Home Arguments Software Resources Comments Translations About

Twitter RSS Posts RSS Posts RSS Posts Email Subscribe



Climate's changed before
It's the sun
It's not bad
There is no consensus
It's cooling
Models are unreliable
Temp record is unreliable
Animals and plants can adapt
It hasn't warmed since 1998
Antarctica is gaining ice
View All Arguments...


Username
Password
Keep me logged in
New? Register here
Forgot your password?

Latest Posts

Archives

Search Results

Skeptic arguments matching the search 'climategate':

Blog posts matching the search 'climategate':

Comments matching the search 'climategate':

  • " Please look at (and comment further upon) the thread Record high temperatures versus record lows" says KR. The trouble is the last comment on that thread, prior to KR, was made in 2009.

    In the meantime you eliminate my supposedly off subject posting showing a Chicago (read Midwest) trend that includes the 50s and 60s would probably show a declining temperature trend....while leaving up the trend from the 70s showing an upward trend....and identifying a new hockey stick!

    Climategate is looking good!
  • "1st)Your interpretation coincides with that of the "climategate mysticism", that is, phase 1: some words out of context are taken away and presented as a conspiratorial theory"

    sorry, but the words seem perfectly in the context - Trenberth was talking of the lack of warming of oceans and curiously, he said "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming" - I don't see out of which context it could be ?

    "; phase 2: the person behind the words make clear he/she didn't mean it that way; "

    he didn't say that IMHO. He said that it didn"t think that it meant that global warming has stopped - but nevertheless, he really said that there was a lack of warming in the observations - that required an explanation.

    I really don't see what worries you : there are obvious problematic observations (the lack of warming of the known heat sinks), and we need to find another explanation. That's a very current situation in science, so I don't see why you are so reluctant to understand that
  • "all in all he seems like a magnet for controversy as opposed to a productive researcher bent on expanding our envelope of knowledge. "

    It seems that rather than say 'lets test this hypothesis' immediate reaction is 'lets destroy the hypothesis'.

    From reading the climategate emails it’s possible to see this process in action. Here is just one example of what Tom Wigley thinks of the Soon paper (Re: letter to Senate - 1059005592.txt).

    "Here are some thoughts about the Soon issue, partly arising from talking to Ben."

    - does this mean he hasn't even read the paper???

    " I do not think it is enough to speak as individuals or even as a group of recognized experts.......What I think is necessary is to have the expressed support of both AGU and AMS. It would also be useful to have Harvard disassociate themselves from the work."

    - Lets get the whole of the establishment to come down on this work. Stalin or McCarthy would be proud of this. Keep in mind all this for one paper.

    "The only way to counter this crap is to use the biggest guns we can muster."

    - What's happened to testing hypothesis and debating the issues in publications and conferences.

    This is one of the most senior US climate scientists writing to 12 equally senior people. Acting to stifle alternative views through force rather than reason. All in all I’d say put your head above the parapet and you'll receive more than controversy.

    It's worth reading what the IOP think on this sort of matter in their submission to the UK government enquiry on the climategate emails.

    IOP

    Here's the section relevant to this issue.

    "There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific 'self correction', which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.
  • "But their free ride has come to an end, as the next few weeks on The Conversation will continue to show."

    Anyone know what this refers to?

    I've long wondered what we can do to hold deniers in politics and the media accountable... but when Monckton can walk into the U.S. Congress and flat out lie (and claiming that the temperature projection which he made up came from the IPCC was a flat out lie) without being charged for it you have to wonder if the people funding this effort don't have the power to prevent any consequences.

    Scientists standing up and calling out their colleagues and the deniers in politics is all well and good, but given that the deniers have already been making false denunciations of the same kind for years now it seems inevitable that they will respond by ratcheting up those attacks. Meanwhile half a dozen climate researchers are being 'investigated' by partisan hacks who accuse them of fraud and misappropriation of funds without any evidence whatsoever and then use freedom of information laws to demand e-mails in hopes of finding more quotations they can misrepresent as they did with 'Climategate'.

    What can really be done to hold deniers to account for what they are doing?
  • "Climategate and the subsequent IPCC-gates"? Oh that's just too funny for words. In spite of the attempts by the Right-Wing Media to get mileage out of the e-mails (obtained via a CRIMINAL ACT, I might add), the reality is that it turned out to be a massive storm-in-a-teacup. Even the most Right-Wing media outlets have since dropped the story-leaving just the Right-Wing conspiracy Websites to go on about it (which is essential for them given the lack of any contrary evidence to AGW). Similarly, all of the alleged errors of the IPCC-again highlighted by the Right-Wing press-have likewise proven to have precious little substance. The so-called "avalanche of skepticism" that you claim has actually ceased to materialize-all that happened was that the Denialists become even more convinced of the existence of this non-existent conspiracy. I'm just waiting to hear about when the hackers will be arrested & charged. I've almost no doubt that they have close links to the same organizations that give Oxygen to the likes of Watts, Plimer & Monckton.
  • "Climategate clearly proves that AGW is a myth invented by scientists looking to make a quick buck..."

    Great idea, except for the fact that "climategate" never happened. It was a hoax.
  • "Climategate clearly proves that AGW is a myth invented by scientists looking to make a quick buck..."

    Great idea, except for the fact that "climategate" never happened. It was a hoax:

    http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/08/muir-russell-climategate-climate-science
    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/14/tech/main6395192.shtml
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/14/AR2010041404001.html
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7097234.ece

    The "hide the decline" technique published in _Nature:_
    http://www.elmhurst.edu/~richs/EC/FYS/Mannetal.OriginalPaper.pdf
    http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/4/741/2008/cpd-4-741-2008.pdf
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692171/pdf/43XA8LK6PCMVMH9H_353_65.pdf

    The "lack of warming at the moment" study:
    http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final2.pdf
  • "ClimateGate" Fail.

    The nut of the article Phillipe cited:

    But a closer look at these polls and a new survey by my Political Psychology Research Group show just the opposite: huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it.

    In our survey, which was financed by a grant to Stanford from the National Science Foundation, 1,000 randomly selected American adults were interviewed by phone between June 1 and Monday. When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred.

    For many issues, any such consensus about the existence of a problem quickly falls apart when the conversation turns to carrying out specific solutions that will be costly. But not so here.

    Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent — but 76 percent.

    Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power.

    And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent).

    Thus, there is plenty of agreement about what people do and do not want government to do.

    Our poll also indicated that some of the principal arguments against remedial efforts have been failing to take hold. Only 18 percent of respondents said they thought that policies to reduce global warming would increase unemployment and only 20 percent said they thought such initiatives would hurt the nation’s economy. Furthermore, just 14 percent said the United States should not take action to combat global warming unless other major industrial countries like China and India do so as well.

    So the takeaway is that we see the usual incoherence about wanting to fix the problem but not personally wanting to pay for so doing, yet encouragingly most people seem to comprehend the fundamentals.

    Here's another recent survey:

    A U.S. national survey released Tuesday finds that public concern about global warming is increasing, with public belief that it is occurring rising to 61 per cent, up from 57 per cent since January. And 50 per cent of Americans believe the phenomenon is caused by people — an increase of three points.

    Fifty-three per cent of respondents now worry about the impact global warming will have (an increase of three points) and 63 per cent believe it will affect them personally (an increase of five points).

    Researchers believe that with a pickup in the economy and renewed consumer confidence, Americans' thoughts are returning to environmental issues. "The BP oil disaster is also reminding the public of the dark side of dependence on fossil fuels, which may be increasing support for clean energy policies," said Anthony Leisorowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, in a release.

    The survey was conducted by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities.

    The survey also found that 77 per cent of respondents support the regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant; 87 per cent want more funding for research into renewable energy sources and 83 per cent support tax rebates for consumers who purchase fuel-efficient vehicles and solar panels.

    The survey was conducted using an online panel of 1,024 American adults aged 18 and older between May 14 and June 1, 2010. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

    Global warming concerns rising in U.S.
  • "Climategate" summarized:

    When papers containing errors that scientists would flunk their undergraduate students for are published and used as political weapons against them, said scientists are likely to get very cranky. That's pretty much all that the hacked email messages proved.
  • "Contrarians alleged that the CRU scientists had manipulated temperature and tree ring data to support predetermined conclusions, that they had stonewalled Freedom of Information (FoI) requests for data"

    Actually it was the House of Commons who used the word "stonewalled" in this criticism of their actions:

    The report added that "scientists could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by aggressively publishing all their data instead of worrying about how to stonewall their critics." The committee criticised the university for the way that freedom of information requests were handled, and for failing to give adequate support to the scientists to deal with such requests.
    -------------
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy

    The idea that there is nothing to this is rather absurd:
    -------------
    Generally honest but frequently secretive; rigorous in their dealings with fellow scientists but often "unhelpful and defensive", and sometimes downright "misleading", when explaining themselves to the wider world. That was the verdict of Sir Muir Russell and his fellow committee members in their inquiry into the role of scientists at the University of East Anglia in the "climategate" affair.

    Many will find the report indulgent of reprehensible behaviour, particularly in peer review, where CRU researchers have been accused of misusing their seniority in climate science to block criticism. Brutal exchanges in which researchers boasted of "going to town" to prevent publication of papers critical of their work, and in which they conspired to blacklist journals that published hostile papers, were dismissed by Russell as "robust" and "typical of the debate that can go on in peer review".

    In the event, the inquiry conducted detailed analysis of only three cases of potential abuse of peer review. And it investigated only two instances where allegations were made that CRU scientists such as director Phil Jones and deputy director Keith Briffa misused their positions as IPCC authors to sideline criticism. On the issue of peer review and the IPCC, it found that "the allegations cannot be upheld", but made clear this was partly because the roles of CRU scientists and others could not be distinguished from those of colleagues. There was "team responsibility".


    The report is far from being a whitewash. And nor does it justify the claim of university vice-chancellor Sir Edward Action that it is a "complete exoneration". In particular it backs critics who see in the emails a widespread effort to suppress public knowledge about their activities and to sideline bloggers who want to access their data and do their own analysis.

    Most seriously, it finds "evidence that emails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them [under Freedom of information law]". Yet, extraordinarily, it emerged during questioning that Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this.

    Secrecy was the order of the day at CRU. "We find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness," says the report. That criticism applied not just to Jones and his team at CRU. It applied equally to the university itself, which may have been embarrassed to find itself in the dock as much as the scientists on whom it asked Russell to sit in judgment.
    -------------
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/jul/07/climategate-scientists

    Interesting to see that this "rebuttal" doesn't bother to mention the most serious charges- conspiring to blacklist journals that published papers that were hostile to them. I've seen one of the emails that directly discusses them plotting this. Any reason for the omission?

    Failure to recognize reprehensible behaviour on the part of those who are on ones' side of an issue, is a typical symptom of ideology driven reasons for holding that position.
    We are all of course allowed our beliefs but it doesn't help forwarding them when you insult the intelligence of those you're trying to convince to join you with yours. That is the purpose of progressive discourse after all, not denigrating or proving wrong those with opposing views, but showing yours are so attractive they adopt them as their own.

    To preempt the expected response that beliefs have nothing to do with this, it's science, let me furnish the lede in that GuardianUK piece:

    "The Russell review found the climate scientists had not lied – but failed to criticise them properly for corrupting a scientific process that demands complete transparency"
  • "How comes Wikipedia doesn't even mention the word divergence in their Hockey Stick controversy article? Is this divergence something that was somewhat hidden before ClimateGate, or is this something that has been discussed as part of the ClimateAudit work?"

    The divergence problem (along with various other uncertainties) was discussed well before Steve McIntyre began his crusade against climate science. See John's post "What do the hacked CRU emails tell us?"
    and note the following article.

    Not sure about the Wikipedia article, but my take is that it covers mostly the political controversy instigated by M&M.; It would be nice to update the Wikipedia article to include the fact that relevant issues such as the divergence problem were already documented in the peer-reviewed literature (some people seem to think McIntyre discovered this). Consider also that the original "hockey stick" graph contained a large uncertainty range, something consistent with a more pronounced MWP and LIA.

    See also the latest Mann et al. reconstruction.

    http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2008/mann2008.html

    thingadonta,

    "All that the final map, relative to the above discussion, shows, is show that the older proxies in the MWP are not picking up warmer temperatures the way modern instrumental methods do. "

    Well if one has already concluded that the MWP was warmer than today (based on?), that conclusion might make sense (keep in mind that reconstructions without tree rings reveals a similar pattern). I think there are many who badly want to believe that. Although it has no impact on greenhouse gas physics (although some might argue a more variable climate is a more sensitive one), if skeptics can show the MWP is equal or warmer than today, they think it will help convince folks that modern warming is entirely natural.
  • "It's really sad to see you guys cling to that as if you could continue to milk it for disinformation. The truth is, no one cares about Climategate anymore, except professional deniers and their clueless followers."

    It looks like Asteel's intemperate remarks are tolerated while my calling them is deleted.

    I am sensing serious bias in this moderation regime. John Cook - you need to sort this or serious debate will exit from this blog and you will be left preaching to the converted.

    Jean S has made an accurate and telling comment and Asteel's abuse will not mask it.
  • "Peer review process was corrupted"

    This is an argument I'm coming across more and more. Not so much with climategate, although that does come up, but with sceptics who say that climatologists and scientific organisations are lying about climate change to secure government funding. Where can I find evidence to debunk those allegations?
  • "So one year’s worth of climategate has given us exactly one typo ...."

    I'm sorry to have to say that no proper examination of the Himalayan glacier error could correctly sum it up as a 'typo'. There just might have been a typo somewhere between the uncertain source of this claim and its eventual publication in AR4 but that is beside the point - the IPCC not only repeated the obvious error, and ignored the warnings of an "IPCC author", but stubbornly stuck by the claim for 3(!) years:

    "Georg Kaser, an expert in tropical glaciology and a lead author for the IPCC, warned that the 2035 prediction was clearly wrong in 2006, months before the report was published. "This [date] is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude," he said." (The Guardian)

    ...which as anyone who followed this episode would be aware was but one of numerous times when the claim was questioned - not from skeptics - but from proper glaciologists. The IPCC response was two years too late, but more importantly, came after an embarrassing episode of dogmatic refusal to accept fallibility that has damaged the reputation of this important body.

    I think the customary high standard of rigour at Skeptical Science has slipped in this piece.
  • "The real scandal of 'Climategate' is the illegal smear campaign designed to distract people from the scientific reality of global warming."

    Smear campaigns are rarely illegal, particularly here in the US. I think the "illegal" bit is restricted to the theft of the e-mails ...

    Of course, denialists wouldn't be denialists if they didn't argue that the theft itself was illegal ...
  • "The Review took a similar approach, ..."

    Which review is being discussed here? There have been quite a few reviews of different aspects of the "climategate" non-sense so it's worth being clear.

    Albatross: I don't suppose it's that important but note that this article is talking about CRUTEM (which is the land-only dataset compiled by the Climatic Research Unit) and is only a component of the HadCRUT which also includes the sea-surface temperatures from the Hadley Centre.
  • "What do the 'Climategate' hacked CRU emails tell us?"

    It tells us what we already known since long; the science behind climate changes is far from well understood - if it was then it would not be any interesting Nature/Science articles left to write and the whole area would "degrade" into an engineering discipline taught as an academic subject at universities where one could graduate as a climate engineer. However we dont have any graduated climate engineers - only climate researches.
  • #14 Robert Way says @13:48 29 March "What they don't tell you is that going back to 1400 there are only 8 proxies so they do not include the data past 1550 because of the substantial reduction in the number of proxies"

    So why two years later in 2001 does Briffa choose to show a similar reconstruction extending back to 1400, with only 2 (TWO!) sites in 1402, 8 sites in 1500 and 19 sites in 1550?

    Perhaps because this reconstruction came out as desired?



    Figure 2. From Briffa et al 2001 (JGR) Plate 3, also showing the pre-deletion data used in Briffa-Osborn 1999 (magenta). The Briffa 2001 version ends in 1960 and has been extended using data from Climategate emails (showing the decline).
    ref: HIde the Decline, the Other Deletion
  • #2 dorlomin
    "The real damage of climategate was the press seeking to sell a controvesy rather than explain science. Amist one of the three strongest la Ninas for the past 60 years and very low solar activity we are still smaking straight into the 30 year average on the UAH dataset
    http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
    (as a measure of mid troposphere temps UAH and RSS tend to show a bigger swing through ENSO cycles)"
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Good observation, but I don't share your optimism, given the politicians who are moving into the US House of Representative, and State Capitals with their agenda.

    They, and the multimillion dollar lobbyists feeding them, are going to attack climate science with new plateaus of ruthlessness and public relations campaigns!

    So hang on, if you want to defend honest science it will be a rough ride, especially in Washington DC!
  • #29 (fydijkstra): How on earth has the CRU dataset all of a sudden become more reliable than the much beloved UAH dataset (that is even run by a skeptic).
    I thought brave skeptics proved the CRU data to be fraudulent in the Climategate scandal?

    Why is it that "skeptics" now all hail the CRU data to be the most accurate? This seems odd, what has changed?

    Could it have something to do with the fact that CRU don't cover the high Arctic, thus omitting the region that has warmed the fastest, by far, causing a rather large cold bias in the data?
  • #53 HumanityRules, we might disagree whether McIntyre a politically motivated or not, but even if you think he is not, there have been plenty of attacks that clearly are. For example, several years ago Rep. Joe Barton sent out letters demanding all sorts of material from Mann's employer, and the new and very radical right-winger Attorney General of Virginia has just done the same (Mann used to work at the U. of Virginia). Then there are all the blogosphere attacks on top of that.

    But you asked about McIntyre's criticism. The first I had heard of this whole issue was in 2005 when McIntyre and McKitrick had a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters that suggested an artificial hockey stick-like shape could be introduced by a feature of the Principal Component Analysis that Mann et al. used. But there were two comments published on the paper (I thought I remembered a third, but I can't find it). M&M; had replies to the comments but I found the replies to be weak, and I think the comments were on the mark. The comments both showed that while Mann et al were technically in error in their application of PCA, the error actually had little impact on the results. In fact, the analysis was later redone with the error corrected, and this was shown to be true -- the error had little impact. I found freely downloadable PDFs of the comments, links below (not sure about the replies).

    Von Storch and Zorita used climate models to generate a synthetic set of proxy data that they analyzed with the original and corrected method. The difference was not significant.

    Huybers showed that the reason M&M; found a significant artificial hockey stick effect was that M&M; themselves made a statistical error. Their Monte Carlo simulation were not adjusted to match the variance of the instrumental record. This led them to significantly overestimate the reduction of error statistic, and led to an exaggerated artificial hockey stick effect relative to the actual Mann et al. method. When Huybers corrected this error by M&M;, the M&M; code gave results very similar to Mann et al.

    Bottom line: yes, there was an error in the original 1998 paper, but it made almost no difference to the result. McIntyre claimed it made a big difference, but only because his own approach was in error and exaggerated the effect. The error has long since beeen corrected. There has also been a vigorous scientific debate about that 1998 paper, and in the whole field, and of course today the work being done has advanced quite a ways since then (improved methods, more data). But the result is still standing.
  • #58: "leaking by a whistleblower seems “more probable than not”"

    In one sentence, you say 'we don't know for sure'; in the next sentence, you've got a more probable outcome. Isn't that called a guess?

