that thankfully this is an entirely false dilemma.
I find this to be a scandalous disgraceful and immoral position for them to take.
I find it scandalous and immoral that people try to exploit the deaths of pensioners for their own ends and to smear their opponents.
I am reading Greg Palast’s new book, Vulture’s Picnic. It is about the heinous shenanigans the oil companies do. Part of that is, of course, to manipulate events in order to kick the price of oil up. And part of that is to make us all believe that Peak Oil is happening.
It is a VERY enlightening read.
Of course, green tree huggers, who want us all to cut our energy usage, have ALWAYS been in favor of high prices as a disincentive to use energy. Well, no wonder the oil industry partners with alternate energy folks – they look at you all as if you just fell off the truck. They LOVE it when you argue for higher prices! (Actually, I am pretty certain the oil companies put a plant or two in the green movement long ago, and can imagine that the plant was the one who suggested to the tree huggers about high prices forcing us all to stop driving.) Since about 85% of people’s driving is commuting, of course higher prices just mean we pay MORE. Thank you, tree huggers! We have no chance to drive less, and now we have less money to do ANYTHING.
We really appreciate your being dupes for the oil companies!
As to government policies raising prices, we all know the oil companies don’t have any lawyers or lobbyists. They just let governments do anything they want, right? Oil companies have NO influence whatsoever. Their political donations are out of their respect for Franklin, Washington and Jefferson and the bold democratic experiment called “America.” /snarc at the end here
SteveGinIL – my goodness you have been busy over the last hour or so. Mostly pretty good stuff, but I would advise caution over what people say about Peak Oil and a careful check of the numbers (which can be hard to find). There’s a major surge in gas production so that Peak Oil+Gas may be some way off, but I think that the oil-per-se numbers do indicate that Peak Oil is with us right now or very close. It’s all to do with how easy the oil is to produce at high rates at today’s prices. Maybe if the prices go up sharply then more oil can be produced, but the problem is that higher prices also work in the opposite direction by damping demand.
Allow me to give you an example:
http://www.gulfoilandgas.com/webpro1/MAIN/Mainnews.asp?id=9514
Zakum is the world’s fourth-largest oilfield. It has been producing since the 1960’s, and Upper Zakum holds (this from memory) something like three times as much oil as all of Texas’ past production + present reserves. Texas was producing ~1.86mbpd in 1991, yet Upper Zakum is having another $13bn invested in a very sophisticated operation to bring production up from just 500kbpd to a still-rather-paltry 750kbpd by 2015.
In other words, it isn’t enough to just look at the reserve numbers, it is also necessary to look at what production rates are possible. The simple fact is that all the cheap and easy oil has been produced. We’re now into increasingly difficult and expensive oil. It is going to be ever harder to produce oil at today’s production rate. When a massive new discovery is announced, such as Brazil’s Tupi (~8bn bbls), it sounds like the world’s problems have all been solved, but Tupi is going to be very expensive and difficult to develop, and might never be able to produce more than 200kbpd. http://www.subseaiq.com/data/Project.aspx?project_id=274&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
Then you have to consider that the new production is not a net gain, because when it eventually comes on-stream, it first has to ‘replace’ all the lost production from depleting fields. I really don’t think the world can keep producing oil at an ever-increasing rate.
“…climate scientists have weighed this…”
With, as any idiot with a moiety of marbles can see, their thumbs on the scales.
:-)
+1
Aliquot of acuity. Naw, moiety of marbles beats it all hollow.
===============
The operative word there being “idiot.”
What any or every denier idiot thinks they see is of little account to those with sense in their heads.
Anyone who uses the term “denier” as a pejorative is beneath being taken seriously.
lolwot,
Re-read your stuff and try to think a bit more.
lolwot – Now, as they pass the basket in your Church of AGW, don’t forget to drop a tenner in. And kiss your Pope’s ring, too. Would that be Pope Hansen, Jones, or Mann?
Your utter faith in their pronouncemnts is endearing, but accetping these people on faith, after reading these emails and the Climategate I emails, wow.
O! I get it. You must be refusing to actually READ them. Well, we wouldn’t want your faith to have too big a shock now, would we?
lolwot –
You DO know that this is a blog post ABOUT THE EMAILS, don’t you? If you are going to attend here, how about reading them? Don’t just come along and troll. This is for people who have informed themselves about the TOPIC AT HAND, not for you to come and spiel the party line.
And they’re funded by Big Money (World Bank and other big ones), Big Oil (BP, Shell…).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/24/world-bank-global-warming-journals-and-cru/
I wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and all my American friends.
Me too! And M. Carey, I left a response to your last comment on a previous thread (the comment at the bottom of the thread–the post where the subject of our daughters came up) if you missed it. Again, my warm and earnest best wishes for the Holidays for you and your family. And everyone else too!
mike, thank you for your response, and my best wishes to you and your family.
Thank you; and the same for you and yours.
If there is any doubt about what Harvey was saying, Mann’s email about our blog hostess’ “not helping the cause” should remove it.
What does Mann mean by “cause” though? It’s interesting people quote it but don’t spell out what they think the “cause” is. Perhaps because they don’t want to explore that as there is one very obvious innocent, even commendable, meaning of the word.
Why don’t you educate us on what the cause is… That is if you disagree that the cause is the obvious: promoting the threat of CAGW in order to drive a political agenda and to continue the funding gravy train.
I look forward to your enlightening us as to the noble purpose that is the cause.
The cause could be supporting/defending his own work/ helping him put forward his argument. All scientists are making arguments – when they publish they are publishing arguments that they hope will convince other scientists.
The phrase “the cause” is so vague that it could mean any number of innocent or malign things.
Your personal choice, the most malign option you could probably imagine, which you seem to insist is the Only True meaning, is actually rather contrived.
In fact I think many skeptics would even disagree with your “obvious” interpretation of that phrase. It’s interesting that so far you are the only skeptic I’ve seen bother to explain what they think “the cause” is.
Dare I say you seem to have simply interpreted the phrase in a way that fits a conspiracy theory which you want to believe? Much like moon landing conspirators would take a vague quote by an astronaut as evidence the moon landings were faked rather than considering the less-exciting alternatives?
Thanks for perhaps revealing the truth behind climategate though.
I think Jim D has it right.
(copy paste from http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4740)
Skeptics don’t tend to use the term “the cause” because they don’t actually believe what they are all saying has any coherent message which could be called a cause, and that is quite telling. I think it is a term that only comes out of confidence in your own viewpoint being part of a consensus..
So would you say that the only good options are quasi-religious? The only moral position is to “believe in the cause?”
Yes, some people believe in science, but only because it is full of well tested theories and consistency with observations.
I am a skeptic. I wear that as a badge of pride. I’m a “show me” kind of person. But I have a huge sympathy with Harvey’s position as outlined in this piece. My first love is science and the it is the damage that climate science is doing to science that I find most distressing.
Instead of doing the scientific thing and saying, in public: “WE JUST DON”T KNOW YET!”, the AGW community have tethered themselves to a dogmatic quasi-religious position. They have bet the farm, and become activists for a political position. And when it unravels (as science teaches it always does) where will science be left?
Having run up a bill of trillions of dollars that didn’t need to be spent, and having destroyed the lives of the poor and the careers and reputations of those who dared disagree.
And who will believe you when you have cried ‘Wolf!’?
John, seems like you are doing a little wolf crying yourself.
“WE JUST DON”T KNOW YET!” just isn’t true. We don’t need to know things 100% to consider them and make decisions based on them.
If there was an asteroid heading towards Earth and scientists could only tell us there was a 5% chance it would hit the Earth in 10 years time we wouldn’t interpret that as “WE JUST DON’T KNOW YET” and use that as an excuse ignore it.
Yes, by all means we should immediately impoverish the entire world in an effort to build a huge rocket to push the earth put of the way. That is clearly what we should do.
This is akin to saying that because there is a 5% chance for a major earthquake in San Francisco we should move the entire city to Iowa.
K Scott, I don’t know aout you, but if I thought there was a 5% chance of a major earthquake in San Francisco I would leave it.
The chance of a major earthquake in San Francisco is near 100% given sufficient time. It’s an interesting illustration of how bad people are at judging how to react to this kind of threat; high impact events that will strike at an unknown time in the future.
Another classic illustration is the threat of a major metorite impact – very low probability, extremely high chance of killing you if it happens. In comparison to the risk, the cost of mitigation – perhaps 10 to 20 billion dollars a year for the world for good detection systems and asteroid-steering rockets – is trivial, but we still won’t do it.
Likewise, on a worldwide scale the R&D required to get 4th generation nuclear reactors made into a commodity would have been lost in the noise if started when the threat of global warming became apparent 25 years ago; this being the only realistic way of slashing emissions without noticeable economic impacts.
We have to accept that people are capable of living in denial about this kind of threat even when (as in the case of Earthquakes) they have happened in living memory – there are people who will disregard building codes in earthquake zones. This is where governments have to act.
So what’s your argument for this doomsday scenario?
No one has produced any evidence that cutting greenhouse gas emissions would “immediately impoverish the entire world.”
Please provide the extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary claim.
Robert
“Cutting greenhouse gases” will not immediately impoverish the whole world, anymore than World War III would (neither would be very beneficial, but that’s another story).
But, in its most likely incarnation it will also not result in a perceptible change of our planet’s climate.
In fact, there have been no specific actionable proposals, which would make any real difference.
Those specific proposals, which have been made, would cost around $1 trillion today for 0.05°C theoretical reduction in global warming by 2100. These are obviously hare-brained schemes.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6112/6208819043_0931707315_b.jpg
If you can name any specific actionable proposals that can be shown to have a reasonable cost/benefit impact, please do so. I am not aware of any.
Max
These are obviously hare-brained schemes.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6112/6208819043_0931707315_b.jpg
Actually Hansen not bad plan though shouldn’t cost 1.5 trillion.
What govt could do is allow more nuclear plants.
Next govt could design nuclear powerplant which could adopted
and used and if so require least amount paperwork and environmental
impact stuff. And allow nuclear plants to be build faster and at lower costs.
Next do something about storing nuclear waste. Give a target for how much this should cost. Then open bids to see if other ways can lower these projected cost. Also establish means of decommision nuclear plants which lowest costs. Try get new nuclear reactor built to where oldest current reactors are- to increase safety and use better technology.
All the above should not cost very much- say less than 10 billion.
Focus new nuclear plants to replace older coal plants plus coal plants least efficient and profitable should a priority. So coal electrical plant needed to ship coal furthest and higher shipping cost would an element in what meant by least efficient.
After making such selection nd rating them, provide bonus [tax credits] for companies to select these areas. But not overboard- at most that value should be at most 1 cent per kWh.
So what else needs to be done?
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
– Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
– Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
“Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send out entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced – a catastrophe of our own making.”
– Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth
“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced – a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
– UN Agenda 21
“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing oureconomic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
– Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
– Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
Jane Fischer (@readnthink90) on November 25, 2011 at 11:55 pm provides a selection of “Liberal” fascist authoritarian humanity-hating quotations about the real nature of our international rat-bastid green-on-the-outside-and-red-to-the-core Watermelons which I have happily archived and intend explicitly to source.
How might we categorize such a collation on Wikiquotes if los warmistas infesting the site couldn’t be counted upon to obliterate it instantly?
Jane,
Thanks for the quotes. They are a timely reminder of the underlying lethality of the greenshirt zeitgeist and an insight, perhaps, into the mysterious “cause” that Mann seems to serve. And a timely reminder, as well, of the deadly seriousness of the Big-Green intrigues. Again, thanks.
In your analogy you have made a basic error.
You have assumed that an asteroid actually exists and are screaming at people to do something expensive and pointless about it anyway.
Que ?
Judith, you write “JC request to the hacker: ”
PLEASE, Judith, dont use this word “hacker”. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the emails were hacked. For this to happen, two entirely different skills are required. You need the skill to break passwords, etc; and you need the skill to know which of the emails are most incriminating. I doubt anyone, or any team, has both skills.
There are really two likely explanations as to what happened. Either some people at CRU collected the most incriminating emails, in order to hide them from FOI, and left this file unguarded. With the release of Climategate 2.0, this strilkes me as unlikely. I feel it is far more likely that a disgruntled insider, who had all the passwords, and knew where to look, collected a series of incriminating files; like the Watergate “Deep Throat”. One file was released before Copenhagen; now a second one before Durban. This seems to be quite deliberate. There appears to be at least Climategate 3.0 ready to be released, whenever whoever holds the password decides to do so.
As a second point, I would hope that you, Judith, would lead a process to try and get all those who supported the Team, and who kept quiet about all the science that has been misrepresented during this whole debacle that is CAGW, to come clean, and explain WHY they kept quiet, when they knew violence was being done to the scientific method. That to me, is the greatest “crime” that Climategate 2.0 reveals.
Violence to the scientific method, but the correct results.
So we need more violence to the scientific method.
Indeed.
Effective research is often like watching someone making sausage. The process is kind of gross and disgusting, but the results are very often tasty.
Huh?
OK, so you haven’t seen this famous quotation before.
Context:
Science is often considered the same way, and why I think the email controversy is a shrug.
Once you’ve done violence to the scientific method, how do you know the results are correct?
The scientific method tells you. The point is science isn’t as well organized as people may think. When Einstein was asked how he went about his work, he said he “groped.” I hope that’s the right word.
So, if the Scientific Method doesn’t say what you want it to, you torture it until it does?
As my civil liberties attorney friend is wont to admonish, the problem with torture is that it forces the subject not only to sing, but also to compose.
John B,
What climate science as a whole is doing has little in common with science. You have your concern exactly backwards.
This password-protected “Climategate 3.0” file seems to indicate that they want to look like they are blackmailing someone. Is that the general impression here? This is somewhat like the whole Wikileaks approach.
Hardly “blackmailing,” Jim D. It looks much more as if the “FOIA” people had packed the FOIA2011.zip archive with that encrypted file in order to put into irrevocable public circulation proof that the information contained therein is antecedent to whatever damage control waffling might be undertaken by the C.R.U. correspondents and their co-conspirators in the next few months.
It can be expected that the AGW fraudsters will try to lie their way out of the embarrassingly damaging revelations of their defalcations revealed in the open portions of FOIA2011.zip download.
Once they’ve stuck themselves well and truly into the meatgrinder, along will come the contents of all.7z to flip the switch.
In the words of Robert A. Heinlein: “Whee! Blood all over the bulkheads!”
Could be, but it also makes sense that after a second release, the leaker just wanted to preserve the information against a total digital shredding of all records. Releasing it to procreate in a locked box in the wilds of the internet is a way to do this.