    In fact, nothing in the stolen e-mails or computer code undermines in any way the scientific consensus—which exists among scientific publications as well as scientists—that climate change is happening and humans are the cause. -- SciAm 4 Dec 2009

    Stolen. Not leaked. Let's don't conflate the two.
  • #9: "Overall, I bet the so-called skeptics are drooling at the possibility of this coming to pass,"

    JMurphy, you called it. Little did we know just how much drooling is going on. Here is RC reporting this story was a fraud:

    Coldest Winter in 1000 Years Cometh – not

    This claim circulates in the internet and in many mainstream media as well: Scientists have allegedly predicted the coldest winter in 1,000 years for Europe. What is behind it? Nothing – no scientist has predicted anything like it. A Polish tabloid made up the story. ...

    The “climate sceptics” website WUWT, noted for their false reports, takes up the RT piece, presents it together with The Voice of Russia and mentions „Mikhail Kovalevski“. Watts seems to be the bridge for the story´s crossing into the western media.

    And the stampede was led by the drooler-in-chief. Makes you wonder about just how the so-called 'Climategate' propagated so quickly, too.
  • .
    #43 Tom Dayton

    Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html#ixzz0gh3ygxsK
  • 1) People might want to read about Jim Tozzi and the Data Quality Act in Chris Mooney's "The Republican War on Science." It is a well-established tactic to try to consume scientists' time to lessen the amo8unt of inconvenient research done. As usual, the tobacco guys led the way.

    2) If people want to talk about defamation and typical steps in starting defamation proceedings, I'd observe that Canada (where McIntyre is) and Australia (where Karoly is located) are not identical, but are certainly more similar than they are to US or differently to UK. See CCC p.184 or as a start the Wikipedia reference.

    Even better would be to read "the book": Canadian Libel and Slander Actions, by Roger D. McConchie and David A. Potts, 1000 pages. Chapter 6 is especially relevant. If you don't have a copy handy, here's McConchie's useful website.

    3) People might Google: "concerns notice" defamation OR
    defamation "notice of intended action"

    In general, that is the usual first step towards a possible defamation lawsuit, because {CA, or AU} have time limits. One has to send a notice to the potential defendant claiming defamation, explaining why ,etc ... but need not have an explicit threat to sue. In fact, such may likely be better omitted from that notice.

    4) McIntyre writes at CA:
    "In addition, in order for a law suit to have any purpose, the plaintiff should have suffered actual financial damages – an element that does not appear to be present, for example, in the Michael Mann libel suit against Tim Ball, which, in my opinion, involves nothing more than personal vanity."

    McIntyre is of course free to express his opinion, which is in direct contradiction to the advice in McConchie and Potts (p.21 of my well-marked copy) and to well-established Canadian law: financial damage is simply not required

    I wonder if McIntyre knows AU defamation law better than CA's. Likewise, I wonder if others lining up behind him on this have bothered to read any of the law or consult relevant lawyers before offering opinions.

    5) McConchie, of course, is the lawyer representing Mann versus Tim Ball, and Andrew Weaver versus Ball (read item 11 on p.15), and separately the National Post. Read items 64-66 on pp.43-44.
    In general, defamation proceedings start with a request to retract and/or apologize, and if a lawsuit is brought, such is cited to show the court that a reasonable effort was made short of a lawsuit.
  • 1. About 2 years, ever since "climategate I"

    2. I don't remember how I found the site. At the time when "climategate I" broke I said, "WTF" and started looking around the web for some real answers. It didn't take me long to find them at Skep Sci.

    3. I visit the site daily, or try to anyway.

    4. Can't think of anything.

    One small nitpick: When I first found this site what really impressed me was the even, measured tone of the posts. It was very refreshing to just read the scientific arguments clearly stated, as opposed to the bloviating and bluster of the denier sites. But lately, it seems to me, the posts have become a little more biting in their tone (a bit more like Tamino's site). I know it is very frustrating to have to constantly counter the unending stream of disinformation spewing from the deniers. And sometimes it's best to fight fire with fire. But what I love best about this site is when the science is presented as a rock-solid bulwark against the stream of denier nonsense.

    Like I said, it's just a small nitpick. Keep up the great work.
  • 143 I never said GCR had anything to do with contrails. I was replying to a comment 103 that suggested that clouds would form "only a few times a year".
    141 the manipulation and pressure behind the scenes in the IPCC are well documented in the climategate emails. Here is one from Mann to Jones "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues... to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board." Or this one "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [TRENBERTH] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
    The sun-cloud connection may be a breakthrough in understanding but it has been treated as a heresy.
  • 34 Jeff Freymueller

    I don't think we are allowed to comment on the climategate e-mails on this wesite, but here goes. I read in them a concerted effort among some to get rebuttals of papers in specifically to beat the IPCC deadlines. That is not the normal course of scientific debate, that is politics.

    I also don't think they are particularly bowing down. I think the broader politics around the IPCC fits fairly naturally with the views of many people, climate scientists included.
  • 355, mik_rosser,

    [snipped uncalled-for harsh reply]

    For information, just use the search function on this site.

    Searches for the following will give you more than enough ammunition to thoroughly refute each of those 1,000 times over (not to mention this very post on the consensus):

    climategate
    peer review
    pop tech
  • 44 David Horten
    45 Bibliovermis.

    I am well aware of why the IPCC was created. One can hardly say it has been a roaring success when the likes of Lord Monckton can be invited to appear before a Congress committee on Climate Change. I don’t think we can carry on with business as usual for another 22 years. I can’t remember the exact figures, but the opinion polls showed a considerable drop in public support when ‘Climategate’ first surfaced in the media and they have not recovered.

    All I am trying to do is to initiate a debate on the way forward. If we accept that we can’t carry on as we are for another 22 years, then something has to change, and the sooner we decide on what that change is, the sooner we can implement it. It is all very well having the IPCC produce its findings, but they are all to do with climate science. In my original post I said that we need to quantify the effects of different courses of action (or inaction, if you prefer) in combating it. Climate Change is not happening independent of other events, almost certainly the most significant being population growth, which is going to hit the fan in a pretty big way without any help from a world of rising seas, temperatures and tempers.

    I cannot think of a more illustrious body of people to investigate the effects of Climate Change on food production, economic growth, housing needs (including location), possible mass migrations etc. etc., not to mention verifying once and for all the work of the IPCC, than one composed of Nobel Prize winners. If others can, then put them forward, but please bear in mind that the Nobel Prize winners have already been selected, so no possibility of any delaying tactics by the deniers regarding selection.

    The general public, if pointed to this site, will, in the main, take one look, shake their heads, and go back to watching the telly, yet it is the general public that have to be convinced of the need for action. I have put my views forward and I hope, via all these posts, instigated a debate on how best to achieve that goal. If we can show that the lovely child/grandchild, currently the apple of the family’s eye, so to speak, is likely to face all kinds of privations before they reach the biblical 3 score and ten, then I believe we can get public support for action. The deniers would then be seen as the enemy, not the good guys trying to save our current way of life.
  • Lloyd Flack's comment at #7 pre-empted my thoughts after reading the Anticlimategate* material, but it bears repeating...

    The Denialati are not interested in science, they are intent on the promulgation of propaganda. This says everything about the veracity of their 'case'.

    And what's the story with almost $100k for another surface stations project for Watts? Have they forgotten already that both Menne et al 2010 and their own sanctioned BEST [sic] project confirmed that there is no story there, other than what the professional scientists had said all along?

    I almost hesitate to use the word, but 'whitewash' anyone?

    Another thing: there has always been a clamour from the contrarians for various scientists to release their emails because they are public servants. Well, if the denialist lobby is intending to become involved in pushing curriculum units in public schools, doesn't that make them liable to the same requirement for public scrutiny? Can we now expect their all of email exchanges to be released? Geese and ganders, after all...

    Finally, Stevo, I wouldn't call you pessimistic, but realistic. The difference between smoking and global warming is that the whole of humanity and the biosphere is involved in the latter, most with no choice in the matter, and the warming/change is a juggernaut that can't be stopped once the momentum has significantly started. The smoking/harm relationship may be thought of as an arithmetic one and reversible except for the direct (usually voluntary) victims, where the emissions/harm relationship is geometric and irreversible even for people/species that have/had no involvement.


    [* Sorry, Lloyd, but the -gate is too juicy to resist.]
  • Climategate U-turn

    No warming in 15 years, from the mouth of Phil Jones himself - NEXT!
  • sun tzu wrote : "...we have been undergoing a mild period of cooling over the last couple of years..."


    Have we ? Having seen this year so far break most global temperature records, it would be interesting to see how you came up with that particular statement. Where did you get it from ? Or is it something you worked out yourself ? If so, what information did you use ?


    Here are some other threads on this site, to do with other matters you have included in your post :

    Mars is not warming globally

    Land use

    CO2 coming from the ocean

    CO2 is the main driver of climate change

    It's the sun

    Climategate 'conspiracy'
  • Henry justice, firstly, see muoncounter's reply to you (if you have missed it) over on "Does CO2 always correlate with temperature (and if not, why not?)"

    Next, your gish-gallop list of the usual so-called skeptical arguments are easily dealt with on these threads :

    Climategate and the peer-review process

    Is there a scientific consensus on global warming?


    Taking the Money for Grant(ed) – Part I

    Taking the Money for Grant(ed) – Part II
    (The latter two are from Global Warming : Man or Myth ?.


    In fact, you would probably get a lot from just starting at this thread :

    Newcomers, Start Here


    Finally, your use of a site which contains the following - "intelligentsia ranks of leftists/liberals progressives and socialists", "the 'elites'", "left-liberal climate science", "the left-biased MSM", "the elites' science of stupidity", "liberals-progressives-socialists" - betrays an obvious need for political bias and opinion rather than facts : a sad state of affairs for anyone claiming to be a scientist.
  • #34 Daniel Bailey at 08:38 AM on 19 November, 2010
    Your comment was deleted because it was deemed in violation of the Comments Policy; specifically due to your implication that because Dr. Rajendra Pachauri lived in a home that you perceived to be beyond the means of his current income that he therefore must have "missed" declaring a "hidden" source of income. I find that insinuation of dishonesty repugnant; a man of your intellect should be above conduct of that sort.

    I see. But the neighborhood Pachauri's house is located being an expensive one does not depend on my personal assessment in any way. General cost of living there is in fact among the highest possible in India.

    Expat Arrivals - Areas and suburbs in Delhi for living
    Golf Links:     This is one of the poshest neighborhoods in Delhi. The homes are large and well-guarded. Many businessmen and diplomats call this area home.

    New Delhi: A rough guide
    Golf Links     is among preferred housing areas for CEO/diplomats.
    Rental for 3+bedrooms and 400-1,200 square yards approximately Rs250,000-450,000 ($5,500-$10,000 per month) - the property we are talking about is considerably larger than average there.

    Dr. Pachauri lives in 160 Golf Links with his family indeed (wife and two daughters, elder one moved out later), as it is demonstrated on page 6. of Electoral Roll 2003 of Assembly Constituency 3, MINTO ROAD (GEN), New Delhi, India

    I have read and re-read both SoundOff's comment and Monbiot's post several times and fail to see to what you are taking issue with.

    OK, I give it another try. As I have said, his alleged income as specified by Monbiot (less than $75,000 per annum) does not seem to be sufficient to maintain his life style in the long run. Let me note there is nothing inherently wrong with this kind of analysis. It is not insinuation, just an appeal to common sense. While you may find it repugnant, many tax authorities do the same thing worldwide.

    In fact the KPMG review done on a TERI contract and made public by Dr. Pachauri contains the hint for a possible resolution.

    3.1.5 It was noted that Dr. Pachauri receives dividends on his personal investments in both the bank accounts.

    That is, there is an additional revenue stream of unspecified magnitude indeed, coming from personal investments. This income source was not investigated further, as KPMG's contract have not authorized it to scrutinize financial dealings of Dr. Pachauri unrelated to TERI.

    And this is where we arrive at the core issue. The term "conflict of interest" (COI) is a technical one, with a very specific meaning. The presence of a conflict of interest is independent from the execution of impropriety. But it does depend on all the interests involved, whenever an entity is entrusted with some impartiality.

    For example the CEO of a corporation is expected not to make any personal investment in stock of the competition. If she did, conflict of interest can create an appearance of impropriety that can undermine confidence even if in fact she does her best to overcome the competition as CEO, effectively devaluating her investment of course (an irresponsible behavior in itself as far as her family is concerned).

    Therefore the narrow survey conducted by KPMG is absolutely insufficient to clear Dr. Pachauri of (otherwise existent) accusations of conflict of interest. To do that, his personal investments should also be scrutinized.

    But there is more to it. Conflict of interest as such is not always a personal issue. In Pachauri's case organizational conflict of interest (OCI) is in fact way easier to demonstrate. In this respect it is absolutely irrelevant if he has transferred all the money he has earned in various advisory roles to the account of the organization he manages as a Director-General. If in those roles he promotes an agenda that make governments support his organization more vigorously, a conflict of interest exists, even if he gains no money directly from this behavior.

    Sometimes these dependencies can get rather subtle. For example cover page of the IPCC Climate Change 2007 Synthesis Report says Layout and Graphics Design Support: TERI Press. As Dr. Pachauri is head of both organizations, it is a conflict of interest.

    Dr. Pachauri served on Board of Directors of various oil and gas corporations (he was also on the International Advisory Board of Toyota Motor Corporation). At he same time in a recent interview he accuses oil firms playing foul by funding a group of skeptics, presumably the same people who dare going as far as to wage war on an innocent chairperson.

    He sets up a conspiracy theory, accusing "those who feel threatened, such as fuel companies or automobile manufacturers".

    However, if we try to get real, Big Oil has nothing to lose by carbon trading schemes. It is a fact of life hydrocarbons, if burnt, give twice as much energy for the same CO2 emission as coal (because they also produce water, already overabundant in the environment).

    Therefore, as soon as a price tag is attached to carbon dioxide emissions, oil gains a competitive edge relative to coal. It is important, because monopolies have better control of the oil market, coal resources being more evenly distributed. If it were a closed market, huge profits could be made by creating artificial shortages (as it was already done several times) with no additional investment to exploration or production.

    Coal (or nuke) has the power to upset this game, so anything is good enough with a potential to prevent it. This is why Big Oil promotes AGW scare in the background, supports Pachauri's nonprofit organization (it does) as it is behind most antinuclear madness.

    Oil companies go as far as venturing into PR driven alternative energy projects as well, like solar or wind, at least as long as they can do it on plain old taxpayers' money. Should public money stream dwindle, they have the additional benefit of demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt oil has no viable alternative.

    That's the secret game. And Dr. Pachauri, TERI, the IPCC with many other organizations and individuals do play it happily. Most being unaware of their true role, but some, like Dr. Pachauri are smart enough to see the real stakes accurately.

    I would rather not venture into analyzing this time what it means in terms of conflict of interest.

    So, please share the details of why you feel SoundOff's comment violates the Comments Policy, because (call me slow) I'm not seeing it.

    It does not violate the Comments Policy other than being a bit off-topic perhaps. However, as we have seen, the truth behind the issue is more complex than SoundOff's comment or Monbiot's essay may suggest. I have simply requested deletion of #1 if (and only if) it were forced to be left unchallenged.

    In the future when moderating, I shall identify myself so that others do not blame John for my moderating.

    That's a good idea.
  • Ken Lambert said:

    I have no reason to not accept the truth of the below excerpt from NP


    KL surely has not read very many articles in the NP or he would not be making that statement. NP is a well known right wing, AGW denying and anti-science rag.
  • transjasmine, just your first paragraph has many fallacies - if only you had read more on this site.

    Anyway, here are the threads you need to read to help with your misunderstandings :

    Does Breathing Contribute to CO2 Build-up in the Atmosphere ?

    Global Warming 'Positives'

    CO2 - Everyone's Favourite Pollutant

    ClimateGate

    Like I say, that is just from your first paragraph - there is a lot more but I don't have time at the moment to point you in the right directions. Maybe later...unless someone else can be bothered to waste their time on this !

    Basically, perhaps you had better start here :

    Newcomers Start Here
  • transjasmine wrote : "JMurphy i dont believe what i have said contains any "fallacies" but if you would care to enlighten me as to what and why it was wrong?"


    Follow the links I gave, to discover that :

    Breathing doesn't contribute to the increase in CO2, so it doesn't need to be taxed;

    Plants and trees need a lot more than CO2 to survive, and a warming world will inhibit their growth;

    CO2 is a pollutant;

    'Climategate' was a storm in a tea-cup, which didn't show scientists doing any falsification because there was no falsification to show.

    Read the links for further information and I will provide more links to counter the rest of your misinformed views when I have more time.
  • fydijkstra wrote : "Climategate has revealed what climate realists allready knew for a long time: the science is not settled at all, and even the hard core of the IPCC supporters is highly in doubt."


    I don't know about "climate realists" (whoever they might be - at a guess, those who don't accept AGW ?) but anyone with even a passing interest in this subject knows that not everything is settled - after all, why does anyone bother bringing out related papers on the subject any more ? If everything was settled (apart from the physics, of course), so-called skeptics would have to look elsewhere for their political kicks.

    But who are these "hard core of the IPCC supporters" who are "highly in doubt" ? Do you have any concrete examples that don't include interpretations of emails ?


    fydijkstra wrote : "Climategate has certainly changed the understanding of how these hard core climate scientists do their utmost to hide the uncertainty and to prevent that other views are published"


    Oh no, not back to the conspiracy theories again, are we ? Again, do you have any concrete examples that don't include interpretations of emails ?


    fydijkstra wrote : "And that fits perfectly to some of the recommendations of the IAC report about the IPCC:
    "3. Characterizing and communicating uncertainties, particularly with regard to the level-of-understanding and likelihood scales used in the IPCC reports;
    5. Increasing transparency, including explicit documentation that a range of scientific viewpoints has been considered;"


    Unfortunately not. That fits perfectly the interpretation that is given at a site called Moose and Squirrel.
    Or was it wilbert1755 ?
    Or did you copy it from somewhere else ?
    Perhaps you should actually read the report and come to your own conclusions, in your own words ?
  • fydijkstra wrote : "The S&B; paper was the first in a series of papers that questioned the attempt by the hockey team to rewrite history, denying the Medieval Warm Period. In 2003 that was so shocking for the climate community that six editors of the journal resigned."


    I see you have resorted to desperate, illogical and unsupportable assertions like the rest of the so-called skeptics here. What is going on ? Are things really that bad a year after 'climategate' ? You were hoping that the emails would reveal the final nail in the coffin of AGW - and now you have to admit that you have nothing but interpretations of emails and scientific papers ?

    Oh well, just in case anyone else is interested in the facts, the MWP is shown in :







    Both of the above contain Mann reconstructions. Does anyone notice anything about the MWP, i.e. that it is warmer than any other time apart from the most recent period ? Not very well hidden, is it - just not contemporaneous in all areas at the same time, which is what the so-called skeptics would like to believe.


    You should try reading the Wikipedia page on SB03. It includes the following :


    According to the climate skeptic Andrew Montford, the paper had little impact on the prevailing scientific opinion that the Medieval Warm Period was primarily a regional phenomenon and was a "huge disappointment" to the climate skeptic community.

    Can you confirm that the quote is from his book ?

    Looks like you are in a dwindling band of those who still see what they want to see, unfortunately. Not good for your reputation, especially on here.
  • fydijkstra wrote : "The discussions about ClimateGate on this site show an interesting feature: observations and interpretations of facts are never objective. Our interpretation of the facts is always coloured by our frame of reference, our theoretical background."


    In this instance, there is only one fact (which cannot be interpreted and which can either be accepted or denied) : Three enquiries have found no substance for any of the accusations.



    fydijkstra wrote : "Let’s simply call them warmists. This is not name calling, it’s just the use of a word to characterize a group."


    So what about those who think the world is warming but that it is all natural ? They can't be called 'warmists' too ? Or can they ? Or is 'warmist' a desperate name used by so-called skeptics in the belief that it makes their own beliefs seem somehow more normal ?



    fydijkstra wrote : "There are also people who believe, that the climate has always changed, that human activities do have a certain influence on the climate, but that natural climate fluctuations are dominant, and that we should not be too worried, because mankind has shown to be able to adapt to climate change during at least 100,000 years. Let’s simply call them sceptics. This is not name calling, it’s just the use of a word to characterize a group."


    No, let's call them what they in fact are : those who want to believe anything but AGW, so they will argue one thing, then another (possibly the opposite) so they can argue against AGW no matter what. Perhaps we can call them 'denialists' ?

    I mean, your rationale there is so contorted, it is impossible to read it with a straight face.
    Who doesn't think that "the climate has always changed" ? Anyone ?
    Who believes in the dominance of "natural climate fluctuations" without any evidence - only a belief that there must be something there in the background, perhaps, with a cycle of a few thousand/tens of thousands/whatever years, maybe ? Those who prefer to deny.
    Who believes that we can adapt easily enough and that we shouldn't worry, everything will turn out alright in the end, possibly ? Just like 'we' did thousands of years ago...when there were hardly any people, no political borders and freedom to roam at will. Those who prefer to deny.

    This is not name-calling : this is the reality of those who wish to deny AGW.
  • fydijkstra wrote : "Warmists claim that the 4 independent investigations of ClimateGate have fully exonerated the group of climate scientists around Jones and Mann. No conspiracy, no perverting peer review, no fraud. Nothing. And the message stands upright: the climate has changed unprecedentedly and will change dangerously, if we don’t act now. The evidence has become even stronger since ClimateGate!"


    Rational people look at the outcome of the three main investigations (which are you claiming as the fourth - the one into Mann ?) and see the dismissal of all the baseless conspiracy theories. No surprise there. The only ones surprised are those who are like the 9/11 troofers who dismiss anything that goes against their specific conspiracy belief.
    Nothing has really changed but since none of the enquiries really looked into the evidence behind AGW, it is difficult to know where the second half of your paragraph is coming from - probably your own interpretation of the enquiries ?



    fydijkstra wrote : "Sceptics consider the independent investigations as white washing. The investigations yielded some heavy critics on climate scientists and the IPCC, but this was hidden in very polite recommendations. Maybe nothing illegal has been done, but the hidden critical comments confirm that climate scientists should not hide uncertainties, and should be open for alternative explanations of the facts. Exactly what sceptics have been saying for two decades! And what is that evidence that has become stronger in the previous 12 months? Which paper has definitely confirmed the warmist view."


    No, those who wish to deny AGW consider the results to be "white washing". Real sceptics would be glad that the basis behind the work of CRU, etc. have been found to be strong. Real sceptics would be working to make sure that the science is as good as it can be, and would be making sure that there is as firm a basis for the science as is possible.

    As for the "hidden critical comments", I suppose it takes the mind of a so-called skeptic to be able to find those 'hidden truths' which escape the rest of us.
    I don't know where you got the idea of being "open for alternative explanations of the facts" either. More 'hidden truths' or just your interpretation again ?
    If you are still asking for proof of AGW, you obviously haven't been reading anything on this site over the last year. That would be a surprise...not !



    fydijkstra wrote : "Could it be, that both sides of the ClimageGate debate suffer from this kind of blindness? And could it be, that the truth is in the middle?"


    No, I'm afraid not. The blindness is experienced by those who wish to deny AGW (who are blind to anything that goes against their particular beliefs), and who are prepared to argue for one explanation one day, and another the next. That is selective blindness but it can be cured by opening of the eyes and the mind.
    As in the so-called differences between evolutionists and creationists, you are either on the side of science or you are on the side of personal/religious/political belief - there is no middle-ground and those claiming that there is, are aware that their own arguments are unpersuasive to all but the most gullible.
  • Michael H Anderson - You might wish to look at the Comments Policy for this site; a quick search on your name and climate postings indicates that you may have any number of postings deleted due to violations of said policies.

    If you are actually interested in the evidence on climate change, you should look at Temp record is unreliable, the numerous postings on Climategate, and the rather astounding amount of actual science linked to on these pages. Do some reading before commenting!

    If, on the other hand, you wish to rant, insult, and otherwise just make noise, I suggest you not bother posting here.
  • Arkadiusz Semczyszak, as usual your point is difficult to discern, beyond a typical 'If it is us, it won't be bad anyway'.

    You seem to prefer the tiny minority of cherry-picked experts, like J. Everett, whose own website, although providing lots of links to actual data, is lessened by use of the term "alarmists"; his indecision as to whether it is actually warming or cooling; his 'soothing' words about things not being too bad maybe; sources from the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, Lomborg, Morner, John Daly, CO2Science, IceCap, CO2Sceptics, ClimateAudit, SEPP, WarwickHughes and IceAgeNow - with a link to RealClimate as some sort of 'balance'; and his use of the St. Roch/Northwest Passage, 'recovery from the LIA', UHI, Consensus, 70s Cooling 'scare' and Climategate fallacies. The whole thing is a glorified Gish-Gallop, with some credible links thrown in to make it look credible.

    Even the quote you have from him is as a minority voice in a hearing before the SUBCOMMITTEE ON OCEANS, ATMOSPHERE, FISHERIES, AND COAST GUARD of the COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION UNITED STATES SENATE ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS SECOND SESSION APRIL 22, 2010 - a link you should have provided. Out of 33 references to the IPCC, his testimony has 32 of them, including his desire to change the make-up of the IPCC. Obsessed ?

    As for your link to the NIPCC - that is just laughable, I'm afraid.
  • fydijkstra wrote : "Concrete examples that the Climategate e-mailers were highly in doubt can only be given from interpretations of the e-mails.
    Concrete examples that they wanted to hide uncertainty and prevent that other views are published. Again, we are talking about the interpretations of the e-mails..."


    If I may be allowed to interpret your post, I don't believe you understand the difference between a 'concrete example' and an 'interpretation of an email'. What you can interpret (or, at least, read what other people have interpreted) from a limited number of emails taken out of context, means nothing unless you can point to real-world actions that followed on from those emails. Can you ?
  • JMurphy, there is a relevant thread for your comment: Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy.
  • Ken, I believe your post here illustrates a fundamental problem with the utility of the "climategate" data, leaving aside entirely questions of the legality or ethics of its provenance.

    You remark, "The best article on Climategate I have read is by Terrence Corcoran, who analysed the first 5 years of the 13 year record and gives a detailed chronology."

    Terrence Corcoran cannot render a "detailed chronology" of the thoughts and communications touched upon in the emails in question; the record is acknowledged as incomplete and thus a complete, detailed and fully precise chronology is impossible to produce from what was published. The people who obtained the emails did not provide the rest of us with the complete dataset, they chose to pass along certain portions of the record while redacting other parts. Worse, we cannot know the editorial intentions of those choosing whether we'd be enlightened or remain in ignorance.

    An example from the National Post article you cited:

    What really rocked the paleoclimate work at CRU, and ultimately shook the IPCC, was a seemingly out-of-the-blue email on June 17, 1998, from Michael Mann to Phil Jones, then head of East Anglia’s CRU centre. Before then, no mention had been made in the email cache of Michael Mann...

    "Seemingly out-of-the-blue." Was it? How do we know?

    Corcoran seems to understand at some level that the detail necessary to draw broad conclusions cannot be derived from what we're allowed to see by the people who obtained the email. Here's how he expresses the problem:

    The emails are not a random grab of email records from one scientist’s computer or extracted in a coarse raid on the central computer facilities of one climate institute. Only by reading the emails in chronological order, from the first email sent March 7, 1996, by Russian scientist Stephan Shiyatov, from the Laboratory of Dendrochronology, Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, in Ekaterinburg, Russia — complaining to British scientist Keith Briffa about funding problems for his tree-ring research — does it become clear that the emails are part of a conscious and systematic assemblage of 13 years worth of vital communications among some of the world’s leading climate scientists.

    Emphasis mine. Corcoran acknowledges an agenda on the part of the people who obtained and disseminated the email as well as their selectivity in deciding what we may or may not know about its content. We can't do science with this sort of data, we're left with intuitions and thus are fully at the mercy of our prejudices.

    My prejudice leads me to wonder why the folks who obtained and published the emails in question chose to preserve ambiguity over certainty by not providing us with the complete dataset. Is that ambiguity necessary for making the strongest impression, and what would happen to our conclusions if we were able to see the entire record?
  • Dave123, that reminds me of this quote:

    "For a creationist to believe in evolution, no evidence is good enough. For a creationist to believe in a god, no evidence is good enough."

    I suspect something similar applies to AGW "skeptics"
  • @ Lloyd Flack

    ”some nasty effects denialists” probably “grown from” ...

    John Hartz (and commenting here from “a position” scientifically-catastrophist), they should to study: “In a recent report, NASA climate change scientist James Hansen observed that current climate models do not factor in 'climate forcing' – changes that affect the energy balance of the planet – caused by aerosols, and as such DELIVER INCORRECT RESULTS.

    HE CALLS IT 'THE PRINCIPAL BARRIER TO QUANTITATIVE UNDERSTANDING OF ONGOING CLIMATE CHANGE.

    Until aerosol forcing is measured, its magnitude will continue to be crudely inferred, implicitly or explicitly, via observations of climate change and knowledge of climate sensitivity.' Fildes argues that policymakers need to be responding to a wide range of other climate forcings – not simply greenhouse gases – and considering their effects regionally as well as globally.

    THE IPCC CLIMATE MODELLING PROCESS IS UNRELIABLE because it does not do so, he says, adding that the focus on greenhouse gases has been driven by a priori assumptions in the models themselves. This will have to change in the future, he adds. 'Not to minimise the focus on greenhouse gases, but we need a more eclectic policy mix.

    Part of our research does suggest that the accumulative impact of greenhouse gas output on future world temperatures may be lower than the IPCC estimates – which is good news if true – but the point is to tackle the problem in a variety of different ways.'”

    From this work, we see that our treatments in “the fight” against CO2 have little chance of success, if only because: “We predict that the PCF will change the arctic from a carbon sink to a source after the mid-2020s and is strong enough to cancel 42–88% [!] of the total global land sink.”

    Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is a HUGE COST - and the effect may be different, and - very likely that - in a much longer period of time than we think - for example, because climate models do not take into account that: “The permafrost carbon pool is not yet fully integrated in climate and ecosystem models and an important objective should be to define typical pedons appropriate for model setups.” ( Kuhry et al., 2010.)

    Abrupt and dangerous - to humanity end ecosystems - climate change - have been and will in the future. No matter whether natural or anthropogenic - it certainly will - and probably in the near future!

    So we better count on "good news if true" Hansen's article, from which I quote - and we spend (especially against the "Greek" crisis in Europe) funds, for example flood control systems, irrigation (especially in poor countries) and the resettlement of people from areas vulnerable to spill ...

    ... because even if we assume that the current warming is - in part - natural - it still - as he writes Camburn - the full effect of the recent grand maximum of solar, "we sense" of delay - for even 100 years.

    P.S. And drought in the U.S.? - it is difficult to find here a clear effect of GHG's, although anthropogenic influences are significant: “ Western states happened to build dams and water systems during a period that was unusually wet compared to the past 6,000 years,” he said. “Now the cycle has changed and is trending drier, which is actually normal. It will shift back to wet eventually, but probably not to the extremes seen during most of the 20th century.”, “The change in cycle regularity Abbott and his colleagues found correlates with documented activity of El Niño/La Niña. When the patterns became more intense, wet and dry cycles in the Pacific Northwest became more erratic and lasted longer, Abbott said.”
  • cjshaker wrote : "AGW believers want to massively increase the cost of energy for all countries, and make us ration energy usage, and Climategate is none of our business?
    'Cancun climate change summit: scientists call for rationing in developed world'"


    What do you believe is the link between so-called Climategate from a year ago, and studies published last month ? I don't recall any discussions in the emails concerning energy prices, etc. Do you have the relevant references you can post ?

    In the meantime, from your link, things are not as scary as you may believe :

    Prof Anderson insisted that halting growth in the rich world does not necessarily mean a recession or a worse lifestyle, it just means making adjustments in everyday life such as using public transport and wearing a sweater rather than turning on the heating.
    “I am not saying we have to go back to living in caves,” he said. “Our emissions were a lot less ten years ago and we got by ok then.”

    Are you shocked to be asked to conserve energy ?
  • Gallopingcamel wrote : Satellite data has only been available for ~37 years but over that time scale there has been a warming trend. In short, I agree that warming has occurred . My point is that there has been a cooling trend since 1998, contrary to what Hansen et al. claim, based on surface station records.


    What 'cooling trend' ? Instead of just stating what you believe, can you link to a graph (or something) that shows this 'cooling trend' ? And you can you show how it relates to what 'Hansen et al. claim' ?



    Gallopingcamel wrote : Here is NASA's view based on surface station records:
    http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
    These graphs appear to be diverging over the last 12 years. Am I wrong?


    Hard to tell when it is unclear what you are actually trying to prove from that link. The only graphs I can see there are a global temperature one, and one for Japan with no detail as to axis labels. What do you claim is diverging, and from what ?



    Gallopingcamel wrote : Ned (#115), the SSTs were very high into January 2010. I found a link at UAH that showed the February 2010 SST sharply lower but it has disappeared. Can anybody help me out?


    Forgive me for intruding but this shows that there was no UAH SST reading for the 2nd to the 5th of February this year, and the 6th to the 7th reading were only in 3rd highest place since 2003. Since that date, however, and before, the readings have all been higher :

    UAH SST



    Gallopingcamel wrote : To get back to the main subject of this thread, this discussion has clearly demonstrated all five of the "characteristics of scientific denialism". Unfortunately, the vast majority of the posts demonstrating these traits are from AGW Alarmists.
    The Alarmists display additional failings owing to their unwarranted certainty that has no place in science. Until Climategate they were often inclined to go as far as to claim "the science is settled" while personally attacking anyone who disagreed with them.


    And that is just bizarre, wrong and totally divorced from reality, I'm afraid. Either you can't see that or you don't want to. Shame, either way, but anyone reading all these posts can see where the truth lies.



    Gallopingcamel wrote : Real scientists disagree over scientific hypotheses and then start looking for ways to test those hypotheses.


    Which particular hypothesis did you have in mind ?
  • Johngee, it seems to me that Mr Corbyn is always predicting freezing, Arctic-like conditions and so, like a broken clock telling the correct time twice a day by accident, so does Mr Corbyn.

    However, he hasn't been doing so good this year, as the following forecasts show :


    December 09: Wet and windy start giving way to severe
    Arctic blasts with heavy snow and blizzards in parts.
    Turning mild or very mild later – a ‘green’ Christmas
    before colder year end.

    I recall December being very cold, the coldest in a hundred years or something, but still he got it wrong.


    Ferocious and dangerous winter weather [for January 2011]

    Um, quite the opposite actually.


    [February] Overall much colder than normal with snowy Northerly / Easterly blasts at times

    Well, not so far, anyway but who is going to rely on that being correct...except by accident !


    Jan AND Feb will be unusually cold in Britain, Ireland, & Europe

    Maybe I've been lucky not to have experienced any of that here in London ?


    Generally, the tone of his 'scientific predictions' and his website can be surmised from the following text, taken directly from the source :

    Constant references to 'ClimateGate News'

    ● ‘Global Warming’ forecasts will fail AGAIN.
    ● ‘ManMade Climate Change’ is failed science based on fraudulent data
    ● Gordon Brown & all politicians, please, PROVE IT or DROP IT
    ● 2010 is the year of the fight for evidencebased science & policy
    ● Carbon Trading & all CO2 reduction schemes must stop.
    ● ‘Warmers’ flee from challenge to present evidence for CO2 case.
    ● CO2 theory lies refuted by science fact
    ● ‘ManMade Climate Change’ scam now ignominiously doomed


    Hmmm...
  • Ned wrote :


    "I do not understand why you [GALLOPINGCAMEL] persist in accusing the honest, hardworking scientists of NOAA and NASA of "throwing away data" that they were never given in the first place ... particularly when many different, independent analyses of the data show there is no effect on the end result."


    For the very same reason that he/she keeps repeating things like :


    'The idea that humans are a significant factor in raising global temperatures rests on a very shaky foundation as "Climategate" has shown.'


    I.E. A few emails/files (none of which actually relate to the science of AGW, unless you believe in cherry-picking words and quotes) are enough for some to carry on denying.



    'Unless better evidence is presented I will continue to believe that natural factors dominate.'


    I.E. With reference to the previous excuse : 'I don't want to accept AGW and will use any straws to clutch at.'



    'The "Copenhagen Diagnosis" mentioned at the top of this thread encapsulates the IPCC's over reaching and exaggeration of mankind's influence.'


    I.E. 'I don't understand/want to wilfully misinterpret the IPCC and what they do and don't do..because I don't want to accept AGW.'


    'This is what I call the "Catastrophe de Jour" approach which has damaged the IPCC's credibility beyond repair.'


    I.E. 'I must join in with those who want to destroy the credibility of the IPCC and we will use any small errors to try to do so; or, at least, to make sure that we can justify our denial of AGW.'



    'The IPCC's Alarmist predictions for 2100 depend on climate models (GCMs) and Michael Mann's adherents who cling to tree ring temperature proxies.'


    I.E. The conservative projections based on GCM and AOGCM models from 10 different countries are, supposedly, all based on Michael Mann and his friends. Hmm.
    And, supposedly, they are the only ones using tree-ring temperature proxies. Hmm



    'One of the many scientists who doubt mankind's ability to affect climate is Roy Spencer:'

    I.E. One of the very few, but a trusted expert to those who wish to clutch at straws and deny. And one who is presently struggling to explain the high UAH anomalies without reference to AGW.


    All the statements are trying to justify denial, and neither facts, figures nor reality will be allowed to get in the way of that. That means constant repetition, ignoring others, repetition, repetition, etc., etc.
  • NQuestofApollo, your post gives lots of opportunity for everyone here to point out your misunderstandings, but I would like to start with your first assertion :

    "Remember Michael Mann's "hockey stick graph" - the one trotted out by Al Gore and the IPCC as proof positive that AGW exists? If in fact the Earth is warming - why did Mann feel the need to concatenate two different data sets?"