This seems far more likely to me. The person releasing these e-mails could reasonably worry about being “caught,” and that if caught, he might not be able to decide to release the rest of the e-mails (as his computers and such could be confiscated). This could be a way of addressing such concerns. As it stands, he could just tell people a password,* and they’d have access to all the e-mails.
*The encryption key used is quite lengthy, but it could be generated through an algorithm which takes a short string as input.
There is another possibility worth considering. The person who released the e-mails may have released the archive this way simply so he doesn’t have to keep it anymore. He could delete all copies he has of it now since all he need to get full access is the password he already knows. This could make it much harder for him to be caught, much less prosecuted.
Probably all of the above to some degree, plus the fact that 200,000 e-mails would be too many for the blogosphere to mine effectively in one release.
Jim D,
Blackmail?
That Australia twit at wikileaks was flagrantly making threats regarding encrypted files.
Where are the threats, the demands? All that has been asked is for climate scientists to tell the truth and be open.
With a few notable exceptions, this has not happened.
I think Rich’s explanation is much more reasonable: Get the data out in the hands of its owners: the people who paid for these government workers to work in good faith and have been so far cheated.
I have hopes as to what is in climategate 3.0, but I will suspend them in favor of patience.
hunter hacker hugger
I like it.
M. Carey,
You are not making yourself look more clever.
You use “hacker” like it is a bad thing. It is in golf, but it is an art form in computers these days. Big Brother’s nemesis may not be all bad.
For the umpteenth time. I want all the critics of “stealing” the emails to go on record as opposing Wikileaks.
I never developed an opinion of wikileaks, it just reinforced my opinion of security issues. I did change my passwords to something a little more difficult to remember :)
/raises hand/
I oppose the release of the WIkileak information and support the prosecution of those responsible.
/lowers hand/
Maybe as a gesture of good faith, you should tell us if, as a climate denier, you are ready to go on record supporting the anti-evolution movement, holocaust deniers, and anti-vaccine campaigners.
That’s very odd. I thought anti-vaccine campaigners were misanthropic eco-mentalists like you. No? Oh well – perhaps you can set me right on my misunderstanding of something else that slithered out from your ‘blog’. The one where you say that scientists tell us 2 degrees of warming will be ‘disastrous’. I only ask because you have clearly stated here that CAGW is a ‘denier strawman’ argument.
Does that mean you are a denier? A strawman? A disaster?
Perhaps my confusion also stems from Professor Richard Betts surveying the field he knows well and saying –
‘Most climate scientists do not subscribe to the 2 degrees “Dangerous Climate Change” meme (I know I don’t)’
And while we are tying everything up nicely so that it makes sense for everybody we can add this –
‘only an idiot would suggest that a 2 degree rise in temperature would be “disastrous” for humanity’
Because when we put it together, we can discern the reason for the title of your ‘blog’ – the idiot tracker; presumably you are searching out those idiots (like yourself) that have frightened themselves into a doomsday mentality and have started to misrepresent a whole field of science as a way of ‘denying’ reality. I think we therefore have to think of you as a science denier (as well as an idiot).
I wouldn’t indulge Robert. He is a pseudo-intellectual moron who has nothing better to do with his time than make distasteful, cretinous comments on this blog.
Visit his blog, “The Idiot Tracker” and you you will see the spread of psychopathology on the Internet.
Which of course it is. Can you provide a list of scientists who advocate a theory called “CAGW”?
Go ahead and find the links (to scientists proposing/defending “CAGW”).
If you can’t do that, there you go.
Yes, stealing isn’t such a bad thing, comparatively speaking. There’s murder, which probably everyone agrees is worse.
Thieves are just shy lonely people who prefer anonymity, but need love. Make friends with a thief, and invite him into your home for Christmas.
Without referring directly to climategate and setting it aside for one moment, so I guess you were against all of those whistleblowers who blew the lid off of this or that agency malfeasance before they actually had laws protecting whistleblowers? Because you couldn’t possibly support anyone “stealing” information and making it public in order to serve the public good because the “theft” is a far worse crime than the underlying malfeasance. Or am I misinterpreting your position? Now back to climategate, I don’t think that anyone can claim that the release of this information was not to serve the public good. Setting aside any judgment of the actions of these scientists, it is surely clear to all that placing the emails, the documents, the code etc into the public domain has had the beneficial effect of making these scientists, green groups and the UN IPCC much more accountable for their claims. They are no longer able or as easily able to engage in covert propaganda. They are now under intense scrutiny. Entire books are being written and studies being made and also investigations occurring. This is all good, if you believe in open society, liberty and democratic institutions. But in your worldview, theft of information is far worse?
Stealing e-mail is against the law. That’s why the police are looking for the thief. The thief knows stealing e-mail is against the law. That’s why he is hiding.
Based on the contents of the stolen e-mails, some of those who wrote the mails are accused of criminal behavior and/or unethical practices, but they aren’t hiding, and the police aren’t looking for them.
Extreme foes of the e-mail writers are maligning them on blogs and in the press, saying they are guilty of fraud and should be in jail. Moderate foes say they are guilty only of unethical practices.
Official investigations have cleared the e-mail writers of wrong doing, with the exception of one who may have violated FOI law, but was not charged because the statue of limitations expired.
Not surprisingly, the foes of the e-mail writers protest the findings of the official investigations, calling them whitewashes, and implying all the investigators are dishonest.
The foes of the e-mail writers, particularly those alleging criminal acts, may be overplaying their hand, similar to the way the GOP did in their attack on Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky scandal. Clinton left office with the highest presidential approval rating since JFK, probably in no small part because the public was appalled at his foes’ attempts to vilify him.
Actually M Carey, the crime is unauthorized access to a computer system.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/contents
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/1
The question of course comes up if the person actually had authorization to use the system.
In which case this would be interesting
http://www.roydens.co.uk/content40.htm
“Qualifying disclosures” under the whistleblowing legislation are those which show one or more of the following –
a criminal offence;
the breach of a legal obligation;
a miscarriage of justice;
a danger to the health or safety of any individual;
damage to the environment; or
deliberate covering up of information tending to show any of the above five matters.
Now you could make a case for “the breach of a legal obligation” re the FoI requests, but that would only apply to a small proportion of the emails. Most would not fall under those categories and would therefore not be covered by the legislation.
Which then raises the question – I have authorised access to my employer’s computer system, but does that mean I can legally make public internal emails without my employer’s consent? I don’t know, but I would certainly guess not, and any email I send have the following disclaimer automatically added –
“This e-mail is confidential and is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed. It may be privileged and should not be read, copied or used by anyone other than the intended recipient. If you are not that person, you are not permitted to make use of the information and you are requested to notify the sender immediately that you have received it and then destroy the copy in your possession without disclosing its contents to any person.”
These were e-mails that should be available under FOIA.
I was for the Wikileaks and these e-mails being released, even though my politics are a bit different than the Wikileak guy.
And this triple slander of trivializing the Holocaust by use of the term denier and then implying that people who want proof with all sources of error considered are anti-evolution, anti-vaccine, etc. is asinine.
In fact, it is the cAGW folks who are underestimating the power of evolution when they decide that bacteria, animals, plants, etc. can not adapt to a few degrees of temp. change over 100 years.
I agree Jim, eventually “truth will out.”
I could not figure out why world leaders endorsed the AGW fable until I read the 1962 message that probably convinced them they would die if they did not find a way to unite nations and end the threat world wars:
http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/x2jfk.html
That seems to be the seed that convinced world leaders of the need to start manipulating scientific information.
You dont need skill to select the mails.
he uses a keyword search to select mails that are on CA topics.
That is clear if you read the mails. For example, there are many housekeeping mails(out of office reply).
Furthermore he has no skill. It’s obvious from some of the emails he quoted in the first batch that we are talking about an external hacker, not an insider at UEA. He or she has insufficient knowledge of the science to be an insider. This is obvious from some of the emails tht were quoted where an insider would instantly recognize the wording was describing something mundane and innocent.
The hacker also has form at omitting parts of the emails that contradict the agenda (or as “skeptics” would say: deleting parts of the emails)
There is no reason to believe the person who compiled, packaged, and distributed the mails is the same person who gathered them from what ever source held them.
And no special skills are required any longer to crack into systems. The greater difficulty is in crawling the cracked environment to find low hanging fruit without tripping alarms. As a person in the IT business my personal view (worth every cent you pay for it) is this was an inside job. It is infinitely easier that way and hence more probably to occur.
An insider who won’t reveal his identity because:
1. He wants Phil Jones to like him ?
2. He’s afraid Phil Jones will kick his butt ?
3. He’s afraid UEA will fire him ?
4. He’s afraid prospective employers won’t trust him?
5. He’s afraid he will go to jail?
6. All of the above.
lolwot,
Did you make that up on your own, or did someone tell you this load os bs?
Your definition of an “insider” is far too narrow. If you worked in any kind of large educational research institution you would know that even a cleaner (or someone that looks like a cleaner) could gain access to any number of servers and systems that lie around inside of the target institution. A cleaner certainly won’t know about the science but certainly is an “insider”.
Thank you for your essay and abstractions, Dr. Curry, particularly for the bit you drew from , Alexander Harvey on collide-a-scape, where he observes of the Climategate 2.0 (FOIA2011.zip) release:
Hm. What Mr. Harvey calls “the science community” is more properly characterized as the rent-seeking, government-funded catastrophist cabal dedicated to the concerted campaign of suppressio veri, suggestio falsi that’s been evident to those of us on the properly skeptical side of this roiling hoax for more than three decades now.
The reason why the high priests of “Climatology” had “left largely publically undefended” that “unspoken middle ground,” of course, is that they were functioning not as real, honest scientists but rather as purely political advocates hideously corrupted by their desire to panic the public with one of Mencken’s “endless series of hobgoblins,” the most shameful act of deliberate duplicity in the history of any discipline.
They’ve traded their white lab coats for sets of orange prison jumpsuits, and whether they’re indicted, convicted, and incarcerated or not, they’ve earned themselves the hatred of every honest human being forevermore.
I’d been interested to note specific – and disparaging – mention of your name, Dr. Curry, in the exchanges of the C.R.U. correspondents exposed in this recent further exposure of the borborygmi within the belly of the beastliness we know as the AGW fraud.
Inasmuch as your personal ears must be a-burning therefrom, what’s your reaction to how your “colleagues” (if they’re entitled to that courtesy) had been slandering you?
Well the interesting thing is those comments were written years ago (in 2005 i think), before I spoke up critically in reaction to climategate, criticizing the IPCC etc. I think those comments were even written before I invited Steve McIntyre to give a seminar at GT. I think the comments were motivated by my service (and comments) on the review committee of the CCSP synthesis and assessment report on tropospheric temperature trends. Not sure when the review committee met (before or after the infamous Webster article, probably after).
I’m guessing their comments now would be much less polite.
I suspect that the members of “The Team” had identified you then – in 2005 – as a scrupulously honest, intellectually rigorous, impeccably credentialed researcher and writer on the subject of the global climate and therefore a profoundly dangerous threat to their concerted fraud.
Consider yourself Leon Trotsky to Dr. Mann’s Mikhail Frunze, and beware of visitors bearing ice axes.
What a load of hooey! Were you blushing for shame when you wrote this sycophantic crap?
And to what extent, Holly Stick, has Dr. Curry not proven herself to be a “scrupulously honest, intellectually rigorous, impeccably credentialed researcher and writer on the subject of the global climate“?
PPR or engrave your “sycophantic” in 84-point letters on galvanized sheet steel, fold it until it’s all spikes and corners, and shove it retrograde up your distalmost alimentary sphincter.
Holly Stick,
Please sell your swill at someplace whose customers enjoy your used cow food.
Rich,
You are of course welcome to amuse us with your delusional syncophantic crap, but can the threats. Now that a climate denier has overcome their natural cowardice and murdered dozens of kids attending summer camp, the time you could threaten to rape children or lynch scientists or stab someone in the anus is, unfortunately, over. Because decent people know what you are and are not going to tolerate it.
Even if Rich was being sycophantic, why do you react so stridently against it? It doesn’t help the discussion much. I agree with Rich though; Dr Curry has demonstrated a commitment and loyalty to scientific rigor that others could and ought to emulate. I think that if we were to get a look inside Dr Curry’s mailbox what we would see would be in stark contrast to Dr Jones et al.
Robert on November 25, 2011 at 11:35 am demonstrates his utterly perverted desire “to rape children or lynch scientists or stab someone in the anus” (jeez, I just suggested to this Holly Stick schmuck that he shove his “sycophantic” horsepuckey briskly up his own tochus, which – who knows? – might just give Holly Stick the kind of thrill such coprophagous critters seem paraphilicly to pound their pudlets over).
You really are a friggin’ “Liberal” fascist rabid threat to people all around you, ain’tcha, Robert?
It’s to address the threats posed by people like Robert that we have the Second Amendment and the increasing popular regard for Vermont carry.
Myself, I would prefer more climate science and less biological sciences.
Even Tony and Gavin would moderate this.
Regarding the alleged Kissinger quote, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_Law
Regarding ‘climate science’, I prefer Yeats:
“The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
… although I would change ‘best’ to ‘good’, because there are a few heroes who do not submit to the bullying.
“I prefer Yeats.” Yea and verily.
Yea and ts, surely.
I too prefer Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
“while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
There’s plenty of passionate intensity here.
There is no lack of conviction in that statement.
from: Phil Jones
subject: Re: This and that – and CCSP
to: Tom Wigley
Tom,
In Asheville this week but now back. Had a brief work with Tom K. on the VTT
work. So he got a summary like you. I’m not supposed to be talking to anyone
of your group except through Tom K. I’ve just got comments on your exec summ
from Dennis Hartmann. I’ll go through these this weekend. I think I’ve effectively
signed off on Chapters 3 and 5.
You’ll likely have to rewrite the summary to pick up the bullet points from the
other 6 chapters. Hopefully you’ll get comments before May 1. We have to finish
by April 1 (there is a conf call on the 18th), which will hopefully be it for me.
At the moment the NRC person is having difficulty with my following comment –
There is an issue related to land-use/land-cover (LULC) changes that
>could be addressed here or maybe elsewhere in other chapters. This is
>that in the modeling discussion (in Chapters 5 and 6) LULC is considered
>to be a forcing that is in some models and not incorporated in others as
>the forcing and its history is uncertain. If it is a forcing (and we
>think it is), then we should not be worrying that it influences the
>surface or tropospheric temperature record. If it is a forcing then it
>needs to be in the data in the order that it might be found. You can’t
>have it both ways – the data are affected by it, so they are somehow
>wrong, yet it is omitted from many models.”
I do need to work on the English a little, but it should be understandable.
Tom K is also very fed up with Pielke !
Cheers
Phil
PS Have you been getting postcards from Thomson publishing (?) about
essential science indicators. I have 3, for 3 papers saying they’ve been
heavily cited. The 3 are fromREDACTEDand have been cited 57, 68 and 41 times !
3 articles in the top 1% of the field.
Articles are the one with Anders Moberg in 2003, one in Science on the last millennium
in 2001 and the one on error estimates from 1997.
At 23:46 10/03/2005, you wrote:
THanx Phil. Some comments in caps ….
Tom
===========
Phil Jones wrote:
BEN WAS REALLY PISSED OFF WITH ROGER — AS WAS TOM
KARL I GUESS (NOT YET TALKED TO HIM). ALL OF HIS POINTS
CAN BE SHOT DOWN, BUT IT IS A PAIN NONE THE LESS.
APPARENLTY JUDY CURRY EXPOSED HER INFERIORITY COMPLEX
(ANS HER INFERIORITY).
Tom,
REDACTEDOff tomorrow and not back in CRU till March 10. I’m not supposed to
talk to anyone of the report authors ! There was a lot of odd things
said after the presentations in Chicago last week. We’re charged with
writing a report, which will be published, but you get to rewrite the report
and no-one sees the one we looked at ! What is the point of publishing it !
REDACTEDRoger Pielke didn’t come out of it too well. Some thought he had some
good ideas but didn’t express them very well. Most thought he just didn’t
express them very well. All thought Ben’s was the best chapter. Almost
all think RSS is right. Also why is Fu et al. dismissed as controversial?
A VERY GOOD POINT TO STRESS. THIS IS CHRISTY’S WORDING.
Likely most work will be needed on Ch 6 and 1, then 2-4 and least for 5.
The Exec Summary was deemed OK, but it isn’t a summary of the report,
ACTUALLY, IT IS. ALL ITEMS *ARE* IN THE CHAPTERS — BUT ONLY
THOSE DEEMED MOST IMPORTANT (BY ALL EXCEPT ROGER!!)
MAYBE I WILL HAVE TO DO ANOTHER (SIDE) VERSION THAT CITES THE
SOURCES BY CHAPTER AND LINE NUMBER.
so you’ll have to do some major reworking.
REDACTEDRemember I didn’t tell you all this. Lots of details to come – not sure when.
Seems a long-winded process.
COMMENTS DUE BY MAY 1, THEN WE HAVE 2 WEEKS TO MODIFY/RESPOND.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit TelephoneREDACTED3 592090
School of Environmental Sciences FaxREDACTED3 507784
University of East Anglia
NorwichREDACTEDREDACTED Email REDACTED
NR4 7TJ
UK
REDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTED
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit TelephoneREDACTED3 592090
School of Environmental Sciences FaxREDACTED3 507784
University of East Anglia
NorwichREDACTEDREDACTED Email REDACTED
NR4 7TJ
UK
Looks like are Host is not that popular at CRU . A plus point for her I think!!
Interesting that this comment was made years ago when I was 95% “toeing the party line.”
I think it may be a typo, he may have meant superiority because of your ability to master trend plotting with Excel !!
So, Phil Jones treats intellectual disagreement (or maybe just less than fervent applause) as a symptom of clinical pathology? What other famous persons have done the same? What famous ideology has done the same and does the same?
Oh, by the way, these questions are not rhetorical. Those of you who wish to have a career in academia must learn very early to spot people like Jones. You will find that when you converse with them that they are taking notes and they will share their opinions with important people in the hope of convincing them that you suffer from a clinical pathology. Beware.
Any idea what NRC report they are working on? Might be interesting to revisit it.
Judging by the dates it’s this report: http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/default.htm
Judith,
You should read what one email correspondent said about Trenberth… though seeing your recent presentation, maybe you’d agree with them ;)
How many “scientists” are in the “Team” (of Mann, Trenberth, Hansen, Phil Jones) ? 20 ? 50 ?
We must search our souls and reflect on the question of how could such a small number of people do so much harm to science and the scientific method, and to society in general? How could they fool so many people into accepting their exaggerations, and collaborating in their “cause”?
Why did other scientists (except a handful) keep quiet ?
Why did it take a whistleblower (or hacker) to expose these proceedings?
Is that the way normal (or post-normal) science is done? Or is supposed to be done?
There are several teams, as it were. A good co-author network analysis should reveal them.
I’ve long made use of Web-capable reference management software (RefMan, EndNote, etc.) for securing and managing citations listed in the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE database. These software packages employ Internet connectivity to PubMed for this purpose.
I’ve often used PubMed access – both with and without the intermediary of such reference management software – to run “co-author network analysis” tasks.
Are there similar freely accessible online databases into which EndNote or RefMan can connect that will facilitate such analyses of publications in climatology and allied disciplines?
David, the Wegman report includes a co-author network analysis…
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/07142006_wegman_report.pdf
See section 5 beginning on p. 38.
Yes I know, a good start but small.
Did George Mason University complete it’s investigation of Wegman for plagiarism? I haven’t heard anything about it in quite a while.
How predictable.
“Why did other scientists (except a handful) keep quiet ?”
I suspect Dr. Curry (insider) knows the answer to this question.
And I suspect Dr. Curry isn’t going to tell us.
Andrew
Mortgages and bills Andrew!!
Sir Thomas More: “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?”
Andrew
And the More I think about it, the More it bothers me that an insider is teaching an ethics class. I see the blind lead the blind.
Andrew
Jacob,
Excellent question. You have summed up an important aspect of this debacle very well.
Some of my sentiments resemble those expressed by Richard Saumarez and Jim D. The new revelations remind us of the academic squabbling, pettiness, and biases that pervade many areas of science, and the existence of a siege mentality among some of the top echelons that works to paper over differences and uncertainties. Like Judith Curry, I also believe the revelations will have little impact on MSM reporting, and so I expect little influence on public opinion or climate policy.
At the same time, I’m troubled by what I see as a misconception underlying much blogosphere commentary here and elsewhere (particularly elsewhere) – a tendency to confuse the IPCC with climate science, and to impute sins of the former to the latter. As Jim D reminds us, there are gradations in the uncertainty within the science itself, ranging from a near certainty (never absolute but very substantial) about the basic strength of greenhouse gas warming potency within a range of estimates derived from multiple sources (not all dependent on GCMs), to a much less sure sense of how this will play out in terms of secondary consequences – for example, how hurricanes or regional flooding will behave. These conclusions can be derived from the thousands of reports in the literature and do not require a dependence on IPCC synthesis of the data. Equally important, though, uncertainty, even if belittled in some public comments by IPCC defenders, is clearly apparent in the literature itself, and so I don’t see the implication that it has been neglected as supportable.
What I state is a personal judgment. While others may disagree, I don’t think the disagreement would be well-informed unless expressed by individuals who are themselves familiar with the climate science literature first hand by reading it rather than second hand from what others are claiming.
Finally, although the use of the email revelations as a political weapon is unfortunate, I do hope the revelations will have a chastening effect on individuals such as Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and some of their colleagues, whose inflated sense of importance and entitlement led to the transgressions that have surfaced.
However, in the spirit of good will and redemption, I wish them and everyone else a Happy Thanksgiving.
Fred hits a point that I wanted to add to. The intersection of politics and science via the IPCC has led to some trying to put more certainty into public statements than they could in a scientific journal (on both sides), and some feel that without more certainty politicians won’t listen. This is an added distorting force that doesn’t exist in purely scientific debates (e.g. in fields of science with no political intersection), but this is the context that drives some scientists who are more involved with IPCC to push for certainty more than they otherwise would have.
But is getting politicians’ attention really the mission of a scientist? It’s not as if there aren’t scads of activists willing and able to carry the message from the scientists to the politicians. Why should the scientists themselves involve themselves?
There’s evidence in the emails that it often works the other way; emails showing NGOs and UN agencies advising scientists on what should or shouldn’t be said in the IPCC reports. This isn’t just subtle corruption, it’s outright interference.
Which brings up one of the strangest things of all about the IPCC; why is the SPM released months before the “science”? Doesn’t that seem a bit odd to have a trial where the judge pronounces the verdict before he hears the evidence?
I think that the success of the Montreal Protocol about CFCs and ozone was to be the model. This hasn’t worked out, but I think they tried the same process with the hope of getting political agreement and action, but maybe the fossil fuel lobby had more to lose, while the CFC people easily found a way to replace freon. This process became politicized mainly because of the opposition interests, but having got there, the scientists became involved with the politics (and all this through the media too).
But again, why the scientists in that role? I’m not saying that Greenpeace (or the Heritage Foundation for that matter) doesn’t have a right to organize political action, but why are the research scientists themselves getting sucked into politics? I think I know the answer, but it’s a rhetorical question.
It is an historical question why the scientists became activists, so research is needed to answer it. But knowing some of the key figures my guess is they thought it a noble cause at the time (and still do). I think the environmental movement has always attracted activist scientists.
And Jim D is quite right that the IPCC was modeled on the massive report that pushed the Montreal Protocol over the top politically. That was Robert Watson’s coup and he tried to replicate it, with lots of help of course. My view is that it has failed simply because it was too extreme. Trying to ban CFCs is one thing, but banning fire is quite another, as our civilization is still based on fire.
There is a lot of research on the rise of environmentalism; maybe we should look into it. It is after all a science based political movement (even if the science is shaky), which is quite rare in history.
CFC’s only matter in air conditioning,which only represents a small portion of the total economy. The energy content in things like steel, cement and aluminum is huge. Something like 1/3rd of China’s total coal consumption is for uses other then producing electricity.
Exactly, Harry. I think it was McCauley who said “Every political movement ultimately expires from an excess of its own principles.” So be it.
David, environmentalism has the cloak of a “science based political movement”. At it’s core, I think it’s much simpler. With the decline of religion, people needed an alternative basis for their end times prophesies. This is nothing new in the history of humanity, it’s just what our old end times fantasies look like when God is removed.
Nothing’s ever completely new when it comes to the human psyche.
PE: End of days syndrome is a bit much for my taste. Political movements often arise for good reasons then get out of control, like any fad or bubble.
P.E writes “Which brings up one of the strangest things of all about the IPCC; why is the SPM released months before the “science”? Doesn’t that seem a bit odd to have a trial where the judge pronounces the verdict before he hears the evidence?”
Obviously you are not au fait as to how the IPCC conducts it’s “science”. The reports which, supposedly, support the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), are “secret” until the SPM has been agreed by the politicians. When the SPM has been agreed, the IPCC must search the supporting papers, and make sure the “science” in these papers agrees with what the politicians have decided is true in the SPM. Only when the IPCC is sure that the “science” agrees with the SPM, is the “science” published. This process takes a few months. Hence the delay.
And I am NOT being sarcastic. This is the gospel truth as to how the IPCC works.
“These conclusions can be derived from the thousands of reports in the literature and do not require a dependence on IPCC synthesis of the data. Equally important, though, uncertainty, even if belittled in some public comments by IPCC defenders, is clearly apparent in the literature itself, and so I don’t see the implication that it has been neglected as supportable.”
Unfortunately, politicians don’t have time to read all the scientific literature. They read the IPCC synthesis.
I forget who puts the IPCC synthesis together. Squirrels? No, that doesn’t sound right. Isn’t it scientists? I’d have to check.
James – I don’t think we should confuse the transgressions of some individuals within the IPCC with the quality of IPCC reporting. The WG1 report in AR4, describing the scientific basis for conclusions about climate change, was excellent in general, with a few questionable areas that had little bearing on the overall picture. This has been addressed in previous IPCC-related threads. Most of the concerns related to WG2 and WG3. My earlier point was simply that it isn’t necessary to rely on IPCC documents to understand both the strengths and uncertainties surrounding our current understanding. You can reach the same understanding from the literature independent of the IPCC, but that requires following the literature rather than relying on second hand reports or cherry picked examples of articles chosen to advance a particular viewpoint.
“The WG1 report in AR4, describing the scientific basis for conclusions about climate change, was excellent in general, with a few questionable areas that had little bearing on the overall picture.”
We’ll have to politely disagree with one another on that one. So anything else is rather moot.
Fred, Some of the new emails show how the team colluded to keep certain papers out of the WG1. They also tried to manipulate which papers on hurricanes to include to get the conclusion dictated by the “cause.”
Tge problem here is that once you cross the line into such unethical territory you lose ceedibility. Just having read the literature does not give you tge authority to pronounce it sound. For that you would have to have the expertise to work through the work yourself, much as McIntyre did with Mann.
Fred,
Disparagement, in my industry, gets you tossed out.
Conspiring to destroy documents and cover up data and docs gets you fired, sued and worse.
Don’t give me this ‘boys being boys’ bs.
That is cheap and condescending.
As to the IPCC, until claimtegate, the IPCC reports were the “gold standard”, the “state of the art”, “sound science”, “the best available” regarding cliamte science.
Now we know it is not. The IPCC is run by people the vast majority of climate scientists have endorsed and have failed to seriously critique.
Until the climate science community disavows the IPCC, they own it and it owns them.
No wiggle on that hook, please.
But yes, in the spirit of Thanksgiving- all the best to everyone, on all sides of this great disputation.
“a tendency to confuse the IPCC with climate science, and to impute sins of the former to the latter. ”
But weren’t all these scientists, like Trenberth, Mann and Jones (and others) lead authors of the IPCC reports?
It’s they who wrote the IPCC reports – did they intentionally (for the cause) dismiss uncertainties and inflate alarmism in the IPCC report – in a manner that contradicts the scientific literature? Is that ok?
The authorship is very extensive (you can check the AR4 documentation for this). Most of the reporting is excellent, and includes an acknowledgement of both well established and uncertain areas. Mann and Jones can be faulted in regard to the Hockey Stick – more a TAR than AR4 concern because it was less emphasized later – but that is a small and peripheral area of climate science. Ironically, it was originally overhyped by its supporters (e.g., in the TAR), and then when faults were found, overhyped by detractors.
I think Trenberth belongs in a different category. He is brilliant, knowledgeable, opinionated, and like all humans, fallible, but if you decide to challenge his conclusions on a topic in a head to head encounter rather than in a blog where he isn’t participating, you are up against a formidable adversary. I’m sure he’s sometimes wrong, but I wouldn’t group him with those who cherry picked data to create a false impression.
Regarding uncertainty, it’s addressed in some detail in AR4. Whether there’s a better way to quantify it is an interesting question, but it would be wrong to say that the report neglected it.
Again, though, IPCC WG1 reports were written by climate scientists, but climate science isn’t WG1. To know the state of climate science, you have to follow what’s in the journals on a regular basis.