    You should read further on this website (by using the 'Search' box in the top left) but I will start you out : Go here, here, here and here.

    If no-one else can be bothered to point you in the right direction for your other misinformed points (and I wouldn't blame anyone else for not wanting to go over all this again), I will return to this later.
  • Pete Ridley, if you wish to believe that the 'Climategate' enquiries are all "whitewashes", and that the "scandal" still remains (albeit only in the minds of those who don't wish to face up to the facts), then I cannot write anything that will get through to you : you only see what you want to see.

    I will, though, disagree with you with regard to the Met Office's Seasonal Forecasts - they had obviously already decided to scrap them before announcing so on March 5, so I doubt whether the House of Commons enquiry had anything to do with it. You, no doubt, would disagree, but, again, you must believe what you want to believe. In the same way, you believe those Seasonal Forecasts were "useless", so, again, nothing I write would be able to change your mind.

    To end, code written to represent the Physical qualities of the make-up of potential weather would, I would imagine, be useful not only for short-term forecasts but also as a basis for long-term climate forecasts.
  • RSVP wrote:
    Ironically, the only way for AGW proponents to ultimately "prove" their theory is for global warming to actually happen. It must be very frustrating therefore to only be detecting +0.16 degrees C/decade, or +0.016 degrees per year, a value that competes hardily with measurement noise.
    You used "hardily" on purpose, don't you? You forgot to tell it is +0.0013 degrees per month, +0.000044 degrees per day, 29 degrees Fahrenheit per millenium, +0.000000005 degrees per second, 5,500 years away of hypothetical boiling oceans and so on? What do you meant by that. Say it clearly -what includes quantifying noise-.

  • skywatcher at 09:49 AM on 25 November, 2011
    caerbannog #39, I've seen you post your excellent reconstruction in quite a few places now, and am yet to see a skeptic reply with an alternative of his own. I'm guessing you haven't seen one either?


    Thanx for the thumbs-up on this. I know that I risk "sounding like a broken record" by posting my results all over the place, but I think that it's important for as many people as possible to see how easy it is to replicate the global-temperature results that so many deniers insist are the product of "secret data manipulations".

    I started playing around with the temperature data a few months ago, mainly out of curiosity. Found that I could get pretty decent "in the ballpark" results via "straight dumb averaging" of the station temperature anomalies. At the time, I didn't even consider coding up a proper geospatial gridding/averaging routine (figuring that it would be too much work).

    But a little later, I decided to take a closer look at the gridding/averaging procedure -- turned out to be quite a bit easier to code up than I expected. I took some "lazy man" shortcuts, like setting my grid-cell size to 20 degrees x 20 degrees (at the Equator, with adjustments to keep the grid-cell surface areas approximately equal as you moved north/south). With such big grid-cell sizes, I didn't have to bother with interpolating to empty grid-cells, since the grid cells were large enough that almost all of them contained station data.

    Took a couple of other shortcuts as well, mostly motivated by laziness on my part.

    Given the shortcuts/approximations that I made, I was quite surprised to how well the output of my crude little program matched the official NASA results. I didn't do any kind of "tweaking" or "experimenting" to get the results that I've been posting -- what you see above is what popped out of my program on the "first try".

    Then when the CRU released its raw "climategate" temperature data, I ran that data-set through my program. Got nearly the same results.

    My results really are the product of just a few days of "wing and a prayer" programming. There is nothing particularly clever or sophisticated in my code -- it's all very straightforward. Most of the coding work was "book-keeping" stuff -- i.e. keeping track of data gaps and accounting for the varying station data record lengths.

    If all station data record lengths were identical, and there were no missing temperature samples (i.e. no data gaps), this would have been a super-simple "programming in your sleep" exercise.

    The bottom line is, the Muir Russel Commission was correct -- validating the published global-average temperature results is really quite straightforward; it is something that someone with reasonable coding skills can do in just a few days (starting from scratch).

    This really is a project that could be broken up into a sequence of homework assignments for first-year programming students.

    You know, deniers really love to repeat that "31,000 scientists signed a petition doubting global-warming" talking-point. But in all the years that deniers have been attacking the surface temperature record, why didn't even one of those 31,000 "scientists" ever roll up his/her sleeves and actually *analyze* the temperature data?

    The really big "take home" lesson here is -- deniers often spend *years* making claims that take no more than a few *days* of work to disprove. And it's always someone else who ends up doing that work.
  • "Trenberth's statement was used completely out of context by those behind the fake 'Climategate' scandal".

    Here is the full context of Trenberth's statement, just for reference.

    [private email snipped - if you really want to read them, they are easily available elsewhere]
  • ... skeptics don't want to ask about 'Climategate'

    The answer is simple: Skeptics - scientists simply do not deal with the scandals and ... science.
    For example, Marcus wrote:

    ... Sun has just recently come out of the deepest solar minimum for over 100 years-after a 30-year period of general decline in the sunspot trend.

    Solar change and climate: an update in the light of the current, Lockwood, 2010:
    “Solar outputs during the current solar minimum are setting record low values for the space age. Evidence is here reviewed that this is part of a decline in solar activity from a grand solar maximum and that the Sun has returned to a state that last prevailed in 1924.”

    2010 - 1924 = 100 years !?

    In addition:

    Activity on multi-millennial time scale (Usoskin, Solanki, Kovaltsov, 2010):
    “The Sun spends ~3/4 of the time at moderate activity, ~1/6 in a grand minimum and ~1/10 in a grand maximum state. The modern solar activity is a grand maximum.”

    The sun is still so much more active now than at any period of at least 7 thousand. years ...
  • 49.Karl_from_Wylie at 11:59 AM on 27 February, 2010
    .
    #43 Tom Dayton

    Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html#ixzz0gh3ygxsK

    Is this really a surprise? I know if someone asked for copies of everything in my decade-old dissertation, I would surely not be able to come up with everything. It's not because I have something to hide, but rather, I am a human with limited amounts of time and limited amounts of effort I can put into organization.
  • Nevertheless, this example shows, that there was at least one event that can be considered a conspiracy.

    Yeah, the theft of the e-mails and the well-orchestrated blitz of accusations against honest scientists.

    The "skeptics" in this thread are really grasping at straws. Being confused about the science is understandable and forgivable; taking Climategate seriously, at this late date, is an act of sheer self-delusion.
  • >Nofreewind, you don't really understand much about tree rings, do you?

    you are right! but i have a good head for finding out the truth and 8 yrs of science degrees.

    >In fact the divergence problem is only associated with a very small number of trees from one particular place. These are the rings reported by Briffa.

    You mean there was no divergence in the MBH reconstruction? It is incorrect that much of the Mann 2001 IPCC graph was primarily from a few bristlecone's in Colorado?

    What is "nonsesne" in this paper?
    http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/ohio.pdf

    Seriously, have all climate scientists taken the time to look at the archeological history. (FAGAN, FAGAN, FAGAN - and he is one of yours!)I think if you did you would agree that the warming from 1976 to 1998 was completely unremarkable, at least the rate of change, even the CET series will tell you that.

    I agree that that 1998 might have been the warmest year for at least 500 years. And the past decade might be the warmest for 500 years or so. If there is even such a things as "global temperature".

    How comes Wikipedia doesn't even mention the word divergence in their Hockey Stick controversy article? Is this divergence something that was somewhat hidden before ClimateGate, or is this something that has been discussed as part of the ClimateAudit work?

    If they can't calibrate their instruments with good recent hopefully 100% accurate temperature data, (???), how do they know there weren't period of hundreds of years in length 200 or so years ago where there was "divergence".
  • @ 34. GallopingCamel: "Most of the denizens of this site are living in a cozy cocoon where there is no Climategate."

    Anyone who still thinks "Climategate" was anything other than a sham is not a Galloping Camel; they are a Stationary Ostrich - one with its head buried deep in the sand. Even many conservative papers, like 'The Economist', have picked up on the gross misrepresentation behind the contrarian hysteria. Of course, the official inquiry may prove me wrong. I guess we should reserve final judgement until then.
  • @ Albatross

    Are skeptics comments on this site - post - are "off topic"?

    If we answered "yes " to this question, we would have to conclude that this post John Cook is "off topic" ...
    “On the occasion” of Climategate he tries to "offer" us previews of AGW supporters eg the "divergence problem" by ignoring the most recent (after 2008) work - papers on this topic. Criticizing Muller - He criticizes (again "by occasion”) opinions of skeptics on the MWA and the LIA.
    Similarly doing CBDunkerson "along with " disparaging opinions Lindzena and Spencer and the main arguments of skeptics (without the “right to reply” - because it is "off topic" - of course).

    Is this okay?

    You can not refuse the "right the reply" skeptics on these matters - if you do it try to "smuggle" through “the back door "...

    I appeal to supporters and adversaries AGW - by non-use of such "tricks ".
  • @ Doug_Bostrom .... we can have a peek at some of the review process only because of multiple freedom of information act requests that have been submitted to see the reviewer comments and responses. One of the climategate e-mails was Phil Jones asking a bunch of people to delete their official AR4 review comments so that they wouldn't be available. Michael Mann (of hockeystick fame) replied that he had passed on to others the request to delete all trace of review comments. A few groups/lead authors did make their comments available voluntarily.

    Roger Pielke, Jr has several blog posts on the problems of AR4 review. The lead authors often choose their papers, and only their papers to be used as referece, even when other peer reviewed papers disagreed. The lead authors also sometimes just ignored comments. A bit of that happened in the Himalayan glacier issue.

    The reviewers and lead authors for AR5 are being nominated now, closing in mid-March. The nominating agencies are governments and selected organizations. IPCC won't release the names of the selected organizations, but I'll bet that WWF gets to nominate and the Heartland Institute does not.
  • @ John Harrington #32

    Some personal perspective...

    There is an old truism that holds that academic debates can get as vitriolic as they do precisely because there is so LITTLE at stake. I can imagine that in certain corners of certain fields there can be a bit of bullying primarily because the outcome concerns very few people and bullying pays. The same scenario is possible in any walk of life with similar paramters(although it doesn't really occur often if you think about it).

    That said, in my 25 years in science I have never seen anything on the scale you describe. I have certainly seen personal biases and conflicting personalities play a role in scientific exchanges (some much more unjustifiably aggressive than evident in those darn climategate emails) - but in the end it is the intellectual/empirical side that eventually holds the field in those exchanges. That's what matters.

    That result is possible because in my science, as in climate science, it is impossible for one person to gain much control over opinion precisely because there are a reasonable number of peers working in the field. Scientists hate despots more than most people -- scientists are usually fierce individualists, and the abuse of power conflicts with the free flow of scientific ideas.

    I also know that if I work on a problem or an approach that is outside the mainstream, I have to work a bit harder to gain acceptance. I don't complain about it -- that is as it should be given that scientists should be critical. But, in the few times I have followed that less trodden path in the past, I have never once felt that I have been blackballed or censored for my positions. Not once.

    It is very hard to get any consensus in science on anything without overwhelming evidence in one direction or the other. Those who claim that there is some conspiracy among scientists regarding AGW (by which I mean CO2 effects on climate) have no clue how the process works or how fiercely independent scientists are in general (or they depend on others not knowing).
  • @ Nichol 13

    "it seems that there must be something in their repetition."

    For some. For most it's from the same bucket as re-using cloth-eared insults about Gore, Suzuki, Mann, alarmists, religion ... it's dragging the discussion down by getting someone to 'swing at a pitch in the dirt'. Unfortunately, it's worked all too well, and every reaction has produced additional repetitions. The NIPCC was a perfect example of a document with well-worn glaring errors - begging people to give those errors endless attention.

    So far, the biggest pro-pollutionist flunkout was Son of Climategate ... too bad more of their message didn't get equal non-attention.
  • @25 Saltspring Person-

    You seem to be unaware of the religious aspect of global warming rejectionism. Both Spencer and McKitrick are signatories to the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming,
    Cornwall Alliance Signatories

    stating among other things that:

    1.We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.

    and

    1.We deny that Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric chemistry. Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally rapid. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.

    Which leads to your point 1 about scientists suppressing other scientists. McKitrick and co-author MacIntyre have conducted the primary attack on Michael Mann's Hockey stick. Their statistical tools have been shown to be corrupt:

    Summary of Analysis of M&M; with links to peer reviewed publications


    at the same time- someone was attempting the equivalent of a DoS attack on Hadley by flooding them with FOI requests.

    SkS discussion of 'ClimateGate'

    Was this McIntyre's doing? So the question is who started trying to suppress who first?

    What other suppression do you have in mind? Is there any supression currently going on?

    The rest of your points have been addressed by others, but I'll add that for there to be a change of opinion in 5 years, the data ought to be on the ground now, bedcause it will take time to replicate it and explore it. So what's your unrecognized smoking gun?
  • @tobyjoyce

    Just to get one thing straight first: are you accusing me for being a creationist? If you do, then do not bother to read the reminder of this answer - just as I will not bother to read anything written by you hereafter.

    -

    I don't understand your what your objection is or why you think it is controversial what I claim.

    I am perfectly aware there is many scientific fields that fall under the category of being observational sciences. However the border line between being experimental and observational is not a black and white one but a gray scale. Other fields are named observational not because it is not possible to conduct experiment but because it would be clearly unethically to perform experiment. Psychology is good an examples as any of this.

    There preferred method is of course experimental if available, if not the observational method will do. In the case of climate science we do not have a parallel universe, not even an duplicated Earth, we can compare with therefore out of necessary reason climate science is an observational science. To me this is pretty obvious.

    However my purpose was not to catalog all and every science filed, as observational or experimental but to point at the fact there is exists a division and that climate science is observational. Because if this there are certain assertion that can not be hold as true in the same manner as in an experimental fields.
  • @Arkadiusz Semczyszak

    "...Polish Academy of Sciences, who officially say: that now it is nature that decides, not man-made ... "

    That is exactly the point!

    And how do we humans determine the decisions of nature?
    By science, of course, specifically, the scientific consensus. We all know the consensus may be wrong, but it has been a stable consensus now for twenty years or more ...

    For months now, (to take one example) A. Watts has been trumpeting how his blog is the most popular science blog on the web, as if that endorsed his position. So what? Tell him that "Nature decides", not the number of hits, Arkadiusz.

    Every survey that showed a decline in the % of the public accepting the science of global warming has declined was greeted with glee on every denialist website. Tell them that "Nature decides", Arkadiusz, not public popularity.

    Deniers unashamedly used so-called "Climategate" to undermine public trust, which was the equivalent of the Jonny Cochrane undermining the state's forensic science as tainted with racism in the OJ case. Tell them that "Nature decides", Arkadiusz, this is not a jury trial.

    When a poster ("marty") was told on a previous thread that "nature was not a democracy", he more or less said that scientists were trying to establish a dictatorship. Tell him that "Nature decides", Arkadiusz, there is not a show of hands at the end of a debate.
  • @Berényi Péter #149

    Thank you for being so throughly and pretty transparent on the subject.

    Regarding the second part, we have the actual on-topic in the link to Trenberth's statement -one click ahead from the last link your provided- and his "It is amazing to see this particular quote lambasted so often.". The rest is only linked by your racconto of the supposed chronology, what takes us back again to the question, are the e-mails real? haven't them being doctored or snipped to suit specific advocacies? It is the kind of situation people says "only God knows". If the hacker stepped out and passed a polygraphy, and forensics experts swore they didn't find evidence of doctoring or any change of content, I would start to believe they are real -not that the planet is in a trend of cooling and there's a conspiracy to hide it-. This takes us to the next point:

    Regarding the first part, I read your words a few minutes after reading this article (in Spanish) in the newspaper. It can be summarized as an appeal court setting that violation of emails are a federal crime and emails are completely equivalent to a epistolary letter, not only in a general quality of them being "private" but specifically protected by the constitution as being "inviolable" what is much more. That is in my country but the countries where the communication took place are not much different about what is legal. The hacker has the constitutional right to not self-incriminate and Trenberth et al had at least the constitutional right to privacy, if not inviolability of any epistorar communication.

    This bring us at you cloning in #149 the "climategate mistique" of, in your own words, «I do not think "private email" is a proper characterization of correspondence between government employees (or scholars working on government grants) during office hours using their work email addresses,...». A lot can be commented about: if the person hasn't that right, the company or the agency has the right (the "mistique" followed it with "the agencies refuse to show it because they are part of the conspiracy"); what about the parts of messages quoted in other messages coming from private individuals; what if one employee using his own account plot with another employee to burn Mona Lisa, have the agency to pay a milliard dollars to the Louvre because it was "agency time"?

    This can be going on for ages, but basically the arguments about why the e-mails are not private are like those of ambulance chasing lawyers, the kind of argument with the arguer being immediately benefited by the new rules his argument creates, that is a 30% of Mona Lisa's compensatory damages.
  • @Camburn: if this has nothing to do with the science, why do deniers keep using Climategate as a "watershed moment" in their efforts to prove AGW is a hoax?

    The fact is, there was an organized campaign to harass honest, hard-working scientists, and you seem okay with that. It doesn't cost much to condemn this, just a few words, and yet you won't...why?
  • @Gilles #115

    I thought the thread was about the interpretation of Dr Trenberth's quote, I think I have already answered : In my opinion, he just meant what he said: there is a lack of warming and it's a travesty we can't explain it.


    You do know he didn't (by the way, I call your technique "back to square one"):

    1st)Your interpretation coincides with that of the "climategate mysticism", that is, phase 1: some words out of context are taken away and presented as a conspiratorial theory; phase 2: the person behind the words make clear he/she didn't mean it that way; phase 3: the people behind phase 1 try to cast shadows on 2, insist on 1, and suggest that 1+2 is like O.J. saying "I didn't do it", trying to promote the public associating the target with something reported at 6PM News. There are many techniques that are useful with ignorant folks in a laundrymat context ("If the dude didn't mean it, why didn't he sue the people pointing a finger to him? Eh!?) --- Iterate. In case the debate goes badly for your position, return to the last place you feel in control and on solid ground, that is, phase 1 (...back to square one...).

    2nd) Why did you put almost a third of this thread's comments? Can you summarize the main points of what you have said so far?

    The blackbody at which temperature ?

    Really!? That is pretty obvious, there is a range of pertinent ones and the implications will not change. But I proposed that to Ken Lambert who appears to be knowledgeable.

    But I can make it easier for you: If some year's imbalance is, say, 0.9W/m2and the planet warms, will be next year the imbalance the same ceteris paribus.
  • @Ken #129

    uhu? I don't think so.

    The fact is it looks that the new treasure hunt is getting a paper that states a cooling-warming of the oceans from any 4 or 5 years in a row within the last decade that states an average from -2 to 1.6W/m2 in 0.05 increments. It's just a matter of time -and a research of academical resources including those outside public access WWW- that you'll find the paper with the value of your choice.

    The Knox & Douglas paper was why I suggested -to others- the exercise in #128 -the exercise predates the paper-. I have to thank you for that paper because it's now in my database for critical thinking in Statistics. Take a look to figure 1 there and tell me what you see.