I’m off to a family Thanksgiving dinner, but I hope to be back later.
Even Lindzen says WG1 is “useful”. However Fred Trenberth is one of the worst ideologues. He’s pressured editors to resign for doing their jobs. He tried to pressure authors to change their portions of AR3 without any scientific basis. You should hear Lindzen describe this (Fermilab lecture). It is unpleasant.
I also disagree that the important aspects of the science are secure. They are still in dispute.
I’m no expert on Trenberth, but this story seems to indicate that he is a indeed a formidable adversary, even when his opinions have little scientific merit.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/11/foia2011-on-shameful-paper.html
Fred,
You are sounding more and more like a German explaining why they never paid attention to those camps and smokestacks.
Latimer Adler
You write:
Here is link to Chris Landsea’s resignation letter, which tells the story.
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm
Max
Trenberth’s treatment of Landsea was despicable. No one who knows about that episode has a shred of respect for him. He’s nothing but yet another CAGW Lysenkoist.
Yes, Trenberth seems to be a real jerk. If you are an editor who is doing his job, when Trenberth sends you an email, you resign. How remarkable. He is an ideologue and a person you had better hope to not have much to do with, unless one is armed. Note to Kevin, we have a bill of riights in this country, get used to it or get out.
I am one who does not know about this episode.
Links please.
Yes, as we can see from Trenberth’s reaction: (from #3946)
I meant to add: Apparently Trenberth has not got an open enough mind to even consider that the climate change might not be affecting hurricanes in any significant way.
Funny thing is that Landersea eventually come around to Trenberth’s way of thinking.
Places all that in an interesting light.
Do you have a link for that?
Fred: “These conclusions can be derived from the thousands of reports in the literature and do not require a dependence on IPCC synthesis of the data…”
That may be so, Fred. But some of the thousands of reports in the literature tell a different story. The problem is that the IPCC’s synthesis is (a) flawed and incomplete (b) treated as gospel. So we have governments and policy makers all over the world basing their energy policies on poorly-founded and possibly erroneous conclusions. How long is it going to take us to escape from the malign influence of this cabal?
Fred, with you being on the inside and in “the know”, it is easy to appreciate how disturbing it must feel to realize how badly misconstrued all those ignorant hundreds of millions of poor sots have it.
They are the ones being told by their governments, their technical experts, their national media and by the very authority of the UN itself that the sky is falling, that extremely deep personal sacrifices must be made to avoid dire immanent certain catastrophe as having been determined long ago by ‘settled science’.
That must be a hugely inconvenient and unhelpful waste of time.
Fred, I did not intend my comments as a personal attack upon your concerns. My purpose is to show you that your discomfort over others being uniformed and misguided occurs because you are assuming that they ought to be somewhat familiar with what you yourself personally know extremely well. They aren’t and they couldn’t be such persons without living some semblance of that lifestyle first hand. Not everyone in this world is going to be a research scientist. Sorry …
I agree that the publication of the emails is an extremely unpleasant intrusion on privacy, motivated to exploit opportunity and shape the debate. Speaking as someone who is both on “the in” and on “the out”, I do not see their release as damaging to climate science researchers.
I was reminded and reassured that the participants were real passionate individuals with their own opinions and their own desire to express themselves as best as they know how.
It was the deliberately suppressed absence of individual dissenting opinion which caused me to doubt the veracity of climate change research. Now I know with confidence that the honest turmoil and creative debate is alive and healthy.
In a sense the ugliness proves the honesty of the process.
Raving – Thanks for your comment. I can’t find much to disagree with. My point about the “veracity of climate change research” is that it isn’t the same as the veracity of a few conspicuous individuals.
You refer to my familiarity with climate science as something that I “know extremely well”. I do have some breadth of climate science knowledge. However, as someone who tries to follow the literature, I’m constantly reminded of how superficial is my understanding in any given area compared with the professionals who work in that particular area of the science. That’s why I consider individuals who haven’t undertaken the effort to follow the science as consistently as I to be even more handicapped if they want to make judgments on the state of the science. Maybe we all should be more tentative before making dogmatic pronouncements about the quality of work that others are devoting their lives to.
I say this about climate science as a whole, because whatever our opinions about how some individuals have behaved, generalizing from those to the entirety of climate science would be a serious mistake.
Won’t you please comment, Fred, on the scientific ethics of that coterie which formed the public perception of climate science? I agree with you that the vast majority of climate scientists are honest, though ethically silent, practitioners. They, as well as you, have been misled by this unethical pack of attack dogs.
================
Kim – I’ve expressed disapproval of the behavior of Phil Jones and Mike Mann – see Changing Minds – and there are a few others whose performance troubles me to a lesser extent.
On the other hand, I disagree that I’ve been “misled” on the science, because these people didn’t lead me. I’ve acquired my understanding of the science independently, and in the most central areas, it agrees with the mainstream views described in the IPCC reports (mainly WG1), with some doubts about a few of the peripheral areas.
Thanks for the reply. How have the latest emails modified your opinion from your pre-CGII link?
==========
Also, I’d be interested in your thoughts about how the emails show the coterie privately much more skeptical than they were publicly, and more so than commenters such as you and Nick Stokes.
====================
Kim – I haven’t read all emails in the latest batch, but my impression is similar to that of Steven Mosher.
I continue to be amused at how much more skeptical the ‘true’ experts were than the advocates such as you, Nick Stokes, and so many others.
=============
Fred, I cannot argue because I agree with what you have said wholeheartedly.
Perhaps it would be helpful to cast things in a different light …
Science is an exercise in anarchy. Truisms emerge and gain credence by self-evidence. They flourish and dominate by having the force and resilience to withstand relentless attacks of counter opinion from all possible direction.
Consensus building, gate keeping and advocacy are tools for those who cannot trust in the naked openness.
Unwittingly or otherwise, whoever stole those emails and published them, did climate science the greatest service possible.
Raving (on November 26, 2011 at 4:29 pm) had written:
H.L. Mencken – a journalist well-remembered for his reporting on the Scopes Trial (1925) and immortalized as the character of reporter “E.K. Hornbeck” in the play and film Inherit the Wind – put the case you’re trying to make quite perfectly:
I must disagree a little here. The emails do show collusion to keep certain papers out of AR3 and to get others in based on the “cause.” There is also a long history of manipulation of the peer review process in this field that should make one pretty skeptical about the literature. Mass resignation of editors is always a sign of a big problem. This doesn’t happen in any other field I’m familiar with.
I don’t place much value in just reading the literature. A much more productive activity is auditing the literature as McIntyre and others have done. Statisticians have done great service here, for example McShane and Wyner. The problem for Fred is that if you can’t audit things and apply rigor to the literature, you can repeat false stuff and true stuff and not know the difference. I would like to know if Fred thought the hockey stick was right at one point because it had the prestige of climate science behind it or whether he bought in to Hansen’s 1988 sensitivity estimate and Congressional testimony. His results were peer reviewed after all so they must be sound, n’est pas?
I still maintain as I said earlier in this thread that the climate science literature often lacks rigor and requires auditing. Given a choice between a statistician and a climate scientist, I’d take the statistician. The real problem is that the data is generally quite noisy and you are looking for small effects. Often, the error bars are large and the statistical significance is nill. Still worse, by not being skeptical, you can enable the lack of progress. Progress requires admitting that there is a problem. In Fred’s world, I’m afraid, there is not a problem. The literature is sound and climate science can be accepted without rigorous auditing. I think that’s a problem. We need to challenge the community to do better. There is a level of discomfort involved here in challenging the establishment. Discomfort leads to progress. Comfort and security lead to confirmation bias. However, I’m pleased that Fred has come out in opposition to Mann and Jones’ behaviour. I disagree that this behaviour did not contaminate the literature.
If this were an unimportant issue, I wouldn’t care as much. But this issue is critical for our future and we need to be vigorous in demanding better results and more honest science.
David Young – do you believe the MWP was warmer than it is today?
JCH, I don’t know for sure. But I do trust historical information regarding the little ice age and the Mideval cllimate optimum. I think this data indicates that it was at least as warm then as now. There are a number of proxies that indicate this when you do NOT employ “Mike’s nature trick.” But, we need better evidence on this. We need some rigorous attention to the proxies and to stop the manipulation. It appears to me that people like Schmidt and Mann are still stonewalling on this.
David, you want auditing and quality assurance? Those are tools of the business world.
Caveat emptor. The unstated assumption in commerce is that a person is reliably being sold a little bit of falsehood. Rules and guarantees are needed to limit the misrepresentation.
Research cannot afford persistent systematic misrepresentation. No hard rule and no guarantee of assurance are possible. It spoils the anarchy.
One can only hope that the participants will be honest with themselves (occasionally)
David Young – is there a temperature reconstruction you like?
JCH, I don’t have an opinion on this. I do think the world has been warming, but we probably don’t know what part of that is due to which forcings and which part to internal variabliity. So, I’m watching the temperature wars like everyone else with interest.
Fred Moolton: I do hope the revelations will have a chastening effect on individuals such as Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and some of their colleagues, whose inflated sense of importance and entitlement led to the transgressions that have surfaced.
I think that’s a forlorn hope. There are too many people claiming that no transgressions occurred. For examples, we have Holly Stick here, and the famous Penn State committee of non-inquiry (that’s a slight paraphrase of the actual language describing the status of the committee as not a committee of inquiry.) At real climate, for another example, you can read many justifications for the sense of entitlement of Mann and others; even the journals Science and Nature have derided the notion that even a hint of transgressions has emerged.
Indeed, there is a possibility that the only people expressing credence in the hints of transgressions are exactly the people questioning the policies (“the cause”) promoted by Mann and others.
But I am getting ahead of myself: What transgressions?
OT
Listen to Dr. Hathaway (NASA) on sunspots, ‘no Grand Maximum’, Maunder minimum, Little Ice Age, Global Warming etc.
(Long interview recorded on 22/11/11, Hathaway’s voice @4 min in, @ 20 min out)
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC7a.htm
vuk – I don’t think your link’s working.
There is a direct link now. If the link is pasted into the Climate etc website, it automatically embeds ‘youtube’ which would be destructive considering it’s the OT subject.
With so much out there now, it is hard to see how Prof Mann continues to insist that the emails lack context. At the same time, he appears to be working hard to suppress material that would supply it.
And I think there is no returning to whatever state the science was in during the mythical time before it was like it is now (personally, I think it was always like this except that Toto had not pulled the curtain back yet). The movie Longitude gives a fascinating view into the ‘good old days’ before science was political (right). Once-bitten-twice-shy will dominate the public response to climate science for a LONG time.
Chip
When anyone says their words are being taken out of context, I think it is fair to give them the benefit of the doubt once. But if they say it about numerous instances well its pretty obvious they have no explanation to give and thus should answer for their words and deeds.
regards
In my experience, when someone protests about being taken out of context, putting things in context rarely helps their case.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/you-call-the-people-who-will-answer-your-questions/
That is my favorite “out of context” moment in climate science. It is hilarious :)
I mean really, these guys really take themselves a touch too seriously.
I hadn’t seen that before – you’re right, it is a cracker :)
I thought for a moment it had to be Eric Idle not Eric Steig. Unbelievable.
He must be one of those people that can’t even hear themselves speak.
Eric is always good for a chuckle :)
Taking something out of context is one thing. Splicing sentences is another. Holy cow.
Here is another by Tamino in defense of Mann’s mastery of statistics,
http://climateaudit.org/2008/09/08/ian-jolliffe-comments-at-tamino/
If I am following this correctly, Tamino is misleading people into thinking that Mann was being endorsed, when quite the opposite was being stated by the author Tamino misquoted?
Hunter that would be correct. Jolliffe appears to have developed the PCA or some parts of it and thought it was not at all a good choice for the type of times series.
It’s a Manntra™ derived from his evidently unshakable belief in the efficacy and persuasiveness of the ‘Because I Said So’ argument from (his own) authority.
Hey Jude and I thought “you gone and left us just like all girls do……..” :-)
I prefer the word whistleblower to the word hacker.
For what its worth I am convinced that this release will be more damaging to the climate change ‘scientists’ and their fellow travellers than the first lot were.
Sorry for repeating something posted elsewhere. Climategate one was the middle game. Climategate 2 is the end game and fortunately the Fiddlestick Team have no credible pieces on the board.
Happy Thanksgiving Dr Curry. I will be including you, and the denizers, among the many blessings for which I thank God on this day — in some shame I underappreciate you the rest of the year.
I will be adding “RC” the FOIA whistleblower to the list, as well.
May all your holidays be filled with comforts and joys.
I think the ‘Liberator’ of the emails is probably English. The timing of the release signifies either that they have no understanding of Thanksgiving……or they have a sense of humour :)
Or both :-)
What happens if a group of people talk only to themselves?
(1) outsiders are going to think they’re plotting something.
(2) what they talk about is going to become ever more stale and ossified.
While the ‘Team’ take this approach, the science will remain in stasis, decade after decade, going around in ever decreasing circles.
Dr Curry, ignore Romm and keep trying to break the thought-proof bottle these people have constructed for themselves. Happy Thanksgiving!
It’s called Groupthink
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
I agree that this won’t make much if any difference with respect to the MSM, at least in the short term. That said, the camel’s back is not indestructible, and the straws continue to pile up..
But there are a few things that the skeptics can now put in the bank. The iconic hockey stick graph has been once and for all debunked, at least for any reasonable and fair-minded reader.The claim that the 20th century warming is “unprecedented” is the very foundation for the alarmist case. That’s gone now. I see that as a very big deal indeed.
Firstly Dr Curry, there’s zero proof whatsoever that this was a hack. Even the police in the UK can’t confirm that (depsite getting cyber ‘experts’ involved).
Secondly, happy thanksgiving!
I think the emails are important for two reasons:
1-the contents (some i’ve seen are pretty damning- especially those about deleting data, emails and such to prevent it falling into skeptical hands)
2- it undermines any ‘defence’ of the first batch along the lines of ‘taken out of context’, ‘isolated incident’, ‘not normal behaviour’ etc etc.
It shows a systematic and systemic abuse of FOI law, scientific practice and basic ethical procedures.
Had i, or anyone else in an industry position behaved this way- we’d be summarily dismissed.
Pretty much zero chance that’ll happen to them though, hey.
“Firstly Dr Curry, there’s zero proof whatsoever that this was a hack.”
There’s also zero proof in any of the claims of malfeasance regarding the emails.
And there’s no proof of AGW either.
Andrew
So you admit there’s no proof of wrongdoing in the emails. So why then do you all claim with such certainty that the emails display wrongdoing?
Meanwhile you all demand *proof* for the Hack and *proof* for AGW (thanks for bringing up that example too) before you will accept them.
lolwot,
You invoked a threshold of proof thusly: “There’s also zero proof in any of the claims of malfeasance regarding the emails”
I was just observing that there is no proof of AGW, if you’d like to apply the same threshold.
Andrew
I don’t apply that threshold. Never. Requiring proof in anything but maths is stupid.
But plenty of skeptics consistently hide behind the “proof” to get away with dismissing manmade global warming or get away with dismissing the hack.
Frankly there’s so much evidence for the hack and manmade global warming and so little evidence for the proper context of these quotes from the emails that skeptics are clearly in the wrong big time.
“I don’t apply that threshold. Never.”
lolwot,
Except you just did, in the quote I copied from your comment.
Now I know why lol is on your clever Interweb Moniker: “You’re not serious.”
Andrew
No I was using a kind of parody of someone elses argument to show how meaningless the argument is.
If you want to demand proof before you will accept the emails were hacked then you should also demand proof before you accept any of the interpretations of the emails.
“If you want to demand proof before you will accept the emails were hacked then you should also demand proof before you accept any of the interpretations of the emails.”
Not necessarily true. How the emails were obtained could be traced back to by some objective evidence. Interpretations of the emails are going to be subjective. Apples and oranges.
Andrew
lolwot,
If you wave your arms much harder you may hurt your shoulders.
True, no proof of malfeasance. More comic relief :) I am sure some day they will all have a good laugh over a few brews. Probably at a neighborhood pub though.
Ah, but the real question involves the existence of enough “evidence” to convince a jury. Shouldn’t be hard to find some qualified “peers” for that mob’s panel.
But somehow that doesn’t apply to global warming or the hacker.
For global warming or the hacker we need proof. Not simply enough evidence to convince a jury.
Mark F,
“Ah, but the real question involves the existence of enough “evidence” to convince a jury. Shouldn’t be hard to find some qualified “peers” for that mob’s panel.”
None of this should go to court. Climate scientists and politicians should just be forced to watch Jon Stewart. Scientific misconduct aired on comedy shows is humiliation enough. They just aren’t intelligent enough to know how laughable they are :)
“Stieging” will end up in the dictionary one day as a verb; “He was caught Steiging up the data.”
“enHansening” should be listed; “His understanding of science was inadequate to explain the phenomenon without some enHansening of the physics.”
Arrhenius, “Don’t be an Arrhenius, think before you publish!”
Trenberthian motion anyone :)
Actually there is. The UK courts for one ruled there was evidence of FOI avoidance, which is illegal. They only escaped prosecution due to a ‘timing’ legal loop hole that was improperly applied.
Further, there is plenty of emails discussing the deletion of data and emails discussing said data, directly to avoid sharing said data and emails. This would constitute ‘proof’. This would need confirming by looking at the backup servers, but no one, including the enquiries, has done this.
As for the hack- zero proof. If you have some, then let the cambridgshire police know immdeiatley, as they, to date, have found none. zilch. nyada.
So in fact, the longer this goes on, the more it looks like an inside job.
Labmunkey, it never went to court, because the Information Commissioner found that the statutory time limit for the bringing of a prosecution had been exceeded. In a public letter he made it perfectly clear that had it not been for this technicality, he would have prosecuted, with every expectation of success.
Happy now. Nick?
Huh. Well that would explain why the link went missing.
So it was ruled that they did break the law, but not in court and they couldn’t be prosecuted due to the loophole.
My bad- sorry Nick.
No. I don’t believe that “he made it perfectly clear that had it not been for this technicality, he would have prosecuted, with every expectation of success.” That would be an outrageous thing for a lawyer in a semi-judicial position to do without any hearing.
I think he did- hence him applying to have the law changed.
NIck, you’re on a hiding to nothing. By your logic the Commissioner could never bring a prosecution.
Here’s the text from the House of Commons report:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmsctech/444/44407.htm
“The ICO decided that although the emails referred to […] indicated prima facie evidence of an offence, the Commissioner was unable to investigate because six months had passed since the potential offence was committed, a constraint placed on the legislation by the Magistrates Court Act 1980”.
I haven’t been able to locate the copy of the Commissioner’s letter to Acton – LM it was NOT a “ruling” perhaps another denizen can help – but it was not one that a Chancellor of a University would like to receive. He dilated at greater length than the HoC on the errors of the CRU’s ways, and made it perfectly clear that he believed an offence had been committed, and that he would have proceeded further had it not been for the unsatisfactorily brief limitation period, something I believe he is taking steps to correct.
Stop digging.
“Stop digging.”
So we started with a claim that a UK court had ruled that the law had been broken. So I dig a bit. Oops, no it wasn’t a court, it was the ICO. The ICO ruled? well … no, but he was sure he would have succeeded in prosecuting. Now it turns out that he wasn’t even able to investigate.
Yes’ I’d better stop digging.
Nick I have pointed out LM’s error, and supplied the truth – that the Commissioner wrote a strongly-worded letter to Acton, telling him the CRU had broken the law, but that it was too late to do anything about it. That you find this a gratifying alternative to LM’s misconstruction, and appear to think its continued discussion here will assist your cause, is simply astonishing.
NIck,
“Yes’ I’d better stop digging.”
OK, keep digging, then. It’s still a hole.
LM,
we should forever be grateful that there was no case actually brought.
Why? because it serves a great purpose. You can see how twisted people are in their perceptions. Since the case was never brought because of the statute of limitations people are reduced to explaining that CRU was actually never convicted of a crime. There was a prima facia case that they had broken the law. But the case wasnt brought. That means they forever swing on that rope and all their defenders can muster is this: they were not convicted.
That is the kind of endorsement we have for CRU. They were not convicted. I laugh every time this defense is brought up. You never hear them argue that CRU did a stellar job of dispatching their legal duties. You hear instead that CRU wasnt unconvicted. I love that. Let the unindicted stay just where they are.
Steven,
Speak softly. Most of us are unindicted. We try to keep quiet about it.
I loved Kloor’s kloo-less komment, viz:
Riiight … when someone says “climate science”, the first words that come to peoples minds are “highly reputable” and “proven track record” … where does this guy live?
Judith, your climate-love for Kloor is totally amazing to me. Do any of these folks ever look out the window?
w.
In all fairness, Kloor is right.
Climate science will survive, these indiscretions will go un-apologized for, and little will be learned. If any catchphase (hide the decline) leads to a public uproar – no worries. That will be met with a professional conduct inquiry fully stocked with buckets of whitewash, a nudge and a wink that rules are for the little people or those that we find inconvenient.
History has a way of repeating itself, and horribly unprofessional ethical lapses so completely on display here have been repeated before in other fields (financial industry, Enron, etc) with serious public consequences, but (perhaps not) surprisingly sparse consequences for those in high places.
As for the pompom wielding apologists – I don’t honestly know what to say other than to spend some time carefully thinking about some of the painful historical consequences of ethical lapses of individuals in positions of authority and how this affected society. Then ask yourself if you want to go on blindly cheering, or if you would like to see a change in this behavior.
We can see from the emails released that not every climate scientist engages in this type of garbage – will you speak out against it?
Occupy Climate Science.
There are other worlds besides us vs. them. KK main lean AGW, but he sure isn’t RC.
Willis is just annoyed at the idea that the smears might not work.
What are the first words that come into people’s minds when someone says “climate denier”?
probably that the person using the term ‘denier’ is attempting to malign via association.
or something like that….
I think why is this lying bastard, telling me this particular lie at this particular time?
When someone calls someone a:”denier” in your context, the first thing that comes to mind is that the one using the term is a small minded bigot.
It is important to understand just how partisan the debate has become. As an example, I offer this “defense” of a Jones email from a Ms. Jowit who is on staff at the Guardian which published her article today:
“There shouldn’t be someone else at UEA with different views [from “recent extreme weather is due to global warming”] – at least not a climatologist.”
• Phil Jones, UEA, to Melissa Murphy, UEA, 23 Aug 2004 (email 1788)
Ms. Jowit’s commentary:
“The TV programme Tonight with Trevor Macdonald is going to feature a colleague of Jones, David Viner, arguing that (then) recent extreme weather was a result of global warming. Jones is responding to a request via the press office for another member of the Climatic Research Unit to appear making the opposite argument. Jones is arguing it would “look odd” if two people with opposite views were from the same department and suggests the TV production team “could easily dredge someone up” from elsewhere.”
Please note that she offers no explanation of Jones’ comment but simply repeats it. Yet Jones suggests that the public should not be given reason to believe that there is debate among the scientists at UEA. Truly incredible.
On Bishop Hill, Cumbrian Lad turned up the House Of Commons Select Committee record of Phil Jones on this subject:
In the HOC committee Phil Jones replied as follows:
“..are you comfortable when your staff …are quoted as saying that “within a few years winter snowfall will become a rare and exciting event…””
Jones: “That would be exaggerated and I do not think I ever said that. Maybe one of our staff members might have said it but I have never said that.”
Ian Steward: “Do you agree with it?”
Jones: “I do not agree with it, I think there is always going to be some snowfall in the future, even in Britain, even if we do get to be four or five degrees warmer. We are still going to have cold spells in winter; maybe not as cold as this particular one but we will still have cold spells during the winters and children will still see some snowfall”.
Selective memory, Phil.
Yes, good old Phil. Right on the money, Simon.
Ms. Jowit and the editors of the Guardian “Environment” section are no less lame than Phil. In a thriving academic department that provides graduate education, there will be weekly lectures by invited luminaries and regular faculty or advanced graduate students. Each lecture is followed by a question and answer session that airs all the issues and robustly so. That is the model created by Socrates and championed by every first rate thinker since Socrates. If you want to see science in the making and you want to accelerate your learning as quickly as possible, those debates are the place to be. Science is best seen in free-for-all debate. Ms. Jowit is blithely unaware of this and so are the editors of the Guardian.
If Phil had been secure in his science and his academic position, he would have offered someone from UEA to debate Viner and he would have enjoyed a robust debate with all the issues aired. He would have been proud and thrilled that UEA could put on such a debate. But Phil did not uphold the most important standard of academia and I have no doubt that his students and his science suffer enormously from this failing of Phil. From the point of view of an academic, Phil robbed the public. Ms. Jowit and the editors of the Guardian are doing the same.
Here is something crossposted from WUWT:
Theo Goodwin says:
November 25, 2011 at 8:31 am
Dennis Ray Wingo [November 25, 2011 at 12:19 am] says:
“Interesting one on Mann deleting McIntyre’s posts at Realclimate”
‘Phil, Tim,
Meanwhile, I suspect you’ve both seen the latest attack against his Yamal work by McIntyre.
Gavin and I (having consulted also w/ Malcolm) are wondering what to make of this, and
what sort of response—if any—is necessary and appropriate. So far, we’ve simply deleted
all of the attempts by McIntyre and his minions to draw attention to this at RealClimate.’
Well, well, well, here is Mann displaying a smoking gun and bragging to his “associates” that he is the killer. He and associates, probably including NASA employed Gavin Schmidt, are deleting posts from Steve McIntyre at RealClimate not because they contain poor science, not because they are off topic, but because they are criticisms of the Yamal reconstruction that Mann and “associates” do not know how to handle. In plain English, Mann is censoring a scientific topic, censoring scientific debate, because the very topic and the debate reflect poorly on Mann as scientist. Mann convenes his “associates” to come up with some sort of response to McIntyre. Mann’s primary concern is not to engage in possibly fruitful debate but to manage his public image. He expects that his “associates” will support his brazen and desperate cunning with regard to McIntyre’s posts. No doubt his expectation was fulfilled.
In the spirit of contributing my fair share to “Conspiracy Theories”, I would advise caution in attempting to decrypt/run files in the “all.7z” file contained in FOIA2011.zip. It might be a Trojan Horse. :-)
Cracking the remaining FOIA2011 all.7z file | Watts Up With That?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/22/cracking-the-remaining-foia2011-all-7z-file/
Enjoy Thanksgiving Day!
Some folks are eating turkey today.
Others are eating crow.
PS Happy Thanksgiving to all those in the USA!
Yes, but (given their past performances), I’m inclined to think they may have decided to redefine “eating crow” as “eating pheasant under glass” ;-)
This is very serious stuff . . what the climate science community + IPCC has done is provide the foundation for hundreds of billions of dollars in public policy decisions. They have provided politicians with a particular agenda the ammunition and “scientific” legitimacy to drastically alter human activities and implement international policies they have deemed to be necessary and superior. Opportunity costs . . . schools and hospitals haven’t been built and staffed, roads and bridges continue to degrade and seniors live in abject poverty.
These public policy decisions have an opportunity cost – has this massive shift of funding from medicine to Climate Science resulted in people unnecessarily suffering from cancer or ALS?
It is not some political game or faculty squabble.
Climategate II = Peak Green.
Time is up, the jig has run its course.
Fred . . . writes on November 24, 2011 at 4:26 pm:
No, you’ve gotten the cart before the horse. What you’re calling “the climate science community” did not “provide the foundation” for politicians to do what they’ve done in their hideously damaging “public policy decisions” but rather created an excuse for these predators to engineer a panic by virtue of which our elected and appointed government thugs have perpetrated enormous thieveries and wrought both destruction and death all over the planet.
The IPCC was established by these politicians in 1988 in order to coordinate and expand the junk science of AGW into its present status, a basis for rapine and pillage.
I think that there’s reason to doubt that the credentialed incompetents and damned fools masquerading as “climate scientists” in the decade prior to 1988 were for the most part anything other than almost honest idiots. So it certainly seemed to me when their preposterous blitherings were brought to my attention back in the first year of the Reagan Administration.
But then professional government-paid prostitutes like Algore and his co-conspirators fastened upon it, “the whole aim of [their] practical politics [being] to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
That’s when “The Team” ceased to be scientists in any sense but as a masquerade, and submitted themselves joyously to their role as shills in the most enormous confidence game ever foisted upon an innocent and helpless humanity.
Their corruption is a consequence of the government goons’ efforts to leverage the obviously bogus AGW conjecture, not a cause thereof.
On an earlier thread steven mosher opined that this is pretty much a rehash of the first batch of mails.
Without going into too much gory detail, these mails reveal a lot of the same combination of ignorance and arrogance as we saw the first time around.
The funny thing is that I thought little about it when the first batch appeared, because I had known the Team folks were like this for over a decade. That the public noticed caught me by pleasant surprise. People do learn.
That was the reaction most of the CA people had the first time around. It really wasn’t that surprising to those who were watching through the curtain.