    Neither BP nor you contributed one of many papers revealing a heat gain in deep oceans for recent years, specifically in southernmost basins. Why? Is some cherry-paper picking out there? Some kind of "editorialized" line of evidence? The papers I was referring in a previous comment are related to the travesty as Trenberth meant it. The papers you picked are related to the a supposedly independent line of evidence "confirming" the 'climategate' paraphernalia.

    The matter continue to be "the travesty", as that's the topic of this post and these comments. I suppose people interested in that already discussed the real cooling parts -there are those, I've been discussing about that since 2007- of the supposedly cooling trend and what causes it, all within the other post you listed.
  • @Ken Lambert #157

    Good for you Ken that you set aside figures; whenever you want to get back to that, go to "It's not warming" or any other more suitable post and let me know. I hope that severe cooling I pointed during that very specific period of 2010 has made you realize you need to learn more about how the planet works. You know I'm not patient with people who reason in a way that reminds me the sound of chalk continually squeaking against a blackboard -unless they are, admittedly, students-.

    Now you are coming back to what is solid ground for you: Rhetorics.
    Yet if there were a 'hack' or 'leak' of emails between businesspersons engaged in the oil, nuclear or coal industries, which cast doubt on their theories and public positions - I would bet "London to a brick" that such emails would be screaming out of the internet, the environmentalist industry, and the hackers or leakers would be extolled as public whistleblower heroes deserving of the 'Assange prize'.

    What an easy way to get some real states. Wait! You said "I would". I say you was likely thinking along the way of "it takes one to know one", but sadly it was just your mirror. You speak of Assange and forget that there are many people (CIA, SMS, RVS, MI6, etc.) that knew those mails -and milliards more- and that they have much to gain (or lose), not from showing themselves as hackers but from following the "inner web of the conspiracy" and revealing it in the proper moment. Imagine Russia, with a lot to lose if this anti AGW politics go on, *not having* (was it good, the *spell* marks: alakazaam!) access to those emails or other "incriminatory" emails and *not having* good scientists to support an explanatory campaign. The decent thing to do is a reality check.

    The fact is that all get us back to a Hollywood plot and a screenplay-like partial withdrawal of logic that accompanies it if you like to enjoy the movie. Your diasporic urban tribe have made from the "climategate mistique" its own version of Antitrust(2001) with your kin playing the character of Ryan Phillipee. Or maybe it has touches of The Da Vinci Code. Whatever, but the problem stays when one's epistemology is dictated in front of a TV set and not in an academic hall without the ability to tell the difference.
  • @KL: "The AGW case argues that massive changes to global energy use is urgently required. This involves huge economic and political challenge for all countries."

    Actually, transitioning away from fossil fuels is not only an imperative from the point of view of AGW theory (which you have yet to successfully challenge in all these months spent here), but it is also a strategic necessity.

    Oh, and AGW theory isn't based on lost data, but on sound, verified science. The fact that the original, non-normalized data (still available from national weather services) is or isn't in CRU's possession is completely irrelevant. It's a red herring, just like pretty much your entire contribution to this site.

    One year later, it's clear to anyone who knows anything about the science that Climategate was a fake scandal. The fact that it has pretty much disappeared from public consciousness - replaced by damning ties between climate denialist billionnaires and the Tea Party - is clear testimony that this particular act of disinformation by unscrupulous political activists has been relegated to the dustbin of history.
  • @KL: "The topic of this thread is Climategate - hiding the decline."

    Actually, the true topic is how that innocuous phrase was misrepresented by climate "skeptics" - something which you continue to do to this day it seems, even though no one seriously believe there was anything misleading or dishonest about the phrase in its proper context.

    "All the raw global thermometer data was collected and many (if not all) 'corrected' by CRU to produce the surface temp series HADCRUT etc."

    Please provide actual evidence that the corrections to the data made it less represenative of reality. If you do not have any evidence of this, then you are making baseless accusations, which is not a logically tenable position.

    "In plain language - do dodgy once and don't be surprised if others want to look at your other 'tricks' to verify there is no other 'dodginess'."

    Except there was no dodginess in the first place.

    "when the proxy no longer matched the warming trend"

    Indeed, because tree ring proxies since the 1950s do not accurately represent actual temperatures. The misleading thing would have been to *continue* using the proxies past this date.

    "Archiesteel - I can't remember which thread I last conversed with you but your ungenerous remark does not fit with my recollection of the weakness of your contribution."

    At least my contributions make sense, and are not a series of confused deductions based on erroneous premises. So say my contributions are weak all you want, they are the rock of Gibraltar compared to yours.

    (Nor do I constantly whine about being "censored" when my comments are redacted due to inflammatory language. Instead, I take it like a responsible adult. You should try it. This is just a website, after all - it's not as if we're being paid to post here, right?)

    "The argument then goes - if one bit of this 'science' is dodgy - how do we know that the rest is rock solid"

    Uh, by analyzing it? I mean, that is the logical thing to do.

    On the other hand, if we were to apply your logic to professional climate deniers like Singer, Lindzen, Watts and McIntyre - who have been shown to be wrong over and over again - then none of them should have *any* credibility left, and you should criticize them as much as you do actual climate scientists.
  • @KL: "There is plenty to Climategate. I can go find the exact emails and quote them here and risk being deleted as have two of my comments so far."

    We have all seen those e-mails, and when they're placed in their correct context it is *clear* there was no fraud nor any attempts to silence opposing viewpoints.

    "The meanings are unambiguous - a clear attempt to suppress dissenting scientific views to present to the world a monolithic edifice of AGW concensus."

    Actually, no less than three independent reviews have cleared the CRU of wrongdoing.

    Climategate was a dud. It's time for you to stop flogging that dead horse.
  • @KL: BS, as usual. Tree-rings are not reliable for recent temperature proxies, and as such were not included in a graph. There is nothing nefarious about this, no matter how much politically-motivated people whine about it. It's a common statistical trick, and was not intented to mislead. End of story.

    It's really sad to see you guys cling to that as if you could continue to milk it for disinformation. The truth is, no one cares about Climategate anymore, except professional deniers and their clueless followers.

    Now, if a hacker could somehow get the internal e-mails of Koch Industries regarding their financial support of the Climate Denial Machine, then *that* would provide some valuable insight. Perhaps Wikileaks will release some eventually...
  • @NQoA: "That's pretty much what the "Climate Change Deniers" have been saying all along."

    Actually, that isn't true. There are still many deniers/politically-motivated skeptics who still dispute we are in a warming trend.

    Indeed, many of those who have been trying to prop up the failed manufactured Climategate scandal (which has now been thoroughly eclipsed by Cablegate) are saying just that.

    The fact that you seem to believe warming should be linear is also a sign you are gravely mistaken: complex systems do not react in linear fashion. Look at the Stock Market if you don't believe me...
  • @ProfMandia and unreal2r
    Specifically, the discussion on costs:
    1. Without CCS will not achieve over the next 20-30 years a sufficient reduction in CO2 emissions. CCS is perhaps 70-80% of the cost of combating AGW. CCS is in no way improves the efficiency of energy - on the contrary - only generates costs.
    2. Adoption of a AGW theory version of the IPCC (required haste) the effect of the introduction of large-scale too "young" technology for renewable energy. It harms the technology. For example, solar power - is still underdeveloped energy storage technology is at night - the day melting salt (NaCl, KCl, and others) - is still too inefficient technology.
    3. Trenberth - one of the "creators" Climategate - the end justifies the means?
    4. @ Scaddenp - bravo! I agree completely. The theory of risk - an acceptable degree of probability - an intolerable absolutizing (IPCC), the principle of the superiority of prevention ... Here I recommend the work of V. Klaus, a professor of economics and the Czech president: "Blue Planet in Green Shackles" (one of the chapters of this book) and http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/may/01/vacla-klaus-emissions -Economy
  • @rockytom
    S funding of research related to AGW is a "slippery subject" ... :

    “Even the big oil companies have long since been putting their real money into projects dedicated to showing how they are in favour of a "low carbon economy". In 2002 Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford University to fund research into energy sources needed to fight global warming. BP, which famously rebranded itself in 2004 as "Beyond Petroleum", gave $500 million to fund similar research.[...]”
  • @ScaredAmoeba

    To those who say that really this was not Climategate, I recommend especially the comments on cited by You article Nature News, 15 November 2010; Climate: The hottest year

    ... and Jones paper: An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970, Nature, 2010.
    One of the conclusions is as follows:

    “Here we show that the hemispheric differences in temperature trends in the middle of the twentieth century stem largely from a rapid drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperatures of about 0.3°C between about 1968 and 1972. The timescale of the drop is shorter than that associated with either tropospheric aerosol loadings or previous characterizations of oscillatory multidecadal variability.”

    If the affair - scandals, was not, how this work and this conclusions?
  • @threadshredder, I have noticed over the years of discussing a variety of topics on USENET and the WWW that quite often delusions of this nature are often paradoxically strengthened by them being proven wrong. The one with the delusion is unable to accept the criticism and finds ways to dismiss it on any basis they can, rather than face the fact that they are wrong and are making a fool of themselves. Instead they percieve themselves as having won the argument, thus reinforcing the delusion.

    As it happens, I tried posting a reply to Prof. Singers latest nonsense in American Thinker, but it doesn't appear to have made it past the moderator. This is what I wrote:

    It is ironic that Prof. Singer accuses Mann of dishonesty when his use of the IPCC 1990 diagram as evidence of the MWP is deeply misleading. It is a schematic diagram (not data) of central england temperatures (not global) and the last point of the graph shows temperatures representative of the first half of the 20th century (so it doesn't show any of the warming that has ocurred since 1950 or so. See the appendix of this paper http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2009/2009_Jones_etal_2.pdf which discusses the origin of this diagram, and updates it using CET measurements up to 2007 (Figure 7), which shows that "recent measured warming may be comparable with presumed earlier warmth" (actually they are higher according to the graph, but Jones et al in usual scientific style avoid overstating the results). Prof Singer also fails to mention Wahl and Amman (2007) addressed the criticism of Mann's method and that other proxy analysis, constructed using other methods, produce essentially the same result, so why doesn't Prof. Singer criticise them as well?
  • @WSteven "I'm sure the Conservative Party of Canada is pretty much the same."

    Thankfully no. Although many in the Conservative base here in Canada are absolutely in denial, the Conservative party does officially accept climate change. They even stated after climategate that leaked emails are no basis to change their position on the matter. Not bad for a party who just a few years ago was talking about 'so-called greenhouse gases'

    That is the good news. The bad news is that Canada has been obstructionist on the world stage and has the lowest aspirational GHG targets of any industrialized country. And to make matter worse the official government position is to do nothing until the US does something.
  • A recent article on ABC online is relevant to my 138. In this case the death threats are not being directed at scientists in any way associated with climategate or any other faux controversy engineered by deniers, but at simple climate scientists. Some of the threats explicitly state that the scientists will be attacked "if they continue their research".

    There is a certain irony to this. Tallbloke, unhappy that a comment of his was deleted for containing a profanity, has posted a blog on his website about the supposed censorship at Skeptical Science. In comments he congratulates himself for the lack of inflammatory comments in his blog, but the blog itself begins by suggesting that John Cook is "scarily brief step" from locking scientists who disagree with the consensus on global warming away in mental institutions. Indeed, the form of that suggestion, a truncated paraphrase of Martin Niemöller's famous quote ("First they came for the Jews ..." indirectly associates Cook with Nazism. Nothing inflammatory about that, of course. Or at least, not in tallbloke's eyes.

    The irony is that while tallbloke is trying to beat up a statement that scientists disagreeing with the consensus are probably wrong into a revelation inclinations towards totalitarian suppression of dissent, his fellow travellers are using death threats to actually try and suppress dissent, and indeed, not just dissent, but research.

    This is not to suggest that tallbloke or any other well known denier would approve of such threats. Indeed, I am sure they would be horrified at the thought. But when you habitually accuse a group of people of fraud, conspiracy, genocidal inclinations, and, of course, suppression of dissent by totalitarian means, it would be surprising in the extreme if that did not translate into threats against those people. All of these accusations have been made by some well known deniers, and no well known denier has not make at least some of them. Including, of course, tallbloke with his nazi allusion.

    Anybody thinking the debate here sometimes gets a bit too vitriolic should bear in mind the nature of the accusations deliberately and publicly made by the most prominent deniers against the more prominent climate scientists. They should also bear in mind that probably not one active pro-science debater on this site has not at some time or another been accused of fraud, conspiracy to defraud for monetary gain, and intentions of genocide. I know I have (all three), and I am not even a climate scientist. These accusations are routinely made on denier sites whose participants laud themselves on their politeness and reasonable tone, while vilifying such sites as Skeptical Science for the abusive nature of the comments made here. This illustrates clearly that denialism never stays constrained. It necessarily infects all parts of a persons thoughts or else it will self destruct from inconsistency.
  • A CONSPIRACY OF SELF INTEREST

    Is global warming a conspiracy ? Did a group of scientists go to a back room and make up Global Warming to make a lot of money. Of course not.


    What exists is a “CONSPIRACY OF SELF INTEREST”. It is to the best interest of all climate scientists for enough plausibility be found in Global Warming AKA climate change AKA climate disruption AKA weirding weather to keep the lights on and their paychecks coming in. If global Warming were to be found to be entirely natural, funding and staffs would be drastically cut.

    Does it take a conspiracy with a central co-coordinator to assure us that human beings will act like human beings ? Many like the late Stephen Schneider think that exaggerating certainties and hiding uncertainties is justified for the good of the planet.

    Is the price of sugar a conspiracy or the result of thousands of people dong what they think is in their own self interest. ? The “invisible hand” works in all other aspects of human civilization, to believe it doesn’t in climate science is naïve.

    To be fair around 1998 when there had been many [20] years of continuous warming I can see why the climatologists were concerned. I would have been too. They projected the current temperature rise to mean 3 ° C by 2100. [They exaggerated the rate by about 3 X] They didn’t have a crystal ball to tell them that over the next 12 years temperatures would be flat or slowly fall. And they didn’t have enough knowledge of history to know this 60 year cycle was normal. Studying global warming seemed to make sense. Of course once the laboratories had been built and the scientists hired there was a “constituency “ for further research.

    Most scientist just want to study something and get paid for it and the best way to do that is to go with the flow. Climate change or global warming in the title of your study triples the chances of it being funded by government or Greenpeace or WWF. After you take their money you had better find serious consequences if you ever want to get any more $.

    In addition Climategate has proved that the CO2 mafia is so firmly entrenched that it would be professional suicide to try to do research into non CO2 based causes of our slight warming. Anyone without tenure would be a fool to go against the CO2 mafia and the hockey team. Those with tenure are the only ones in a position to deny the juggernaut. [Lindzen, Spencer, Curry withstand a ton of abuse and Ad Hominem attacks and are very brave about it ]

    There is a pile of money to be extracted from a gullible public. That is where the true conspiracy exists. Cap and trade’s only function is to make tens of trillions of dollars to companies like Enron and the Chicago Carbon Exchange [deceased]. Cap and trade or hideous taxes make no sense even if you believe in AGW because they export jobs to the coal powered factories of 3 rd world countries. So the worldwide emission of CO2 goes up.

    Then there are other one worlder types who didn’t invent global warming but are happy to let it be a battering ram to help them get a redistribution of wealth and a world government.

    Notice that I don’t claim these people invented global warming but they are using it for their own agenda.
  • A serial climate denial blogger posted the following today about Mann’s graph on the comment thread to the NPR article, “Can 'Carbon Ranching' Offset Emissions In Calif.?” [To access this article/comment thread, click here.]

    “Some of you really ought to read Andrew W. Montford's "The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science" to get a thorough understanding of how the science underlying the totally unproven hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming has been manipulated.

    “The use of bristlecone pine tree rings as temperature proxies, questionable statistical methods and appending instrumental temperatures has been shown to be deliberately misleading.”

    Statements like the above should not go unchallenged. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time and effort to patrol the comment threads of media websites like NPR's. In many respects, it is a thankless job, but one that has to be done in my opinion.
  • According to Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English a ‘conspiracy’ is ‘a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful or illegal’.
    It is a matter of taste whether certain events that are elucidated in the Climategate e-mails can be called a conspiracy. On 8 July 2004 Phil Jones e-mailed to Michael Mann about some papers by Michaels and McKitrick and by De Laat and Maurellis, both discussing the influence of urbanisation on temperature. About half of the observed warming could be explained from the warming effect of urban agglomerations. Jones and Mann were not amused, and Jones wrote:
    ‘I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Cheers, Phil’

    Keeping some papers out of an IPCC report is not illegal. But is it harmful? The 2007 IPCC-report would certainly have been less comprehensive without reference to these papers. Affecting the quality of an IPCC report can be considered a harmful action. So, this ‘secret plan made by two or more people’ can be considered a conspiracy.

    Redefining what peer-review literature is, is not illegal either, although it is against the rules of scientific publication. And, moreover, it was impossible for Jones, Mann and Trenberth to redefine peer-review literature. This phrase can be considered boasting. It is no conspiracy.

    Nevertheless, this example shows, that there was at least one conspiracy. This conspiracy had no success. The papers by MM and DLM were mentioned in the final version of AR4. But Jones was successful in omitting the papers from the first and second draft. It was only after repeated comments by Steve McIntyre, that Jones was forced to add a paragraph.

    Conspiracy or not? Fact is, that the members of the Climategate e-mail club sometimes call themselves ‘the gang’ (11 times in the e-mails). Maybe that is another kind of boasting. But my Longman’s dictionary says about a gang: (1) a group of young people who spend time together and often cause trouble and fight against other groups (2) a group of criminals who work together (3) humorous: a group of friends, especially young people (4) a group of workers or prisoners, doing physical work together.
    Number 1 and 3 are not appropriate; they were not young people. Number 4 is not appropriate either; they did not do physical work. So that leaves only definition 2. It’s their word, not mine!
  • According to Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English a ‘conspiracy’ is ‘a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful of illegal’.
    It is a matter of taste whether certain events that are elucidated in the Climategate e-mails can be called a conspiracy. On 8 July 2004 Phil Jones e-mailed to Michael Mann about some papers by Michaels and McKitrick and by De Laat and Maurellis, both discussing the influence of urbanisation on temperature. About half of the observed warming could be explained from the warming effect of urban agglomerations. Jones and Mann were not amused, and Jones wrote:
    ‘I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Cheers, Phil’

    Keeping some papers out of an IPCC report is not illegal. But is it harmful? The 2007 IPCC-report would certainly have been less comprehensive without reference to these papers. Affecting the quality of an IPCC report can be considered a harmful action. So, this ‘secret plan made by two or more people’ can be considered a conspiracy.

    Redefining what peer-review literature is, is not illegal either, although it is against the rules of scientific publication. And, moreover, it was impossible for Jones, Mann and Trenberth to redefine peer-review literature. This phrase can be considered boasting. It is no conspiracy.

    Nevertheless, this example shows, that there was al least one conspiracy. This conspiracy was unseccesful. The papers by MM and DLM were mentioned in the final version of AR4. But Jones was successful in omitting the papers from the first and second draft. It was only after repeated comments by Steve McIntyre, that Jones was forced to add a paragraph.