This second batch of emails emphasizes managing public perceptions of climate science by managing what colleagues at UEA and similar institutions are permitted to say and print, including suppressing dissent, managing media personalities, managing funding sources, and similar matters. It provides a great deal of context for the first batch of emails.
An excellent example is Briffa. Who would have known from the first batch of emails that he dissented from the Team’s handling of tree ring data and did so on several occasions over a long period of time.
One has to study the two batches of emails to appreciate them.
Briffa’s dissent is found in the first batch of mails as well as the second.
But it takes careful reading to see it. I did not cover this aspect clearly enough in the book
Briffa’s dissent is in the first batch but not as fully as in the second batch. Also the second batch makes clearer who Briffa was corresponding with when he dissented.
Just a hunch, but Briffa might very well be the whistle blower. “Hiding the decline” hurt Briffa more than anyone because it focused attention directly on his work and his responsibilities for the data. And they “dissed” him. He told them that the data would not bear the weight of their claims and every one of them turned his back on Briffa’s warning. But Briffa’s dissents were justified, as everyone so famously learned when Climategate One appeared two years ago.
Jeff Id has new material on Briffa.
I think what Mosher was getting at was the content was approximately the same. What’s different is that this is a lot less subtle.
I think some one FOIA, liberated a set of back up tapes or a large hard drive, in the first release freed the foia folder and related email. Looking as if the folder they had put together to respond to the foia request grew wings on its own.
In the second release CG2.0, they have spent time compiling a compressed set of infilling data and leads into the how, why, and who of the corruption that lead to the first release. In the encrypted files that are left are the who, when and where the money trails went, and a play by play analysis of the background mannuvering of the policy to politics for carbon credit gain manipulation through carbon market manipulation by the main players.
Self protection and distance before release is the reason for the encryption, internet wide dispersal of the all.zip data let the truth loose early to provide security for FOIA when the manure fits the han(ds) that flung it.
They were warned by the preamble text that all the truth was know and to change their ways , or come clean and stop the massive killing of 3rd world poor by their land grabbing actions and other WWF, greenpiece, IMF, World Bank, New Forest, and UN based exploits.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/24/world-bank-global-warming-journals-and-cru/
At WUWT, someone has posted a link to the link to the plain text of the attachments:
“Reader Buffy Minton has done some cool work to extract file attachments with the emails. This was never done for the original climategate files to my knowledge.”
More and site at http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/mime-data/
Snip if already posted.”
Yes.
I havent read the entire second batch and I dont intend to. Unless somebody comes up with something that contradicts my understanding of the first batch I see them as compound. Good for a little more detail here and there, but largely piling on.
Its less than fraud and more than boys behaving badly.
Grey.
my favorite color
Its fraud. And the 1000s of email they admit deleting may have proven criminal fraud.
Your Appell link is wrong, and you failed to include his most recent posts, including his apology to Mann:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2011/11/apology-to-michael-mann.html
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2011/11/is-global-warming-ruining-thanksgiving.html
How could anyone know whether an apology to Mann is genuine? His lawyer’s have a penchant for threatening libel at the smallest slight.
What a silly remark. You didn’t bother to read what Appell wrote, did you.
Did You? Gavin’s chart showing temperatures diverging from the models was the naughty chart. Reality was more disturbing than the hockey stick. Ironic what?
What’s naughty about it? They disagree. But like real scientists and unlike you pretend “sceptics” they can disagree without smearing each other and throwing around loose claims of corruption. Honestly, the commentors on this blog make me sick with their false accusations. Curry should be ashamed of allowing this BS to go on. How can she teach ethics without practicing ethics?
Some may smear, I just chuckle and on occasion note that assuming a model has accuracy of 0.8Wm-2 +/- 0.18 is hilarious.
Oh, I did mention that creating data where none existed with novel statistical methods in an effort to prove that something is violating the theory of global warming was pretty funny too.
To me, the climategate 2.0 is more like a Three Stooges marathon, than science.
Holly Stick
She is ethical because she does not want to involve herself in the following:
Having established scale and urgency, the political challenge is then to turn this from an argument about the cost of cutting emissions – bad politics – to one about the value of a stable climate – much better politics. […] the most valuable thing to do is to tell the story about abrupt change as vividly as possible
i.e => Scaremongering
Holly,
here is the final rationalization in summary:
“The experts therefore face a dilemma: They have little chance of giving the right advice. If they don’t sound the alarm, they are accused of not fulfilling their moral obligations. However, alarmist predictions are criticized if the predicted changes fail to materialize quickly.
Climatological findings will probably remain ambiguous even if further progress is made. Weingart says it’s now up to scientists and society to learn to come to terms with this. In particular, he warns, politicians must understand that there is no such thing as clear results. “Politicians should stop listening to scientists who promise simple answers,” Weingart says.”
What a pile of nasty bs. No wonder you like to wallow in it so much.
“climategate 2.0 is more like a Three Stooges marathon” :)
HollyStick,
I wonder who got to him?
That article is transparently insincere.
You also failed to link to this, showing your own biases pretty clearly:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/11/two-year-old-turkey/
Strange. I don’t seem to be able to find Real Climate’s link to this discussion either. I trust you have publicly berated Schmidt equally soundly?
“Without going into too much gory detail, these mails reveal a lot of the same combination of ignorance and arrogance as we saw the first time around.”
Perhaps more. For sheer nasty ill-intent it’s hard to top Mann’s email in which he proposes hiring a private investigator to ruin McIntyre. Now bear in mind Mann very likely knows damn well that Mc. motivations have nothing to do with “big oil.” It’s all about getting back at the guy for attacking his precious hockey stick. Truth doesn’t matter anymore. Forget science. This is entirely personal. And disturbingly vicious.
Provide an exact quote and the context for this allegation: “he proposes hiring a private investigator to ruin McIntyre”.
You can’t of course, because it is a lie. Talk about dishonest and vicious behaviour. Why don’t you do a little research before spreading lies?
email #1680
date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:03:05 -0400
from: “Michael E. Mann”..
subject: Re: Something not to pass on
to: Phil Jones
Phil,
I would not respond to this. They will misrepresent and take out of context anything you give them. This is a set up. They will certainly publish this, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary that you provide. s They are going after Wei-Chyung because he’s U.S. and there is a higher threshold for establishing libel. Nonetheless, he should
consider filing a defamation lawsuit, perhaps you too.
I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.
I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and discrediting them….
——————
What’s the difference between a ‘private investigator’ and an ‘investigative journalist’. In the UK from recent revelations there seems to be none. In the US it might be Humphrey Bogart as opposed to Robert Redford?
That would be so fitting if true. Here is a guy, McIntyre, with all sorts of connections to the resource exploitation industries, who always claims that he is doing this on his own dime. And all in the name of science. Yet, any idiot can see that the mitigation strategies for AGW and the current oil depletion crisis are exactly the same, i.e. get off of our unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels. So the strategy is to place all of the FUD on the AGW side of things and completely ignore the oil depletion side. Of course, Canada has got all those tar sands that his mining colleagues can make a fortune off of, so it makes sense not to say much about oil depletion.
In fact, in this world, north of the border, there is no issue with oil depletion. And there is no issue with the poor Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) on tar sands either. What’s the big deal that you have to burn up about the energy equivalent of 2/3 of a barrel of natural gas to crack a barrel of oil away from the tar sands, plus lots of water. Which means that the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere is almost doubled from that of processing conventional crude. That is simple EROEI math, and is essentially the same argument that one uses to point out how hopeless corn-based ethanol is a gasoline replacement.
So why do people do this if it is so inefficient? This is in fact very easy to understand. Prospectors and resource explorers have always been gamblers at heart. They invest all their chips and hope to make a killing. I came up with an interesting analogy to these absurdly low EROEI fossil fuel resources we are in the middle of exploiting. Let’s say you happened across a broken slot machine in Las Vegas. You put in $1 and out pops $10. It happens three times in a row. Would you keep putting in the coin until someone stopped you? Or would you walk away with only $30? No, you keep going. That is exactly what is happening in the tar sands fields. The operators realize that they can keep on using up the natural gas to make a heck of a lot more money on processed crude oil than trying to sell NG. Construct that pipeline down to the states and they are set for life, or at least until the natural gas runs out, or until they start to cannibalize the oil from the tar sands for processing energy to get to the last bit they can.
Who knows if this will have a significant impact on AGW, but that is the business model.
Happy Canadian Thanksgiving. They beat us to the punch.
You evidently know very little about the natural resources or business.
BTW, how do you make your puritanical living?
Of course I am not an insider, but I occupy that analysis world because everyone else has deserted it. If you can find anything wrong with my analysis in The Oil Conundrum, I would be happy to hear about it. The EROEI analysis starts on page 360.
Oh my, what a fail, you don’t even know how Puritanism evolved do you? Check this out by Monbiot, which I remember reading several years ago:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/09/usa.comment
That’s who came over from the Mayflower.
@web hub telescope
‘Of course I am not an insider, but I occupy that analysis world because everyone else has deserted it’
Is that why you refuse to have any of your ‘analysis’ peer-reviewed or properly published? Because your work is so ground breaking and fresh that you have no peers? Or because it is not fit for publication?
Like Joe Lalonde never actually p…s in the pot?
@WHT, definitions of Puritanism aside, I believe the question of how you make your living remains unaddressed. So, what is the source of your sustainability?
Latimer Alder does not understand how open access to research publications works. I don’t mind having to make reference to the open access publication of my book The Oil Conundrum. This resides on Google Docs for free online reading or download as a PDF whereby anybody can peer-review it to their heart’s content.
It certainly is fit for publication and has been peer-reviewed through online discussion at my blog and at The Oil Drum over the course of the last several years. You are pretty naive not to realize that what I am doing is the way forward for meat&potatoes research. This type of publication has the advantage of providing immediate information for others that are applying similar analyses.
That is OK if you are very confused by this approach because it allows me to elaborate a bit more.
At some point I could conceivably start breaking out individual chapters and having those published as individual research articles. And I could easily get my previous publisher John Wiley to publish this as a conventional book, but I thought: why not take a shot at presenting it this way? It can get further peer review and I can add modifications should people point out errors.
My original blog http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com has been operational since 2004, and this concentrated on oil depletion issues. When I thoroughly touched on all the oil depletion topics I could through a discipline of daily research and blog documentation, I decided to compile all the individual posts into a compendium which is the link above. This gave blog readers the chance to watch the weekly progress and contribute in any way they could, and then when it came time for a comprehensive review, I could synthesize and edit those posts into a comprehensive narrative.
I have stopped updating that blog because now (and in retrospect) it seems fitting to leave it as a scientific notebook that went into the writing of that particular document.
I am now working on a spin-off blog linked to my old blog, which expands the scope to include more focussed research on climate science. If I continue on with this, I will end up likely doing the same thing with those posts. So if you don’t like it fine, but that is my business model, write about interesting stuff and puzzle piece it together. It’s essentially a hobby of mine; some people prefer to edit Wikipedia articles, but this is the way I like to spend my time.
@web hub telescope
Thanks
In the extremely unlikely event that I suddenly develop even a passing interest in oil depletion, I will know where to look.
Normal programming will now be resumed at CLIMATE Etc
You don’t occupy this place, Latimer Alder. The Etc. in the name of this blog is intentional from what I can gather. She realizes this is a systems problem we face, bounded by all the uncertainties of the contextual environment. If you want to talk only about hockey stick all the time, go to McIntyre’s hovel.
I bet you are fun at parties.
‘Hi Webbie, how’s tricks?’
‘I’m really concerned about oil depletion’
‘sure but ain’t it a lovely day?’
‘it would be even nicer if I weren’t so worried about oil depletion’
‘been out and about anywhere?’
‘just to an oil depletion conference with myself’
‘you should maybe meet some new people to broaden your outlook a bit’
‘no point. I’d never be able to visit them on 30 years because there’ll be no oil’
‘How’d those counselling sessions go for your OCD’
‘Bad. The counsellor wasn’t interested in the details of oil depletion at all. I stopped going and went back to my website’
‘Well, have nice day …I must be on my way’
‘Wish I could say the same…but the oil depletion will get you too’
‘F..k the oil depletion. I;m off for a strong martini…….’
groan … sockpuppet applies psychological framing techniques .. how predictable.
Holly,
You are running out of room.
“Now bear in mind Mann very likely knows damn well that Mc. motivations have nothing to do with “big oil.””
That’s not what Mann says in the email. Aren’t we supposed to be taking what they say in the emails at face value because it’s “what they really think”?
You’re right, lolwut. Despite there being absolutely no connection between McIntyre and “big oil”, Mann has consistently levelled the same, unwavering, completely unsubstantiated and laughably twisted accusation at McIntyre. Along with what must be an impaired insight/thought disorder, there appear to be some interaction problems too. One would be forgiven for wondering if there is an issue of psychosis here. Some colleagues seem to me to have formed a rather similar view, reading this latest email release.
Where has Mann done so? Provide citations and links.
At 11:14 19/10/2003 -0400, Michael E. Mann wrote:
FYI–thought you guys should have this (below). This guy “McIntyre” appears to be yet
another shill for industry–he appears to be the one who forwarded the the scurrilous
“climateskeptic” criticisms of the recent Bradley et al Science paper.
Here is an email I sent him a few weeks ago in response to an inquiry. It appears, by
the way, that he has been trying to break into our machine (“multiproxy”). Obviously,
this character is looking for any little thing he can get ahold of. The irony here, of
course, is that simple composites of proxy records (e.g. Bradley and Jones; Mann and
Jones, etc) give very similar results to the pattern reconstruction approaches (Mann et
al EOF approach, Rutherford et al RegEM approach), so anyone looking to criticize the
basic NH temperature history based on details of e.g. the Mann et al ’98 methodology
are misguided in their efforts…
The best that can be done is to ignore their desperate emails and, if they manage to
slip something into the peer-reviewed literature, as in the case of Soon & Baliunas,
deal w/ it as we did in that case–i.e., the Eos response to Soon et al—they were
stung badly by that, and the bad press that followed.For those of you who haven’t seen
it, I’m forwarding an interesting email exchange from John Holdren of Harvard that I
got the other day. He summarized the whole thing very nicely, form an independent
perspective…
Cheers,
mike
p.s. I’m setting up my email server so that it automatically rejects emails from the
“usual suspects”. You might want to do the same. As they increasingly get automatic
reject messages from the scientists, they’ll start to get the picture…
Holly, you are so predictable. Mann et al are really guilty of scientific misconduct. Have you read McShane and Wyner on this? If not, I will not take you seriously. Whenever climate science encounters rigorous statistical analysis, they emerge losers.
Good one Steve.
#4742 is a gas too.
Mosher, where is your link? And you appear to be quoting from a stolen private email stating as a private opinion that McIntyre appears to be an industry shill. I myself consider that opinion to be most perspicacious.
Where are the repeated public accusations that Simon claims Mann has made against McIntyre? Simon, prove your claims or admit to bearing false witness.
Hmmmm. Is Holdren’s email in this tranche or the next?
===============
Holly, emails cannot be stolen unless they are removed from the computer and made unavailable to the owner. The email in question was copied.
Whether or not that copying is a crime is yet to be determined. If the person who copied the email was say… Briffa, who was known to have copied mails and brought them home, then the case would be very interesting.
Phil,
I would not respond to this. They will misrepresent and take out of
context anything you give them. This is a set up. They will certainly
publish this, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary that you
provide. s They are going after Wei-Chyung because he’s U.S. and there
is a higher threshold for establishing libel. Nonetheless, he should
consider filing a defamation lawsuit, perhaps you too.
I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an
investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his
thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the
same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.
I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and
discrediting them.
Phil,
I would immediately delete anything you receive from this fraud.
You’ve probably seen now the paper by Wahl and Ammann which independently exposes
McIntyre and McKitrick for what it is–pure crap. Of course, we’ve already done this on
“RealClimate”, but Wahl and Ammann is peer-reviewed and independent of us. I’ve attached
it in case you haven’t seen (please don’t pass it along to others yet). It should be in
press shortly. Meanwhile, I would NOT RESPOND to this guy. As you know, only bad things
can come of that. The last thing this guy cares about is honest debate–he is funded by
the same people as Singer, Michaels, etc…
Other than this distraction, I hope you’re enjoying the holidays too…
talk to you soon,
mike
err More holly? you know that Singer is funded by Oil.
so you have mann calling Mcintyre a fraud. You have him syaing that he is a shill for industry. you have him identifying that industry as fossile fuels and the same people who fund Singer.. Oil.
Questions?
I love when idiots who never read the mails challenge me.
My favorite Holly is Mann accusing McIntyre of scientific fraud.
Of course he does this private.
Of course he relays this falsehood on to a journalist
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2005 15:52:53 -0500
To: Andy Revkin
From: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: Re: FW: “hockey stock” methodology misleading
Hi Andy,
The McIntyre and McKitrick paper is pure scientific fraud. I think you’ll find this
reinforced by just about any legitimate scientist in our field you discuss this with.
#####
of course the actually literature and subsequent studies show otherwise.
of course Mann’s own friend reran McIntyre’s code and got the same answer
of course Tom Wigley thought it had to be answered.
And this paper that was supposedly a fraud? it could only be answered by breaking IPCC rules.. and then covering that up by denying FOIA requests.
Want more
Mosher, what, this 2005 paper?:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/02/dummies-guide-to-the-latest-hockey-stick-controversy/
The one Wegman copied bits of instead of checking for errors?
http://deepclimate.org/2010/10/25/the-wegman-report-sees-red-noise/
Bad example .
Stevie,
You’re no more a lawyer than you are a climate scientist. Try to stick to ignorance in your primary field of interest, please.
You know Holly and Robert, this is a very odd position to take. The law is after all distinct from morality and truth. Was it illegal to aid fugative slaves in 1850? Yes. Was it immoral? No. Legalism is a rather desparate attempt to distract from the real issues exposed by the emails.
Some may recoil at use of the word “liar”. While Mann certainly has a track record of stating as fact things which are completely unsupported by evidence – for example his assertions about McIntyre being a Big Oil shill, or his assertions about, oh I dunno, the veracity/integrity of his own paleo reconstructions – I am sure there’s another word in the English language besides “liar” to describe him.
Damned if I can think of it, though.
It is not really lying. It is no different than believing someone is process by demons. If you compare, “Merchants of Doubt’ to the rational of False prophets in various religions you see that there is a rational justification for invoking “Big Oil” based on belief.
“Believers” is more appropriate than may think, which creates the “deniers” group think.
See, I actually read some of Dr. Curry’s physiological posts. There seems to be a human need to believe in something evil to counter balance good. They all need analysis of a different kind.
Captain
How true !
My work is as Director of the national centre for climate change research, a job which requires me to translate my Christian belief about stewardship of God’s planet into research and action. – Mike Hulme/Climategate 2
He clearly hears ‘the voices’.
And there I was thinking it was to do with the documentary evidence of “Big Oil” and power companies (not even a very good scientist according to the emails) financing the likes of Pat Michaels and many of the same sockpuppet think tanks (or their sub-think tanks) to do what many of the same think tanks and paid shills were doing to curb tobacco and CFC regulation. Thanks for the physiological (?) insights.
Each side of any debate has it’s sockpuppets and shills.
If I add up all the deaths every year attributable to some evil industrial group we are somehow all dead. Yet, global population continues to climb.
GO figure.
Bowers: I did several skeptical studies for the American Petroleum Insitute and a bunch for the coal burners, who are my heroes. Doing my bit to protect America from the fool greens (such as you sound like). How does that make me a shill? I sincerely believe you folks are a menace ot society.
LOL, there is enough junk science to go around. I am sure many in business consider environmentalists the devil incarnate. It can be a bit of a stumbling block since not everyone can be right, though there may be a bit of the devil in everyone :)
“And there I was thinking”
I thought I could smell burning.
Yo Cap’n
How, pray-tell, does one get process[ed] by demons! :->
LOL the same way the auto-spell correction possess my keyboard by some mystical process :)
If you want to call allegers liars, we have lots of those here.
If you believe it it is not a lie, merely a falsehood.
M. carey
Are you speaking for yourself?
Max
My comment was liar bait. Sometimes few fish are biting.
It occurred to me this morning while rereading Oliver Twist, that Charles Dickens himself, a great master of creating colorful villains, would have had a hard time competing with the likes of Mann and Pachauri.
Meanwhile, the new peer reviewed study showing that climate sensitivity to Co2 has been exaggerated is getting noticed, and not just by skeptical sites. Revkin put up a post on it, and the L.A. Times has an article. I’m sure there are others..
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/25/new-study-in-science-shows-climate-sensitivity-is-overhyped/
All in all, it’s been a damn good week for we deniers.
us deniers :-)
[Somehow this ended up in the wrong place, so am reposting]
pokerguy
The Schmittner paper you cited is interesting. It concludes that the IPCC model-based estimates for 2xCO2 climate sensitivity are exaggerated.
But a key comment in the paper tells me that even the estimates of Schmittner’s models are very likely to be exaggerated, as well:
uncertainty levels may be underestimated because the model simulations did not take into account uncertainties arising from how cloud changes reflect sunlight, Schmittner said.
So correcting for this omission could well get us down to the same levels as projected by Spencer or Lindzen based on CERES and ERBE satellite observations (which included the impact of clouds reflecting incoming solar radiation).
Max
Agreed Max. And yet even as things stand, this strikes me as quite a significant paper. The conclusions go to the heart of the alarmist case in a direct, easy to grasp way. That some in the MSM are picking it up would seem to underscore that…
Pokerguy – The touting of this paper by some segments of the blogosphere illustrates to me the problem that arises when secondary sources are used to justify a set of opinions rather than a visit to the original reports. This is particularly true with cherry picked examples such as this one.
I think the Schmittner et al paper is worth reading, although there are some significant problems with the interpretation. However, it’s also worth noting that a similar recent study undertaken since the IPCC AR4 report was not mentioned in the blogs and media. That study by Holden et al arrives at a different ECS range, 2.6 – to4.4 C, with a peak probability of 3.6 C. For an accurate perspective, it would be necessary to read both papers. For more on this, please see my earlier comment.
Cherry picking remains the bane of the blogosphere, at least on climate change.
Fred,
If your gripe is cherry picking, you have to admit that liberal newspapers do not generally publish findings that weaken the case for global warming. I appreciate your bringing the other study to my attention but in my opinion, the meta-“news” here is not that there’s a competing study. It’s that the LA Times dutifully reported on something that makes the “C” in CAGW sound a little less scary.
Hey Fred, try reading Tyndall, the original source behind IR “absorption”.
@simon
‘being economical with the actualite’?
‘disingenuous’?
‘having severe difficulty with the application of the truth concept’?
best of all
‘shyster’
Thank god you’re still here Latimer. Been away for all kinds of family reasons. Same old “see nothing” BS on display. Gotta ask yourself if we’re finding out more about the human capacity to shut out reason and run with the herd than we are about climate science!
I think we are seeing just what happens when a group of nerds are surprisingly given a lot of power and influence and as simultaneously freed from almost any of the normal restrictions that place limits on their behaviour. Suddenly these ill-prepared backroom boys become Masters of the Universe.
Way back when, William Golding wrote ‘The Lord of the Flies’ which covered the same ground. I studied it for O level many years ago and didn’t really understand it. But a lot of what he wrote seems to have come true (with less direct violence) among the Climatology Cabal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies
Latimer Alder on November 25, 2011 at 9:29 pm draws a comparison between the AGW fraudsters inhabiting their little island of government-funded, politician-pampered “power and influence […] freed from almost any of the normal restrictions that place limits on their behaviour” as evoking William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), which Mr. Alder had been assigned in secondary school.
Don’t bet on “less direct violence” as the result of these junk science jerkwads having gone juramentado on government graft and the perquisites of “advocacy.”
One of the effects of the anthropogenic global warming fraud has been the diversion of proven, developed arable farmland, fertilizers, machinery, and manpower to the hideous boondoggle of “fuel ethanol,” the international impact of which has been seen in the present bloodshed and political destabilization of the “Arab Spring.”
The national economies of the Sandbox are precariously dependent upon the importation of cereal grains in order to provide the people thereof with their basic and utterly critical calorie intake. The most efficient and productive agricultural sector in the Middle East – in Israel, naturally – cannot meet more than about 40-50% of their national population’s requirements for dietary carbohydrates. Imagine how bad it is in the Camel Jockey countries.
It’s all got to be imported, and guess where the world’s greatest and most critically important sources of wheat happen to be?
Why, they’re in First World countries where government subsidization – in the name of addressing “global warming” – has been turning the best wheat-producing resources to the production of corn (maize) not for human consumption or animal feed but to fermentation into wasteful, inefficient, objectively unsatisfactory EtOH.
The conditions long predisposing to the Arab Spring civil unrest (and civil wars) are not directly due to the AGW fraud, but this “fuel ethanol” crap has sure as hell triggered the bomb. Scarcity in the international cereal grains markets has been steadily pushing up prices even in the kleptocratic Arab autocracies’ government-subsidized markets, and it’s not just unemployment and suppression of personal freedoms that kindled the conflagrations we’ve been seeing over the past year.
Those demonstrations in Tahrir Square and Benghazi and Tunis and Daraa and Douma have been – in spite of our incompetent “mainstream” media clowns’ failure to perceive it – very much food riots, and these spasms of bloodshed have been at least indirectly due to Dr. Mann and Dr. Briffa and Dr. Trenberth and Prof. Jones and their “climate science” co-conspirators peddling the pack of flagrant lies we all know and love as the gaudy “global warming” whoop-te-do.
Actions have consequences, and only liars and idiots evade acknowledgement thereof.
Spare the rod and spoil the child. They need to do kitchen chores right for awhile. That will buck them up in a bit. Then they can move on to their new jobs. The state has whole departments for such things already set up to help retrain people, though the recidivism rate remains too high.
How about perennial promulgator of self-serving post-modernist pap? Nah … that doesn’t quite cut it, either, does it?!
In Oz politics, politicians can’t call each other liars, so they say “he is being economical with the truth.”
An old British expression. Another one was to describe a minister who appeared drunk in parliament or at a public function as being “tired and emotional.”
The problem with any euphemism (such as “mentally retarded,” which had been devised as a weasel-word substitute for “moron” and “imbecile” and “idiot” and “Republican”) is that as the connotation gains broad currency, everybody knows just what the hell it signifies, and it takes on pejorative connotation and the purpose of the evasion is defeated.
All sorts of euphuisms have been coined to frustrate the House Rules of the Westminster System, which forbid members impugning other members’ character, and therefore the accusation of lying. My favourite is “the Member for x has uttered a terminological inexactitude”.
number?
I believe he said a shill of industry, didn’t he? If so, do “industry” and “big oil” mean exactly the same thing?
Provide evidence. You are just throwing around false accusations.
Holly,
Can you believe the nerve of these skeptics?
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-leak.html
;)
Holly your answers are up thread. have fun
“Mendacious” is a word sometimes used.
+1
On the one hand it’s encouraging at least that some of these guys are disturbed by the lack of ethics among their fellow team members. On the other hand, how could it be otherwise?. And where are they in a public sense? Their cowardice is unspeakable, especially given how high the stakes are. I honestly don’t understand how these people sleep at night.
The CRU is staffed with people from third rate universities.
The problem comes from the top, a certain Professor Acton. If he had behaved as a proper academic, he would have demanded a far reaching investigation, as would happen in other branches of science (especially Medicine). Instead he promoted Jones to “Director of Research”, having been cleared by numerous investigations.
If the CRU were subject to a proper, forensic investigation, I think it is unlikely that it would survive being asked to produce the data and code on which its collective conclusions are based.
In my view the CRU is a disgrace to UK science, and they dishonour those scientists who have paid their dues in difficult fields. In any proper university Jones would have been sacked.
Those who are not from the UK should realise that the Univerity of East Anglia is a third rate establishment and the behaviour of its senior members confirm this.
Please do not judge the UK by the University of East Angkia.
RCS – I sympathise with your sense of embarrassment on behalf of UK science, but as I see it the CRU is merely a glaring example of the unfortunate global truth that climate “science”, by making up its own flaccid, prize-for-every-child and don’t-talk-about-null-results version of the Scientific Method, has made itself a magnet for mediocrities. The snarkiness we see when they confront critics of their work arises from the fact that many of them, in their hearts, know it.
I am still hugging myself with glee about Phil Jones’s admission that he doesn’t know how to use Excel, and so is completely useless when Harry_Read_Me is off campus.
In any other environment where figures are involved, this failure would mean unemployability, not a frigging Peace Prize.
Scientists usually employ specialized software analysis and visualization tools, not Excel. Glee fail.
Be nice. Obviously anything that showed fraud or unethical behavior would have been released two years ago. They had nothing then, and are now desperately trying to gin up interest in the the dregs of the nothing at the bottom of the great big bowl of nothing they have been spinning fantasies about for years.
You can’t expect too much.
Survey the scientists you know. I’m betting the vast majority knw how to use excel, even if it isn’t their primary analysis tool. Somewhere in their education and careers it was, and they haven’t forgotten how to use it.