    Conspiracy or not? Fact is, that the members of the Climategate e-mail club sometimes call themselves ‘the gang’ (11 times in the e-mails). Maybe that is another sort of boasting. My Longman’s dictionary says about a gang: (1) a group of young people who spend time together and often cause trouble and fight against other groups (2) a group of criminals who work together (3) humorous: a group of friends, especially young people (4) a group of workers or prisoners, doing physical work together. Number 1 and 3 are not appropriate; they were not young people. Number 4 is not appropriate either; they did not do physical work. So that leaves only definition 2. It’s their word, not mine!

    Note for the moderator: I don't see any reason why this post should be deleted: it is not offensive, it is not off topic, it is not political.
  • Actually it should be pointed out that British scientists are less fazed by the label climategate than nutty skeptic intellectuals:

    http://lovelywaterlooville.blogspot.com/2010/09/climategate-and-ghost-train.html

    There have been many positive outcomes from 'climategate' mostly confounding the skeptics I'm afraid, at least in the UK.
  • After Climategate I was directed to WUWT by a denier acquaintance of mine so I could learn what a dupe I had been to believe science. The low level of discourse there (and other sites he directed me to) led me to dismiss their conspiracy claims and to seek out more reasonable sources of scientific information. Thank you John Cook for creating this site and thanks to all the regular contributors/commenters who keep is stocked with science for anyone who is willing to learn it.
  • After my rant about what a distasteful act this was, I tried to balance that out by also looking at what we could possibly learn from this affair (or what came into clearer focus):

    http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/climategate-lessons-learned/

    - There’s no strong relation between knowledge/information and people’s perceptions: Just the facts won’t do.
    - Values and ideals clash in public climate discussions, and this greatly affects the perception and communication of the science.
    - The animosity towards climate science is even greater and more widespread than we thought it was.
    - There are many other aspects besides science that influence one’s policy preferences.
    - The need for increased transparency and openness of data and code is now widely shared.
    - Citizen science has taken off over the last year.
    - Don’t let your anger or frustration shine through in your communication. It doesn’t go over well (except with people who share your PoV).
    - We should rethink our communication strategy (which one? exactly.) Even when we get more angry because of such events, I think we should try to minimize our venging of anger (note to self: me too). As difficult at it is, we should probably try to be more respectful to those who are critical of the science for whatever reason, even if they don't pay us that respect. A very difficult cookie to swallow, but I think it's the only way to have science regain its deserved credibility. Going full attack mode as some favour will beakfire, as "climategate" has shown.
  • After you've finished this series, it would be great if you stopped playing to the deniers' game by referring to the stolen CRU emails as 'climategate'. It suggests malfeasance in the name. You're basically helping to spread the propaganda.
  • Albatros, JMurphy et al..

    Well one man's heroic whistleblower is another man's thief.

    If the emails were uncontroversial - why bother exposing them??

    Notice that none of the participants ever claimed that they were fakes or had been doctored.

    The critical lesson of the Climategate affair is that the most prominent AGW scientists (Jones, Mann, Trenberth, Briffa et al) clearly felt it necessary to obstruct and suppress dissenting views - no matter how inept or unfounded or vexatious.

    If the AGW science was so strong and overwhelmingly correct - the dissenters would not need suppressing - surely they would wilt in the harsh light of open examination.

    A better explanation is that Jones et al really felt the science was weaker than they had portrayed it to the public (which is well documented in the leaked emails); and that dissenters were a real threat to that rather weak edifice.

    Interested amateur skeptics on this very good blog have shown up many of the weaknesses in both theory and measurement.

    SS's mission statement is to more or less demolish the skeptical arguments about AGW - but when robust free discussion reigns - that mission is looking seriously undone.
  • Albatross,

    Lindzen is perfectly aware that during a warming period you will have more warm records than cold records. That is not the question that needs to be answered. That would only be the question to be answered if you were ignorant enough to believe there were zero natural variation in temperatures.

    Santer's "fingerprint for AGW" is purely statistical and based upon the assumption we know everything necessary to know about sources of climate forcing so as to rule out natural variation as the cause of statistical warming.

    People like to compare AGW statistics and people termed as deniers of it like smoking/cancer statistics and those who denied that. But for that to mean anything one has to ignore that just about every substance known to man at one time or another has been statistically linked to cancer and the smoking/cancer link just happens to be one eventually proven valid.

    The general population is aware of this (why aren't you?). Thus the statistical argument alone does not sway public opinion unless clearly linked to other evidence.

    People are not going to give up their life styles over a suspicion or irrational fear based upon a pure statistical correlation of warming to anthropogenic activities.

    People will follow trusted leaders but Climategate ended any chance that route will work. So those fools can go to bed at night knowing they are responsible for eliminating that method of alerting people without first having to experience actual negative effects from warming, if such effects ever occur.

    In fact the desperation of being unable to advance a carefully drawn and solid scientific argument must have been what led to using tricks to hide the decline and politically influence peer review processes as opposed to relying upon facts.

    Warmists would love to paint the other side with such behavior but for it to have the same impact you would have to first put them in charge of the IPCC so they look like the establishment and not just an ordinary Joe.

    Think about it! Indeed the planet is warming and it is likely to at least be in part due to AGW, or at least it was warming, not sure that still is the case. But there is no solid scientific argument that such warming is purely unnatural or dangerous.
  • Albatross... Ironically, though, just today Richard Lindzen was in front of a congressional subcommittee making this statement:

    "Climategate is proof of overt cheating by climate scientists."

    This after there have been numerous, in depth, independent reviews into the matter. It's almost like Lindzen and his smoking. No amount of evidence can sway his opinion.
  • Alec Cowan #130

    "Why? Is some cherry-paper picking out there? Some kind of "editorialized" line of evidence? The papers I was referring in a previous comment are related to the travesty as Trenberth meant it. The papers you picked are related to the a supposedly independent line of evidence "confirming" the 'climategate' paraphernalia."

    The Knox and Douglas paper was published in Aug10 which showed that 2003-08 data for OHC content was flat or slightly negative (cooling)for the top 700m and *deep ocean* of approx +0.09W/sq.m (Purkey & Johnson).

    The paper cites five Argo studies for 0-700m OHC by Willis, Loehle, Pielke, Knox & Douglas show **negative** OHC change, while von Schukmann (0-2000m) is the outlier showing +0.77W/sq.m.

    I note that K&D; quoted Willis (a private communication) as a reference in the Aug10 paper. This is pretty recent information.

    I would like know if the Knox & Douglas paper has been contradicted or its findings overturned by more recent studies.

    BTW all these numbers quoted in the above papers are 'global'. You can highlight parts of the oceans which are heating or cooling, but what counts about 'global' warming are 'global' numbers.
  • Alec Cowan #161

    Your erudition is plain for us all to see Alec. It seems that the 'Assange leaks' were pretty overblown in any case.

    For what has been reported, the dastardly Americans were saying in private similar things to what they say in public. It not that a measure of honesty in discharge of public duties by a democratically elected government?

    Assangeleak stands in contrast to the 'Climategate' emails, particularly those involving CRU which show a clear intent to present a bulletproof story to the public, while privately expressing doubts about the quality of the underpinning data, and actively frustrating public scrutiny of the data.

    From my reading of Dr Trenberth's papers, his frustrations expressed in the relevant emails do reflect in his published work. As I have said on other threads, he is a 'class act' - very open and generous with his time.

    The fact that one disagrees with another about an interpretation of data or theory, does not indicate the insincerity or bad faith of either party.

    It is time to have Dr Trenberth live on SKS so we can all ask our burning questions.
  • All of the above skeptic bashers:

    If you bet a Gore - don't be surprised if you get raised a Monckton.

    One extreme begets another. The climateer group of scientists (all 21) should have a good read of the Climategate emails, the clear attempts at suppression and manipulation of dissenting views of well qualified scientists and frankly admit the great uncertainties in the theory and measurement of AGW.

    The thing which has intrigued me, is the simple proposition that if the case for 'dangerous' AGW by the enhanced CO2GHG effect was so overwhelmingly precise and strong - why bother trying to exclude and suppress dissenting views?

    Bashing Monckton is part of a misinformation process itself - a way of diverting attention to an eccentric extremist and away from the real uncertainties and weaknesses in the very unsettled science.
  • An unfortunate event certainly, and quite possibly the work of the same individual or group that initiated the Climategate hack. If that is the case, their desperation is sad indeed. It is to his credit that Anthony Watts is refusing to link to the site, and we'll have to see how others in the skeptical side of things respond. What is most absurd of course is any notion that anything could be gained by such a hack, as though there were any secret "warmist" communications to be revealed. Nature is revealing quite plainly the anthropogenic effect of human activity on the planet, and try as they might, deniers have less and less wiggle room to spin their fantasy. This absurdly warm March over much of North America, stretching from Mexico all the way to the edge of the Arctic iperhaps has turned the heat up on certain groups to launch personal attacks as the facts and science continue to not support their denialist position.
  • And for those who get all uppity about how "rude" or "aggressive" the remarks within some of those emails were, Arthur Smith has some extracted comments from other discussions. And remember, these aren't private comments, they're directed to editors of journals. I've made some guesses at what might have been said about some of these papers in private, you can do your own guessing.

    http://arthur.shumwaysmith.com/life/content/the_nothing_that_was_climategate
  • And here is a rewritten version of the post to which Caerbannog (#26) replied:

    According to Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English a ‘conspiracy’ is ‘a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful of illegal’.
    It is a matter of taste whether certain events that are elucidated in the Climategate e-mails can be called a conspiracy. On 8 July 2004 Phil Jones e-mailed to Michael Mann about some papers by Michaels and McKitrick and by De Laat and Maurellis, both discussing the influence of urbanisation on temperature. About half of the observed warming could be explained from the warming effect of urban agglomerations. Jones and Mann were not amused, and Jones wrote:
    ‘I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Cheers, Phil’

    Keeping some papers out of an IPCC report is not illegal. But is it harmful? The 2007 IPCC-report would certainly have been less comprehensive without reference to these papers. Affecting the quality of an IPCC report can be considered a harmful action. So, this ‘secret plan made by two or more people’ can be considered a conspiracy.

    Redefining what peer-review literature is, is not illegal either, although it is against the rules of scientific publication. And, moreover, it was impossible for Jones, Mann and Trenberth to redefine peer-review literature. This phrase can be considered boasting. It is no conspiracy.

    Nevertheless, this example shows, that there was at least one event that can be considered a conspiracy. This conspiracy was unseccesful. The papers by MM and DLM were mentioned in the final version of AR4. But Jones was successful in omitting the papers from the first and second draft. It was only after repeated comments by Steve McIntyre, that Jones was forced to add a paragraph.

    Conspiracy or not? Fact is, that the members of the Climategate e-mail club sometimes call themselves ‘the gang’ (11 times in the e-mails). Maybe that is another sort of boasting. My Longman’s dictionary says about a gang: (1) a group of young people who spend time together and often cause trouble and fight against other groups (2) a group of criminals who work together (3) humorous: a group of friends, especially young people (4) a group of workers or prisoners, doing physical work together. Which of the 4 definitions is appropriate is up to the readers. It’s their word, not mine!
  • And “one more” conclusion: if the CRU had obviously, in some cases, such defective data (it is not their fault?), why they work (errors ?) As easy pass "screen" review process? ... and why these works - papers; have become the basis for the IPCC report ?

    According to me, these errors are not the result of "natural scientific process" (which tries to convince us here) Their cause lies in the lack of knowledge of scientific methodology, indeed: "go for shortcuts."

    When something good "fit" to our theory, We simply verify this theory a less; or do not accurate ...

    Professor Weiner known in Poland and the U.S. expert on the "theory of scientific research", says that for the “sake of science”, the skeptics in the process of falsification of scientific theory (in each case) ..., really: They can do EVERYTHING (!), that: History of Science teaches us, that any attempt to restrict this process: they were ALWAYS to the detriment of science ... (note particularly good for # 11 and # 12)

    Dear supporters of AGW theory, if you're right, you have to its just enough to "accurately" to prove - it's easy ... No more "shortcuts" and "tricks" - literally and figuratively.
  • AndyS:

    However, the report would have been more convincing, especially to skeptics, if the senior authors had all been people--probably tenured academics--whose integrity and independence from any pressure from their employers could be clearly demonstrated.


    You're living in a fantasy land. Look at all the scorn heaped on tenured academics by McIntyre, the press, etc after "Climategate".

    Eric the Red:

    As suggested, using Teske as a contributing author is fine. However, making him lead author can give the impression of partiality.


    More fantasy land. McIntyre would've been screaming as loudly if Teske had "only" been a contributing author. We'd still be seeing all the crap about its being unacceptable to include a paper written by a Greenpeace employee.
  • Answering #4, Daved Green-

    The problem here is not so much that being basic, it lacks detail, but rather, that the logical flow of the article is jerky and scattered, and the wording fatally imprecise. Under such circumstances, since, as #3 points out, "'Skeptics' use bits of science like flack to deflect focus from their core arguments", they latch on to each one of these shortcomings and do exactly that -- with gusto and great effect.

    As an example of the jerky flow, consider even the very first sentence. It announces that there are two things 'interesting'. Then it immediately lists them. But frankly, from that list, neither one sounds 'interesting'. So already the logical flow most plausibly promised by the opening sentence has been lost.

    But then the article switches to the 1500 year cycle itself. This switch is quite abrupt, since we STILL haven't seen anything 'interesting' in the "two things interesting". But here too, we fail to keep the logical flow: for the unfortunate phrase "global temperature see-saw effect" spoils the whole paragraph.

    How so? Because the phrase "global temperature" would most logically mean a -single- temperature, which in turn would most likely be an -average- temperature. But the 'see-saw' described must be rising temperature in one hemisphere, while the temperature falls in the other (and vice versa).

    At best, this would be an example of the rhetorical effect known as 'paraproskokian', since the expected meaning of the word turns out not to be ther right one. But as Wikipedia points out, paraprosdokiam "is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax" -- none of which fits here.
    (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraprosdokian).

    Frankly, if I wasn't already convinced of the basic truth of the AGW hypothesis, this article would not have convinced me either. It would not even have convinced me to research it further -- especially since it contains no references for its highly contentious claims.

    BTW: that final contentious conclusion is another example of fatal imprecision in wording: what is being "recorded all around the world" is NOT "the current temperature increase caused by CO2". What is being recorded is merely "the current temperature increase". How much of it is caused by CO2 is exactly the bone of contention (assuming that no one still doubts the accuracy of the measurement -- although you know that because of 'Climategate' they do doubt it). You only give skeptics excuses for disbelief when you misstate it that badly.

    Unsupported statements of the central thesis (here that CO2-caused temperature rise is already being recorded) belong in the proem, the statement or perhaps on the conclusion, but ONLY when the support has been provided in (the body of) the argument. But where IS it? It just isn't there. Without it, you have no rebuttal at all.
  • Anyone that threatens everyone's futures by corrupting the truth for the sake of selfish short-term gain is as unscrupulous and as low as a spammer in my opinion.

    I hope this will get as much media coverage as "Climategate" did, expose the nastiness and make Denialism as socially unacceptable and unfashionable as drink driving.
    I'm sure we would all like to know who is this anonymous donor, and their motives, because it certainly isn't about truth.
  • apiratelooksat50!166 said:

    "I wasn't going to comment on Denialgate just like I've never commented on ClimateGate, because I think it is pointless and really not about the science."

    Joseph Bast on Climategate:
    "...We have been saying for many years that the leading alarmists have engaged in academic fraud, do not speak for the larger scientific community, and are exaggerating the scientific certainty of their claims..."
    http://heartland.org/policy-documents/climategate-opportunity-stop-and-think

    Does HI stand for Hypocrisy Institute?
  • archiesteel #96

    "Oh, and AGW theory isn't based on lost data, but on sound, verified science. The fact that the original, non-normalized data (still available from national weather services) is or isn't in CRU's possession is completely irrelevant. It's a red herring, just like pretty much your entire contribution to this site."

    The topic of this thread is Climategate - hiding the decline.

    Hiding the delcine relates to the treatment by CRU's Jones of tree ring temperature proxies which were spliced with thermometer data after 1960 - when the proxy no longer matched the warming trend.

    All the raw global thermometer data was collected and many (if not all) 'corrected' by CRU to produce the surface temp series HADCRUT etc.

    As even kdkd says ""Even if we take the idea that the "Nature trick" was dodgy...", indeed we surely can ask for an independent verification of the CRU 'corrections' to the raw surface temperature data - by simply asking CRU for a copy of the raw data. Unfortunately CRU 'lost' this raw input data Of course it has has the output with a description of how it was processed in the literature somewhere going back in time.

    In plain language - do dodgy once and don't be surprised if others want to look at your other 'tricks' to verify there is no other 'dodginess'.

    Archiesteel - I can't remember which thread I last conversed with you but your ungenerous remark does not fit with my recollection of the weakness of your contribution.
  • archiesteel:
    Climategate has not disappeared. You may wish that it had, but it hasn't.
    AGW is not based on verified science at all. It is a hypothosis. Within that hypothosis, there are certain elements that are not bearing fruit, which indicates the hypothosis needs to be re-examined.
    On a regional scale, where I live, it is supposed to have warmed 1.3C in the past 40 years. This is according to GISS data. I can tell you living here that we have not warmed 1.3C. I went to the trouble of getting the actual "raw" data to verify this fact. The actual "raw" data shows that the period from 1934-1944, on a decadal scale, was warmer than present temps. That research shows that the global scale has errors.
    I have no doubt that globally, we have warmed since 1850. Living in a higher latitude, I should be observing that warming moreso. I am not observing this at all. That is part of the problem of believeability of warming that has to be "overcome".
    When you base something on a tree ring proxy data, you should check with botonists. Temperature is a very small element of "growth". Tree rings are not a good proxy for temp. Any farmer or forester could tell you that.
    Climatically, we have been in a long term temperature decline since 8,000BP. The higher temps of today are but a blip in the overall trend. As anyone with a brain knows, 30 years does NOT establish a climatic trend. We starte warming in the 1850's. We had accelerated warming in the early-mid 20th century. There was a pause in that warming from the 40's to the early 80's. The warming started in earnest again. Does co2 contribute to said warming? Physics indicates that it has to. Observation of all elements of climate shows the question as to how much. That is the main question in all of this.
    The certainty is not as high as some would believe.
  • Around 2 years. Since before climategate 1 broke.
    Think I just found it noodling around. maybe form Realclimate. maybe from Real Science - Steve Goddard's blog.
    I Look at the site at least whenever something is posted on it. Often when mentioned in other blogs. Does listening to John on "the Climate SHow" podcast count?

    What I would like to see discussed is how to mobilize more people to engage in analysis of as many skeptic articles on various blogs as possible. I read many, and while I have a foundation in principles of physics and vaguely chemistry, many arguments (outside things like logical inconsistency) are over my head. There are enough people interested in the reality to work on cataloguing and getting expert help on the validity of the facts used by skeptics.
    Sometimes SKs posts numerous skeptic articles that are never dealt with, and there are literally dozens of denier sites spouting "proofs" of the demise of ACC.
  • As a member of the public, Climategate is what got me interested in reading about the whole issue of AGW, and the controversies surrounding it.