Jones’ admission is very telling on his status as a “scientist”. Imagine Steve Jobs admitting he didn’t know how to use iTunes…
@Robert says “Obviously anything that showed fraud or unethical behavior would have been released two years ago.”
Guess you’ve never heard of the expression “give someone enough rope to hang themselves.”
The thing about people who lie and participate in cover-ups is they are best exposed a bit at a time… give them something to react to, let them spin their tales, then release more information that illustrates their lack of honesty and integrity. No one truly interested in causing change would release everything at once.
But dream on if you like.
Yeah right. But you’d expect somebody who is in a senior position as a ‘scientist’ to be able to read the f….g help text for the most widely used analysis tool on the f…g planet.
And as the grant holder from the US Department of Energy, I bet he has to make some sort of return to them about how he has spent their money. I bet Excel s involved.
Quiz question…to any passing readers;
Can you use Excel to plot a trend? Yes or no?
I can, and I am not even a junior academic scientist
I don’t see how that describes stealing and then publicizing a big nothing, and then waiting two years to release yet more nothing.
Thanks, though, for underscoring the fact that the thief is a manipulative propagandist, uninterested in openness, circulating the fruits of the theft to try and discredit scientist whose work they don’t like. :)
Then why did he not use that to do a simple fit. I know how to use about six different programs to do this.
The interesting admission here is your admission that you have no idea what a scientist does. Apparently you’ve confused them with software designers.
Please explain what it is that a ‘scientist’ in a senior position and curator of one of (supposedly) world’s most importnat data sets does that means it is not hilariously incompetent of him not to be able to use the world’s most widely used ‘numbers’ package.
Or at least to be able to push the F1 key,find the ‘Help’ and follow his nose.
This guy is supposed to be one of the top scientists in the field of data analysis (for that is all he does). But it seems he couldn’t fill in an expense claim without help.
So what is it exactly about his job that means he shouldn’t have the same basic skill that a 16 year old school leaver with a couple of GCSEs would be expected to have?
As soon as I get your check in the mail, I’d be happy to to tutor you.
In the meantime, don’t you think you should learn what a scientist does before you reach conclusions about how well they are doing their jobs?
Your ignorance is not a superpower.
@robert
‘In the meantime, don’t you think you should learn what a scientist does before you reach conclusions about how well they are doing their jobs?’
Well, this latest tranche from the treasure trove has been very revealing about what this particular set of ‘scientists’ get up to. And pretty distasteful some of it is. So I have learnt a lot.
But I think you really meant that I should consider what a scientist is supposed to do, not what this bunch of whackos actually do.
And a good general ability to use IT should be a necessary skill for any scientist. Or indeed a junior clerical worker. But especially one whose sole purpose is life is as curator of datasets.
Latimer — Quiz question…to any passing readers;
Can you use Excel to plot a trend? Yes or no?
No. I certainly can’t. I make the toys; I don’t have time to use stuff intended for accountants. And I’ve been an electronics/software engineering pro since before excel existed.
Your argument is rubbish. Jones needs to know how to do math, not demonstrate proficiency in following directions suited for bean counters.
RC S, I am afraid that universities are going to be found to behave much more like what we are seeing in climate science in other areas.
P.E. | November 24, 2011 at 2:06 pm |
… but why are the research scientists themselves getting sucked into politics?
—————————————————————————————–
GOVERNMENT FUNDING, AND THEIR ADDICTION TO AN EVER GROWING SUPPLY OF IT…
Research scientists are being sucked into politics to the extent that a group of right-wingers have declared war on science.
Climate deniers have forced scientists to participate in the public discourse to correct the lies, distortions, and slander deniers traffic in.
I’m sure they would much rather do their research in peace.
Sorry but to many kept their mouths shut for to long within the climate science community while various people but most of their efforts in advocacy not science. I don’t there now can be any ‘rowing back’ for having spent years telling the people the science was ‘settled’ and attacking anyone who suggested otherwise , do they really thin people will just forget that ?
Judith, I look forward to your insights (after Thanksgiving) on this new set of data points. Particularly as you seem to be subject mattr in some of them.
Here’s an email you won’t see skeptics quote. I am beginning to think most of the emails are inconvenient for the skeptics. I should quote a few.
Skeptics have been laboring under the premise that what is contained in these emails are the scientists true thoughts, what they really believe behind closed doors.
“One of the tactics of the skeptics is to create the impression among nonscientists, especially journalists, that the entire science of
climate change rests on the flimsy foundation of one or two lines of
evidence, so that casting doubt on that foundation ought to bring
down the entire structure. For temperature, that approach is clearly
behind the attacks on the “hockey stick” curve over the last 1,000
years or the satellite vs. in situ differences over the last 25
years. Refuting the errors of the papers by Soon and Baliunas or by
McIntyre and Mckitrick doesn’t faze these people. They just shift
their ground and produce another erroneous attack. Their goal is not
to advance the science, but to perpetuate the appearance of
controversy and doubt.
I don’t think the skeptics should be allowed to choose the
battlefield, and I certainly don’t think the issue of whether
anthropogenic influences are a serious concern should be settled by
looking at any single data set. I do think the IPCC TAR was right to
stress that you simply can’t plausibly make GCMs replicate the
instrumental record without including GHGs (and aerosols). I also
think the recent AGU and AMS public statements, which you will
doubtless find on their web sites, are right on target. Many of us
were pleasantly surprised that our leading scientific societies have
recently adopted such strong statements as to the reality and
seriousness of anthropogenic climate change. There really is a
scientific consensus, and it cannot be refuted or disproved by
attacking any single data set.
I also think people need to come to understand that the scientific
uncertainties work both ways. We don’t understand cloud feedbacks.
We don’t understand air-sea interactions. We don’t understand
aerosol indirect effects. The list is long. Singer will say that
uncertainties like these mean models lack veracity and can safely be
ignored. What seems highly unlikely to me is that each of these
uncertainties is going to make the climate system more robust against
change. It is just as likely a priori that a poorly understood bit
of physics might be a positive as a negative feedback. Meanwhile,
the climate system overall is in fact behaving in a manner consistent
with the GCM predictions. I have often wondered how our medical
colleagues manage to escape the trap of having their entire science
dismissed because there are uncured diseases and other remaining
uncertainties. Maybe we can learn from the physicians.
People on airplanes, when they find out what I do for a living,
usually ask me if I “believe in” global warming. It’s not religion,
of course. What I actually tend to believe in, if they really wanted
to try to understand, is quantum mechanics. CO2 and CH4 and all
those other interesting trace gases have more than two atoms, and
that fact simply has inescapable consequences. You just can’t keep
adding those GHG molecules indefinitely without making the atmosphere significantly more opaque in the IR. The “debates” in the reputable research community are all quantitative. If skeptics don’t worry about doubling, they ought to be pressed to tell us why they are
unconcerned about tripling or quadrupling or worse. That’s where the
planet is headed. The fact that remote sensing and model building
are hard work, and that much remains to be done, shouldn’t be allowed
to obscure the basic obvious facts.”
So much for it all being a communist conspiracy theory.
“One of the tactics of the skeptics is to create the impression among nonscientists, especially journalists, that the entire science of
climate change rests on the flimsy foundation of one or two lines of
evidence..
It doesn’t. It relies more on one line of shared code: CO2 *2 = 3C.
Hang on, maybe I’m missing some sarc/ but isn’t there a new paper today saying:
… “likely” (66% probability) to lie between 1.7 and 2.6 degrees, and “very likely” (90% probability) to lie between 1.4 and 2.8 degrees, with a best estimate of around 2.2 or 2.3 °C. Our estimate of the warming effect of CO2 is therefore on the low end of, and less uncertain than, the currently accepted IPCC range.
http://newscience.planet3.org/2011/11/24/interview-with-nathan-urban-on-his-new-paper-climate-sensitivity-estimated-from-temperature-reconstructions-of-the-last-glacial-maximum/
There was some sarc/. I guess they have a new (hopefully better) model.
On the other hand, perhaps buried in most existing models lies something like that equation. Climate models have to start somewhere, and in the early days CO2 was just about the only thing anyone was concerned about in the models. So there must be an estimate. And it got borrowed for other models.
Hansen said recently “Their [the models] unanimity in this efficient mixing could be due to some shared ancestry in their code.” (see http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2011/10/25/1). He was talking about ocean heat mixing, but what else could be in the ‘shared ancestry’?
Not sure if this is sarc or not…;-)
Which e-mail..who from?
Usually it is better to offer the link and ID the data.
And since it is clear that the team went our of their way to ignore and suppress any mitigating or adverse data, your quote, if you did not simply fabricate it whole cloth, only shows more of the bias and arrogance of its author.
Weren’t there several e-mails where people admitted they had been unfair with the McIntyre papers? That is what is new and interesting.
If you actually look at the error bars on the direct and indirect aerosols and then look at the error bar on the total climate forcing, it is clear that things could be 50% worse than the average result or 1/3 as bad. So the errors are not symmetrical and there is a greater chance that it will be less bad rather than more bad ……. Of course, that’s just from the IPCC.
Very interesting comments here and I would ask a simple question. If political leaders can be held accountable (legally) for “crimes against humanity”, why not scientist? If in fact, as is obvious to anyone who is not blinded by an elitist mentality that excuses the inexcusable, a group of scientist conspire to fraudulently mislead governments and the public and as the result of this fraud peoples die and vast resources are squandered, why shouldn’t these people be prosecuted? A large segment of the climate science community it is very obvious has conspired to influence public policy in a direction which has not only been economically wasteful but has caused untold deaths due to their deceit.
It is easy to poo poo such talk but in any other endeavor there would be legal accountability for such practices, why is it that scientist seem to believe they are immune to societies retribution?
Consider just these two comments from the e-mails:
“I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,”
and
“Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC,”
What possible defense is there for people who not only participate in scientific manipulation and knowingly deceptive practices but also cover them up?
We do not need a restructuring of the IPCC, we need a criminal tribunal plain and simple.
The short answer is that “crimes against humanity” aren’t real statutory crimes. They come into play in wartime tribunals, not civil courts.
If that ever actually happens in the real world instead of in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy loons then maybe we will find out.
Jerry: If in fact, as is obvious to anyone who is not blinded by an elitist mentality that excuses the inexcusable, a group of scientist conspire to fraudulently mislead governments and the public and as the result of this fraud peoples die and vast resources are squandered, why shouldn’t these people be prosecuted?
Well, it may be “obvious” to some, but it is disputed by others. What are needed are actual crimes listed and actual evidence specific to the crimes. What we have, in my opinion, is evidence sufficient to support search warrants and grand jury investigations. Real investigations, with sworn testimony (under penalty of perjury) by individuals whose careers depend on ferreting out the truth, protecting recipients of government funds (e.g. the superficial Penn State “investigation” of Mann.)
Someone up above quoted the old saying “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” But really, where there’s “smoke” there’s “probable cause”. That is why I support Cuccinelli. I don’t see sufficient evidence for conviction of a crime, but I do see evidence to cut off funding to Mann pending a thorough investigation. That has been done to other research institutions on less evidence of wrongdoing.
To R C Saumarez,
There doesnt seem to be any finger pointing to the “Elders” of science for their activities. I refer to the Royal Society and their counterparts in other countries. Their official pronouncements seemed to dismiss underlying uncertainties. The MSM and politicians took the lead from them, not UEA , Jones etc. Did these august personages never feel any doubt? Did they never talk to the quiet achievers in the background and ask if there was any doubt?. Did they never do a bit of “back of envelope” investigation on their own?. The only “Elder” that spoke up (AFAIK) was Freeman Dyson.
Richard. Unfortunately the Royal Society has a history of involving itself in politics; one instance was the lightning conductor mess. Some members of these august bodies have tried to get them to change their dogged support of CAGW; unfortunately without success. I have had discussions with my MP here in Canada, and he makes a big issue of how can I possibly be correct, if ALL these august bodies say I am wrong. And it is very difficult to argue against this. Sometimes I try to speculate which of these societies will be the first to leave the sinking ship; my guess is the American Chemical Society.
Thanks a very much Juidth.
Is there a better statement that confirms the above statement than the following in ClimateGate 2?
The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out.
Judith, this has nothing to do science, which the seeking and reporting of the truth.
I see nothing really new in the emails, or at least nothing unexpected based on the content of the earlier batch. Maybe people are paying a little more attention to the explicit discussions of doubt/uncertainty in the messages. If those kinds of doubts/uncertainty could find their way into public discussions by climate scientists, that would be a healthy development for the field.
But I don’t think these email messages will have much real impact, especially WRT the truly important questions like what is Earth’s actual climate sensitivity. Based on the obvious lack of political consensus for draconian changes in energy use, especially in those developing countries where energy use is rising rapidly, it seems most likely that the big questions will be settled by how the Earth’s climate responds to substantial increases in atmospheric GHG forcing over the next two or three decades.
Scarcity and rising cost seem more likely to impact fossil fuel use during the next few decades than political action. Political action will depend on a public perception of negative effects actually outweighing benefits for fossil fuel use. It think it would be foolish to bet on that happening any time soon.
Searchable versions are posted at:
FOIA and at FOIA2011
Ho Ho Ho Bishop Hill highlights: Alex Kirby in email 4894 on the BBC’s neutrality.
Ho Ho Ho Bishop Hill highlights: Alex Kirby in email 4894 on the BBC’s neutrality.
Corrupting peer review and editors
What is particularly disturbing is how the emails expose the effort to corrupt the peer review process and coerce editors to be gatekeepers restricting access only to papers supportive of the “Team”‘s position. This is directly corrupting climate science and corrosive of the foundations of civilization. e.g., (bolding added)
Email #2272 (3)
.
2011 Email #2277 (1)
So these guys set out to slander and destroy E&E for daring to disagree with their opinions, and set out to do the same to specific scientists who failed to toe the line on their demands.
“slander and destroy”
From hunter, 9 minutes earlier:
“Taking Mann at face value, it is clear he is a bold deliberate liar.”
Well, it shows that it’s not a bot, a bot would have more internal consistency.
Quality never goes out of style.
Nick & Andrew,
Mann is destroying himself. He needs no help from me.
Sorry to see you guys failing in reading comprehension.
Funny how his way of “destroying himself” is to repeatedly humiliate hapless deniers like you.
Year into the witch hunt, Mann’s hockey stick is still bloodying the noses of deniers foolish enough to tangle with it.
Mann’s a world-class scientist, still widely respected, and deniers are now desperately trying to drum up attention to stolen e-mail from years ago.
You can whistle past the graveyard all you like, but the fact is that Mann have whipped your lil’ denier bottom into a cherry red orb of pain, and will continue to do so as long as you continue to challenge him, because he is way out of your league.