    I was reading articles like this one, which talks about suppression of opposing views from scientific journals, and subverting the peer review process:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/02/hacked-climate-emails-flaws-peer-review
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

    "In another email exchange CRU scientist Dr Keith Briffa initiates what looks like an attempt to have a paper rejected. In June 2003, as an editor of an unnamed journal, Briffa emailed fellow tree-ring researcher Edward Cook, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, saying: "Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting [an unnamed paper] – to ­support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can. Please."

    Stahle is a tree-ring professor from the University of Arkansas. This request appears to subvert the convention that reviewers should be both independent and anonymous.

    Cook replied later that day: "OK, today. Promise. Now, something to ask from you." The favour was to provide some data to help Cook review a paper that attacked his own tree-ring work. "If published as is, this paper could really do some damage," he said. "It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved [inverse regression] method is actually better in a practical sense.""

    Chris Shaker
  • As for the Anderegg paper,

    PNAS reviewers and author's William R. L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold and Stephen H. Schneider are apparently Google Scholar illiterate since searching for just the word "climate" with an author's name will bring results from non-peer-reviewed sources such as books, magazines, newspapers, patents, papers simply in PDF format but were never published, duplicate listings, citations and all sorts of other erroneous results. There is no "peer-reviewed journal only" search option in Google Scholar. Not to mention using those search techniques will get results from authors with the same name but who are completely different people. For instance even when using the author's name in quotes or advanced search operators such as "author:", Google Scholar will still show results from authors with only the same last name. Thus authors with common names will get inflated results. Take for instance using author "Phil Jones" (the infamous former CRU director of climategate fame) with the search word "climate", you get almost 5000 results! They only checked the top 4 papers for their "citation analysis" not for the total amount of results using the search word "climate" for all 1372 authors. Thus none of their numbers were verified.

    Not to mention, why were they searching for climate patents? Their "results" were obtained by searching Google Scholar using the search terms: "author:fi-lastname climate". By default Google Scholar is set to search both "articles and patents" yet no mention of searching only for articles is in the paper. So why were they searching for climate patents and how is a patent that contains the search word "climate" a relevant "climate publication"?

    Even better they cherry picked away skeptics "we imposed a 20 climate-publications minimum to be considered a climate researcher". So if a scientist published only 19 or less papers on climate he is not considered an "expert". They did this intentionally as they noted "researchers with fewer than 20 climate publications comprise ≈80% the UE group." Volume of publications does not indicate scientific truth. It cannot be ignored that skeptics extensively publish peer-reviewed papers so they have to use this propaganda to subjectively define "experts".

    Conclusion: the study is worthless due to Google Scholar illiteracy and Cherry Picking.
  • As luck would have it, John Costella's "Climategate" analysis is available as a reprint from SPPI (Monckton's group) and posted on Anthony Watts' site.

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/21/climategate-analysis/
  • At least Dikram Marsupial allowed half my post.

    The ABC's living treasure Robyn Williams refused to read any of the Climategate material - a fair and unbiased attitude I'm sure. Just close your eyes and sing loudly in the dark dear Robyn.

    Tim Flannery should have known the cyclical history of drought in Australia. With the lone exception of SW WA - we have full reservoirs and river systems in nearly all of Australia as a result of a big La Nina. His opportunistic alarmism during the drought has destroyed his credibility.

    Al Gore - well he seems to be consuming a fair chunk of the planet's hydrocarbons and hamburger grandstanding around the world by private jet.
  • Atmospheric CO2 increase since the 19th century is likely to be at least partly a result of increased human CO2 emissions, as this article concludes.

    However, the correlation between atmospheric CO2 and “global temperature” is not so robust.

    The observed multi-decadal warming and cooling cycles cannot be explained by the gradually and smoothly increasing CO2 levels; the current global cooling despite record increase in CO2 is also hard to explain.

    A robust statistical analysis of the CO2 / temperature correlation, as proposed by pro-AGW scientists, Bart Verheggen, may shed more light on this apparent dilemma.

    http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2010m3d24-Global-warming-Bigger-than-Climategate-more-important-than-Copenhagenits-statistical-analysis

    Max
  • Bruce Frykman, you're confused about what scientific consensus is.

    The subject has by now been extensively reasearched. The results of the research all point in the direction of one coherent whole, which can be called the consensus model of Earh climate. It is established enough that it has been elevated to the level of a scientific theory. Please do not start ranting about "theories are not fact"; if you know anything about what a scientific theory is, you know how stupid that argument is.

    That is what the consensus is. It is a consensus of research results, built over many years. It is not some sort of vote in which people get to say what they believe. It is constrained by the results of a a very large body of scientific work. Science has not been done by consensus, it's the other way around.

    As for Bob Carter, all you are demonstrating is how biased you are. You believe him because you like what he says. Can you be sure that he is not corrupt? No, just like you can't be sure that all the other scientists you half accuse have done anything wrong. But in his case, he says what you want to hear, so you trust him. This is the exact opposite of a skeptical attitude. I'l add that Carter's record of publications in climate is less than impressive. In the El-Nino paper, he tried to push a conclusion that was not supported by the data.

    Talk from "skeptics" about scientists under pressure always makes me smile. James Hansen has been under pressure, from his governement, with an official order; isn't that exactly the kind of thing you object? Did you object in that case? If not, why not?

    Cuccinelli engaged on a whitch hunt/fishing expedition against a scientist he didn't like and did so purely for political reasons, abusing the legal and political power given to him. Did you object to that? These are real, observable, documented occurrences of what you complain about. But they don't mandate your protest because they are perpetrated against those who say stuff you dislike.

    On the other hand the accusations you are trying to relay here have not yet been substantiated. No real evidence has been brought, zilch. The so-called climategate has only revealed how solid the science actually is.

    And yes, it is possible that Bob Carter is lying. Or that he's twisting the truth, or misrepresenting it, or taking it out of context. If you think all these other people are lying without a shred of evidence that they are, why would that not also be a possibility?
  • Can I make a few suggestions regarding the hierarchy of arguments? When you have time, you might want to consider the following:

    I think “CO2 effect is saturated” more rightly belongs under “CO2 effect is weak”; and “It’s CFCs” belongs under “CO2 is not the only driver of climate”. And “CO2 is not increasing” could perhaps go somewhere in the category “Humans are too insignificant to affect global climate”.

    Perhaps “Pacific Islanders aren’t evacuating” could be a subcategory of “Pacific Islands are not drowning”? And shouldn’t “The Earth’s orbit is decaying” go under “It’s the Earth’s orbit”? And “Hemispheric timing” under “CO2 is coming from the ocean”? And “CO2 increases vegetation” under “CO2 is plant food”?

    “Technological breakthroughs will fix global warming” doesn’t seem to belong in “It’s not us” at all. Perhaps it could go instead in “It’s not bad”. Similarly, “Better to adapt than mitigate” and “China pollutes more” could both move from “It’s not bad” to “It’s too late”.

    “Mann inverted the Tiljander series” would seem to be the same argument as “Tiljander was flipped upside down”. The same goes for “It’s magnetic poles” and “It’s geomagnetic activity”. And “Phil Jones hid flaws in UHI study” is very similar to “Chinese station data is missing”. “CO2 limits will harm the economy” is very similar to “The benefits of reducing CO2 isn’t worth the economic pain”.

    Also, three particular arguments don’t seem to be displaying on the “taxonomy” list of 91 arguments: “Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy”, “Trenberth can’t account for the lack of warming”, and “CO2 is not a pollutant”.
  • CBD@117 "It is almost like they are applying slightly different standards."

    Slightly different standards? From what I can see, they have posted numerous articles about the climategate emails and not once checked the validity of those articles with the scientists concerned.
  • CBDunkerson #38

    This is my last word on Climategate - promise...

    One single extract from a Climategate report compiled by Terence Corcoran of National Post Canada should suffice to show what Messrs Mann and Jones were up to:

    Quote

    "Mr. Mann meddled in other ways. In January 2005, he called the editor of Geophysical Research Letters, the official science publication of the American Geophysical Union, to try to head off a paper by Mr. McIntyre. The editor, Steve Mackwell, defends the decision to publish and tells Mr. Mann that the McIntyre paper has been thoroughly peer reviewed by four scientists. “You would not in general be asked to look it over,” Mr. Mackwell told Mr. Mann. Later in 2005, Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Jones on their troubles with the GRL journal after Mr. Mackwell’s term as editor was up: “The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership.” endquote

    Plugging up a leak in the official AGW view at GRL - what pray does that mean in layman's language??
  • Chris #83

    If this were a trivia night, you would win a point. Willis is mentioned once in the text on page 28 of this 52 page paper - Willis et al 2007 re Argo ie:

    "Even this well-planned program had early instrumental problems causing data biases (Willis et al., 2007), but it was possible to identify and eliminate problematic
    data."

    Willis is a co-author with Lyman and he is indirectly mentioned in the 5 pages of references at the end of the paper. I said a 'couple' - so you have 2 points.

    There is no mention of any of Dr Willis' recent 'prelim' OHC analysis and quoted by Dr Pielke.

    You know Chris, I have been raving on about +0.9W/sq.m net forcings from Dr Trenberth's Aug09 paper based on Hansen's 2005 estimate etc - for a long time.

    In the 'missing heat' discussions, Climategate - the predication of the AGW position is that 'its there but we can't measure it adequately'.

    We know its about 0.9W/sq.m but we can only measure about 0.5-0.6W/sq.m is a theme of Dr Trenberth's papers.

    This very long paper by Hansen is a game changer.

    He accepts that von Schukmann's measurement of the global energy imbalance is about 0.5W/sq.m, holds fast to the theoretical CO2 GHG forcing, and then proceeds to explain the reduced positive balance - chiefly by picking Aerosols as the main culprit.

    He argues that aerosols have a forcing of -1.6W/sq.m (negative), when prior models used around -0.4-1.1W/sq.m.

    Quote (pp45):

    "We also must quantify the causes of changes of Earth's energy imbalance. The two dominant causes are changes of greenhouse gases, which are measured very precisely, and
    changes of atmospheric aerosols. It is remarkable and untenable that the second largest forcing that drives global climate change remains unmeasured. We refer to the direct and indirect effects of human-made aerosols.
    We have inferred indirectly, from the planet's energy imbalance and global temperature change, that aerosols are probably causing a forcing of about ‒1.6 W/m2 in 2010. Our estimated uncertainty, necessarily partly subjective, is ± 0.3 W/m2, thus a range of aerosol forcing from
    ‒1.3 to ‒1.9 W/m2." endquote

    Well, I should have applied for a job with Prof Hansen, because I have been banging away with a similar argument for some time - highlighting the wide error bars on the IPCC AR4 estimate of Aerosol forcing and also the unknown amounts being added by rapid industrialization by developing countries.

    There are several other bafflements in this paper (eg. the flatline von Schukmann OHC figure 2005-10) - but the jaw dropper for me is that Hansen has killed the 'missing heat' hypothesis and accepted that the OHC measurement **is** the imbalance and fitted the known unknown forcings to that observation.

    If Dr Willis OHC analysis turns out to be 0.25W/sq.m and overrides von Schukmann - then another revision down of the warming imbalance will be necessary - and more bafflements could follow.
  • Chris Shaker - Let's try a different approach. Climategate is ancient history, and has been pointed out, didn't change the science one fig.

    So, as I ask many skeptics - what will it take to convince you? How warm? How much CO2? How acidic the oceans? How much sea level rise? How many droughts and floods? How many melted glaciers? How much ice loss in Greenland and the Arctic?

    Just think about where you will believe/understand. Because whatever your level, under BAU, we will get there.
  • Cjshaker, you did not fully read. They do things with the data: cherry-picking, misrepresentations, distortions, innuendo, gratuitous attacks on people's integrity, all summed in blog posts with shocking titles.

    The FOI requests thing is so abusive that anyone who really cares about conserving the FOI process should be concerned. One of McIntyre's blogposts generated 48 FOI requests in a week-end. That qualifies as harassment. Not suprisingly, that's when bloggers have more time on their hands. A disproportionate share of these requests were for private communications instead of material useful for research.

    As for your confession that you need pointers and clues to look into the reality of this, it unfortunately indicates that your investigation has so far been superficial. Real Climate has a good search engine.

    However, if you really care, forget about news reports. Look at peer-reviewed litterature. If the research was really flawed, everyone looking to make a name in science (that's a lot of sharp young people) would have latched on, gone over the "bad stuff" and published rebuttals. New findings or comments on existing papers would have flourished. Has that happened? Of course not.

    Climategate is a mountain out of a molehill, a non-story not worthy of any attention if one cares to actually try to understand the state of scientific knowledge in the field.
  • Climate skepticism is like the Gold Rush. There is so little gold to be had that it's truly not worth the effort. But then there are the clever ones, who do the cooking and the laundry and sell the booze to the miners. They're the ones getting rich. There are some very clever climate skeptics out there cashing in on the rush. Steven Mosher with his climategate book. Loehle, who wrote a book titled, believe it or not, "How to be a successful scientist." Yep, from the guy whose publication record is (almost?) exclusively in E&E...;
    Then there is Watts, and all the ads he gets on his site, plus the exposure transferred to his electric car project. And Monckton with his speech tour. They're all working hard for the miners and raking in the dough.

    Quit wasting your time on a blog Ken, there is a large public out there ready to pay you to continue telling them what they want to hear. No data analysis required, no fancy statistics, no headache-generating line by line radiative transfer model, no Rossby Waves, just some good ol' talk in a book with a shocking title. Have at it, it's free money.
  • Climategate 2 is already old news. The real big Climate news story of the day can be expressed in 2 words. "Ross McKitrick". With the backing of a few political heavyweights his report just might be the death of the IPCC as we know it.
  • Climategate emails showed the climate researchers suppressed dissenting views, even if that meant getting editors fired, or redefining what peer reviewed literature meant. They also subverted Freedom of Information laws by deleting information like Ollie North did.

    "The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with."
    ...
    "In another, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday."
    ...
    "John Christy, a scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville attacked in the emails for asking that an IPCC report include dissenting viewpoints, said, "It's disconcerting to realize that legislative actions this nation is preparing to take, and which will cost trillions of dollars, are based upon a view of climate that has not been completely scientifically tested.""

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125883405294859215.html

    The statute of limitations prevents them from being prosecuted, but they broke the Freedom of Information law, deleting data that had been requested under FOI

    "In his statement, Smith said that Holland's request was not dealt with correctly by the university. "The emails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland's requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information."

    But he added that it was now too late to take action because the legislation requires that sanctions are imposed within six months of the offence. "The ICO is gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law. It is important to note that the ICO enforces the law as it stands – we do not make it.""

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/27/uea-hacked-climate-emails-foi

    Squeaky clean white knights they are NOT!

    Chris Shaker
  • Climategate: This Time It's NASA! newly released emails further demonstrate the politicized nature of climate science, revealing a number of questionable practices that cast doubt on the credibility of scientific data provided by NASA. In fact, U.S. temperatures on average had only increased by 0.5 degree Celsius since 1934, rather than 1 degree, as originally claimed.
  • Cowboy, you wrote "...until there is actual evidence that models produce more accurate results." See the argument "Models Are Unreliable".

    You wrote "...recent events that have caused question with respect to the reliability of data used in who-knows-how-many models." The "events" I think you are referring to do not involve data that go into models, but only data that are observations against which the models are tested. Just as importantly, those "events" have zero implications for even those data. See "CRU emails suggest climate conspiracy". Also "On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record". And "Can you make a hockey stick without tree rings?"

    Finally, your questions and comments have covered a wide enough range that I think you would enjoy and benefit from an initial overview of global warming instead of diving straight into answers to individual questions. Subsequently you might come back with some even better questions. Try cce's "The Global Warming Debate".
  • criticalm#38: "far from the efforts of a fringe scientist."

    No one suggested Dr. Curry is a fringer.

    "Climategate and Copehnhagen were gamechangers for the interested members of the lay public."

    We're not talking about the lay public; we're discussing a myth created by someone qualified to know better. Climategate did not change the underlying science; for someone like Dr. Curry, any 'crisis of confidence' would be with the messengers, not the message.

    "differences between Drs Trenberth and Hansen about the measured energy imbalances in recent years adds further uncertainty"

    Nonsense. They do not differ on the extent and causes of warming. How the energy balance is resolved does not add uncertainty to either of those questions.

    "weaken the case for an overwhelming concensus which is required for effective action on climate change. "

    This is an entirely artificial standard, created by the denial industry. Did we have 'overwhelming consensus' on the technologies needed to go to the moon? To build an atomic bomb? No, we saw an imperative and acted in the best way we could at the time. The fact that we have been lulled into inaction by the combination of this 'need for consensus' and disinformation specialists should outrage those who understand the magnitude of the problem. If that outrage manifests as participation in a demonstration, so be it.
  • Dana,

    IIRC, when I read the Climategate emails a substantial plurality of them did relate to the drafting of the paleo chapters of 4AR and TAR. Saying that the emails had very little to do with the IPCC is therefore incorrect. Inhofe was also incorrect in saying that these emails a lot to do with the review of these chapters, however. Most of them were routine (read heated) discussion between scientists holding differing, although not widely differing, opinions of where various papers fit into the puzzle of the evolution of climate over the past few millenia.
  • Dana,
    I originally discovered this site after a skeptic/denier acquaintance of mine unleashed a flood of accusations in the wake of Climategate. I decided I needed to reexamine my what I thought I knew about AGW. Most of what I could find was just rehashing the Climategate accusations of fraud and conspiracy. It was not until I discovered RealCliamte and SkS that I found any actual substance. Informative and easy to understand posts like this one are what keep me coming back. Thank you and and everyone else who contributes here.
  • Daniel Bailey #29

    All leaking of confidential or private documents could be found to be a crime somewhere. If you are a public servant (or a federal employee in USspeak) then you sign employment documents to maintain confidentiality, take oaths etc etc...

    Then "whistleblower" leglislation is enacted at some later date to protect you if you find that some malfeasance is happening in your job. This is a fraught matter for your judgement - those who are 'blown' will always cry 'thief' and try to smear the blower.

    The act of copying documents, leaking internal information is always prima facie illegal - but the leaker might be protected if the malfeasance is proven and the revelation in the public interest. How many scandals have been exposed by prima facie illegal leaking or stealing of documents?

    My point remains: if there was a boring technical discussion going on in the revealed emails and no jaw droppers like 'hide the decline' and 'its a travesty' and 'Can you delete any emails...', and 'even if we have to redefine what is peer-review' then there would be nothing to talk about.

    The real deniers in this debate are those who deny that Climategate exposed the leading scientists private doubts about the data and the measurement (and hence the quality of their work) and their attempts to present a 'sexed-up' monolithic quasi-alarmist story to the public.
  • Daniel Bailey #38

    I appreciate your sentiments and your previous apology which I described as 'handsome'. Your apologia for the Climategate scientists' understandable errors and frustrations is quaint but misses the big point.

    What we say on SS might not (in the immortal words of Mark Twain) be worth anything more than a 'bucket of warm spit'.

    But we are not writing IPCC Reports, nor holding the great responsibility of giving expert advice to world leaders about 'the greatest moral challenge of out time'.

    Those paid professional scientists who are given this responsibility because of their expertise in these fields were not just conducting their private social lives in these leaked emails -they were discussing business and probably largely in business hours (no doubt out of hours too) in facilities furnished by the taxpayer.

    Any email I send in my business I know is a legal document which can live electronically somewhere forever.

    That does not prevent me expressing a robust honest opinion - but I can definitely say that if my business emails were stolen - I would sleep soundly and lay straight in bed as they would contain nothing other than normal business matters conducted in a civil manner.

    I find it incomprehensible that those involved could be so indulgent, devious and arrogant as to discuss ways to suppress publication of other's work, delete emails which could be subject to FOI requests etc etc...and still call themselves professional scientists.
  • Daniel:

    I think the quotes that I've mined from the articles reflect poorly on the scientists involved, and do not make climate science look very credible to the general public.

    I'm not sure how I'm supposed to ask questions about Climategate, or respond to questions without using sources and quoting from them...

    Chris Shaker
  • DavidCOG... Once a word like this is in the vernacular it's almost impossible to remove. It's there, we have to accept it. BUT what we can do is turn that word's meaning around. With time I believe "climategate" is going to become synonymous with "manufactured scandal."
  • Dear Mr. Cook,

    Salby seems to be giving the Andrei Kapitsa line on CO2. Kapitsa, a geographer, was one of the Russians that Senator Inhofe cited on global warming. Andrei was insulted that British scientists didn't listen to him. He died on August 2 at 80 years old and did his good work about 50 years ago.

    Below is a link to a post I wrote about Kapitsa's claims some time ago. Kapitsa's ideas were also spread in the Indian and British media. This was my very first post about Climategate, so maybe some observations are not correct. I never paid attention to climate change until Climategate. Then I was surprised to see that the Republicans were citing these official Russian sources and that the Russian media was trashing our scientists.

    I think it is possible that there was Russian involvement in Climategate. Scroll down a bit to see the information about Andrei Kapitsa.

    According to The Hindu (7-10-08), Kapitsa claims:

    “The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse,” says renowned Russian geographer Andrei Kapitsa. “It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round.”

    http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2009/11/russias-hacker-patriots-embarrass.html

    I hope you will take the time to read my very first post about Climategate because it discusses Kapitsa's perspective, which I don't accept.

    If you search Kapitsa on my site, I have more about him, but this is the main post about him.

    He is from a famous family, and you have to be careful not to confuse them. His father was the very famous Pyotr Kapitsa and his brother is Sergei Kapitsa. I think they were more famous than Andrei. His Wikipedia is dinky compared to Pyotr and Sergei's. You can learn a lot about Russian scientists by reading about this family.
  • dhogaza (#49): What planet do you live on? The S&B; paper was the first in a series of papers that questioned the attempt by the hockey team to rewrite history, denying the Medieval Warm Period. In 2003 that was so shocking for the climate community that six editors of the journal resigned. Many other papers, books, reports and political inquiries later, there can be no other conclusion than that S&B; had a valid point with their pioneer work: the MWP cannot be denied and the current warm period is less exeptional then the IPCC wanted us to believe. The S&B-paper; was no scandal at all. The real scandal (maybe 'tragedy' is a better word) was, that 6 members of the climate community could be so shocked by reading the truth.
    And, by the way, with respect to this topic the Climategate e-mails have shown many interesting things about how the hockeyteam was thinking.
  • dhogaza and company,
    In posts on other threads I explained why Kevin Trenberth and Bob Watson come across as anti-science. They both display bias and prejudice; qualities to be avoided by people who want the respect of scientists. If you see that as an "ad hominem" attack I will try to explain the problem in another way.

    The existence of this blog is evidence that the "Climate Science" debate has changed.

    Ten years ago the Hockey Team was supreme; anyone who dared to question their views was branded as stupid, venal or even evil. The "science was settled" was being trumpeted throughout the "Main Stream Media" and woe betide any brave soul who dared speak against AGW. You talk about "ad hominem" attacks but have you forgotten how dissenters were treated? If you need reminding, the Climategate emails may help. Take a look at the ones mentioning Patrick Michaels or Fred Singer.

    The IPCC responded to the media adulation by over reaching, making exaggerated claims and ignoring every scientific finding that did not support their world view. A combination of pride, hubris and arrogance led inevitably to AR4.

    Most of the science to be found in AR4 is of excellent quality but the scientists who produced it are under a cloud of suspicion; not because they are wrong but because they failed to speak out against the "Executive Summary" in the report.

    The falsehoods in AR4 created a string of scandals compounded by the failure of most IPCC scientific contributors to withdraw from what the public now sees as a corrupt organization.

    Except in the USA, the public is getting plenty of exposure to Climategate and the related IPCC scandals. The AGW elite now understands that changes must be made if their cause is to survive. Today, fanatical certainty is no longer on display except by a misguided minority exemplified by Bob Watson.

    Suddenly it is OK to engage in debate with people who were previously beyond contempt. This blog is an example of this radical shift; I thank you all for your tolerance and courtesy.

    For my part I will try even harder to restrain my flights of rhetoric and keep "on subject" without resort to personal attacks.
  • Dikran Marsupial - I agree. I was using Tom Curtis's analogy regarding embezzlement and burglary.

    As much as I abhor, detest what the Heritage Foundation does, and consider the Heritage Foundation to be evil, I am not aware of anything they were doing that is, in fact, illegal. Whistle blowing would seem to require an illegal activity that is exposed through the action of the whistle blower. If I missed that then I apologize.

    Without an illegal activity, we have a group actively working against the future of mankind, but not doing things that are explicitly illegal (some would say a synonym of this is "Congress").

    Heritage has rights. They were violated. It wouldn't be a moral dilemma except for the fact that the violation of their rights benefits mankind (possibly - it depends if the media grabs onto this like they did the climategate thing - that is unknowable at the moment). After all, these budgets and memos aren't warming the planet and melting the glaciers - excessive CO2 emissions are - and that was established scientifically long before this, long before climategate.

    There is no scientific battle - there is only the political battle left. Lots of fantastic science left to do, but none that will change our actionable understanding of the problem.

    And winning political battles appears to be a dirty business. I think acknowledging the moral conflict is honest, and serves us well. This genie isn't going back in the bottle, but to stridently claim that this is remarkably different that the theft of the emails rings hollow and shrill, and is going to interfere with the real story.

    Always disarm your opponents strongest argument at the outset. Acknowledge the source was stolen documents. Then talk about what is IN those stolen documents.

    Win the political battle.
  • Does anyone else find it odd that Phil Jones doesn't know how to plot data in Excel? Or more importantly, how he makes claimes about trends without doing the plotting and while knowingly stating that the data is statistically insignificant? Sounds odd. It's in email #1885 and here is a link.

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100119495/climategate-2-0-the-not-nice-and-clueless-phil-jones/#disqus_thread
  • Doug (Bostrom) hit the nail right on the head with his "that's my inexpert advice". Most of us here are offering our inexpert opinions and advice for free and there is a saying “Free advice is worth what you pay for it”.

    The climate models are structured from scientific hypotheses that are based upon dubious statistical manipulations, unsound assumptions and estimates used as a poor substitutes for a proper understanding about global climate processes and drivers. Rather than paying much attention to inexpert opinions I prefer to listen to the advice of those with some expertise in the subject, such as Professor Hans von Storch, of the University of Hamburg’s Meteorological Institute. Although he is a supporter of The (significant human-made global climate change) Hypothesis, he is honest about the scientific uncertainty upon which it is based.

    In his 2009 paper “On Adaptation – a secondary concern?” (Note 1) von Storch says such thing as:-
    “.. How fast can climate change when only natural causes are operating? This rate may be described by a probability distribution .. (which) .. must be estimated from the limited evidence provided by the observational data base of the past 150 years and by indirect “proxy data”. It is not possible to prove that the estimation is “right”; we can only show that it is consistent with the little knowledge we have. I personally believe that our estimates are approximately correct – but I have to admit that I may be wrong with that assessment”.

    “Commonly accepted knowledge is that no more than one third of the warming of the past hundred years can be explained by increased solar output; the remaining two thirds can be explained only by the effect of elevated greenhouse gas concentrations, i.e., the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. There is a caveat, .. the quality of estimating the magnitude of naturally caused variability is a key issue in this exercise. This magnitude is not known but must be estimated. Accepting its estimated value is a matter of trust. If somebody believes that the estimate is inadequate because of the limited data base, then I can not disprove this assertion. The same is true for my belief that the data base is good enough to allow a reasonable educated guess of this quantity – possible opponents are not able to prove that I am wrong. This controversy has nothing to do with incapable scientists but with the fact that the data available to us are limited. The problem can be solved only by either waiting for a long period of extra time .. or by accepting claims such as realism of contemporary climate models”.

    I shouldn’t need to explain the significance of those comments but for any who need a hint, look for words like “limited evidence”, “belief”, “may be wrong”,

    Contributors here may find his blog Die Klimazwiebel (Note 2) enlightening but it will only help those with an open mind. I wonder who will be the first one here to cast doubts about Professor Storch’s pedigree.

    Andrew Gelman, Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University, uses that “Free advice .. ” as the title of one of his threads. Following up on this led me to an associate of his, Seth Roberts, professor emeritus of psychology at UC Berkeley. In his article “Physicists Disagree about Climate Change” (Note 3) he quotes opposing opinions on The Hypothesis from two physicist friends.

    Gelman then goes on to say “At risk of sounding v smug, my views have changed only a little. I already thought the consensus was more fragile than it appeared. That’s just a general truth about modern science. I was already skeptical of climate models because I knew how easily modellers fool themselves. I began to believe the consensus was not just fragile but wrong when I heard the story of the Yamal tree ring data — the long refusal to supply the raw data and, when the researcher’s hand was forced and the data finally supplied, the way it contradicted the claims that had been made. Climategate didn’t vastly change what I thought; it provided more evidence for ideas I already had .. ”.

    I love that bit about modellers fooling themselves. – enjoy.

    NOTES:
    1) see http://coast.gkss.de/staff/storch/pdf/BadHonnef_0805-adaptation.pdf
    2) see http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2010/08/sustainable-science.html
    3) see http://www.wellsphere.com/general-medicine-article/physicists-disagree-about-climate-change/909357

    Best regards, Pete Ridley
  • DougB #106,107, Adelady #108, kdkd #109

    I was happy to leave 'Climategate', but DougB wanted to kick along.

    Corcoran summarises the story pretty well here:

    Quote:
    "The emails portray embattled scientists fighting desperately to interfere with official FOI processes. One now widely-circulated email, by Mr. Jones, asked Mr. Mann: “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith [Briffa] will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment — minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”
    In this email, Mr. Jones is asking key scientists who worked on AR4 — the 4th Assessment Report on the science of climate change produced by the IPCC in 2007 —to erase all emails related to that report." endquote

    One might ask why these emails needed to be erased if those involved felt they were just a bit of honest disagreement between professionals acting in good faith.

    Clearly they felt there was something to hide if subject emails were revealed in FOI requests.

    As for legality or illegality m'lady, destroying material to avoid an FOI disclosure might indeed be illegal too.

    These days whisteblowers are being encouraged and protected in many jurisdictions so that malfeasance is exposed. No doubt the information or documents thus revealed are regarded as theft or breach of confidentiality by those exposed by whistleblowers.

    I was more interested in the attention drawn to Dr Trenberth's paper and subsequent discussions - even something on the wide error bars on cloud and aerosol forcings.
  • DougB #44, JMurphy #49

    The best article on Climategate I have read is by Terrence Corcoran, who analysed the first 5 years of the 13 year record and gives a detailed chronology.

    Links here:

    http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/12/18/terence-corcoran-a-2-000-page-epic-of-science-and-skepticism-part-1.aspx

    and Part 2 here;

    http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/12/18/terence-corcoran-a-2-000-page-epic-of-science-and-skepticism-part-2.aspx

    Climategate led me to Dr Trenberth's Aug09 paper "An imperative for climate change planning: tracking the Earth'd global energy budget" which has been oft quoted in this blog.

    Dr Trenberth's 'travesty' comment in the leaked emails caused advocates like Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate to publicise Dr Trenberth's paper as *already out there and not a secret at all*.

    This paper really opened my eyes to the state of play regarding AGW theory, modelling, measurement and the importance of the energy balance and OHC measurement; and the wide range of uncertainty in the various forcing components.

    So Climategate was not a waste of time, and it did expose the scientists involved as typically human with all the same vices as someone like Joe the Plumber.
  • DougB #91

    I agree that the 'leakers' of the Climategate emails had an agenda - either a closet skeptic(s) or a disgruntled insider assembled the files of emails.

    Corcoran says he read all the first 5 years and they form a coherent narrative. He says the more recent emails are obviously hurriedly assembled and difficult to follow.

    Corcoran acknowledges that they were deliberately released prior to Copenhagen for maximum effect.

    The critical issue is their authenticity - and that has not been challenged by the scientists involved.

    The emails revealed however that certain scientists were themselves planning a blitz:

    quote:

    "The last emails were sent between Nov. 10 and 12 this year (2009), five days before the whole cache was stolen. One of those last emails outlines an attempt to orchestrate a media blitz by scientists at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting. The strategy was aimed at shaping public opinion going into the Copenhagen talks that ended yesterday." endquote

    Maybe they were simply 'outblitzed'.

    Doug your argument tries hard to dismiss the emails as a 'selective dataset'. This is a strawman. They never constituted a 'dataset'. They are a valuable record of the behind the scenes discussion and modus operandi of key players in the AGW story.

    You also have to consider the difficulty of the leakers slanting the narrative by selectively quoting emails and leaving out others. The narrative for the first 5 years according to Corcoran is coherent - so leaving out vital 'AGW friendly' emails would tend to destroy the narrative, which those involved agree, are the scientists own words.

    If there are emails missing which would significantly change the story - the scientists involved should have released them in their own defence. If they have - point me to them.

    I think the shock to everybody with an interest in climate science, was the attempt to present to the world a front of robust high quality research; when in fact there was significant internal dissent, unprofessional personality clashes and far greater uncertainty hidden in the private communications.
  • doug_bostrom (@29),
    It appears that I have caused you some distress which was not my intention. Please accept my apologies.

    Now I will try to explain my position without using the f***d word.

    Yesterday the UK Institute of Physics submitted a memorandum to the British parliament that did not once use the f***d word. Even so their meaning is pretty clear:

    http://www.publications.parliament.uk/.../uc3902.htm

    I wonder why the US press is ignoring the Climategate eruptions that are taking place in the UK? Ooops! I hope you do not find the C*********e word offensive too.
  • doug_bostrom,
    Looking at the CRU emails is often like listening to one side of a phone conversation. You need the other half of the dialog to fully understand what is going on. Fortunately, additional context has been supplied by McKittrick, McIntyre and many other folks who were communicating with the CRU.

    If you want more "Context" than can be found in the senate minority report try this:

    http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/

    The "taken out of context" excuse does not fly in this case. The more context you fill in, the worse things look for the Hockey Team. If there is a fraud trial it will be interesting to see what the lawyers make of it all.
  • DW #70

    Before we get into repetition please have a look at this topic from May this year:

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t;=78&&n;=202

    Note my posts #24, #30, #60, #67 - particularly #67

    I came across Dr Trenberth's paper as a result of the Climategate 'travesty' emails, and have a passing familiarity with it since late 2009.

    If 'the missing heat' is way down deep it got there very quickly by an unknown process DW, so don't hold your breath waiting for it to burst forth.
  • Enginerd raises a really important point. At what point is the defamation and fraud of the false claims (Muller's, Christy's, and the twisted words from Climategate, just to name a few) legally actionable? If it was actionable, who would be the complainant? And how can universities who employ those who misrepresent facts so blatantly continue to employ them? (Moderators, I understand that this might be a tangent that belongs on another thread.)
  • Eric(skeptic) 's plan 1a seems best to me. Ignoring it only leaves The List out there unchallenged to be used as a bludgeon by people with an ax to grind.

    Philippe Chantreau: "Frankly, if I was just starting to enquire about climate change and I ran into this kind of BS, it would be quite helpful to determine what exactly is there on the "skeptic" side."

    After Climategate a skeptic/denier I know waved the emails around as definitive proof that AGW theory was bunk. I decided that it was time I seriously reexamine my stance on the subject. What i found was mostly (but not entirely) Scientific Theory vs Conspiracy Thoeory. Even without any scientific qualifications it was pretty easy to see who was on the side of reason.
  • Eric, I repectfully disagree.

    The general tone and the intent at CA and WUWT are to discredit and intimidate. Anything goes in order to achieve that. They entertain and even encourage the most ridiculous accusations by contributors, of conspiracy and what not. That is also seen in the overwhelming majority of the "skeptic" landscape. In fact, a most common skeptic argument is that this is all a hoax to get tax money.

    McIntyre has organized and conducted a campaign of harassment by abusing the FOIA, then used a less-than-perfect-reaction by the victims of the campaign to try to further discredit them.

    Accusations of scientific misconduct are as common as sand grains on the beach in the skeptic blogs. How much of it has been substantiated? [Crickets chirping]. Even the so-called "climategate" led to nothing.

    However, when the scrutiny advocated by skeptics is applied to them, we get things like the glorious M&M;/Wegman fiasco. Then when GMU starts investigating and takes 5 months for what is normally limited to 60 days, what is the reaction of the self-righteous, integrity enamored skeptics? [More crickets]

    Beck has truncated graphs to make them look like they were showing periodicity where there were none. Monckton goes to the most egregious length of distortion, as was repeatedly demonstrated here. Scientists just trying to do their work run into zealots like Cucinelli who have the power and the fervor, ideological and religious, to carry on with witch hunts.

    SkS is very accomodating to opposing views compared to the skeptic hornet nests. Mods tolerated BP laying blanket accusations of fraud against respectable scientists without a shred of evidence multiple times.

    How bad does it have to become before we can call bulls#@t by its proper name? If skeptics don't like to be subjected to close scrutiny, they should not proclaim themselves as practitioners of it. If they're hurt by a somewhat inflammatory tone, they should start toning down. Tamino has received multiple threats of physical violence. In the early days of SkS, I had to endure streams of prejudice driven insults. Language a little strong? Cry me a river, Roger. At least it is supported by a real analysis, unlike the idiotic conspiracy rants dripping all over the skeptic blogs.
  • Esop @34,

    "How on earth has the CRU dataset all of a sudden become more reliable than the much beloved UAH dataset (that is even run by a skeptic). I thought brave skeptics proved the CRU data to be fraudulent in the Climategate scandal?"

    A most excellent point. Northing new though-- cherry-picking, contradiction and internal consistency appear to be the bread and butter of wannabe skeptics.
  • Every since it was shown that the GISS department of Nasa cherry picked weather data that resulted in an definitive bias towards warm temperatures, any argument using their information should be suspect.

    "When the satellites were first launched, their temperature readings were in closer agreement with the surface station data. There has been increasing divergence over time (see Klotzbach et.al. here). This divergence is consistent with evidence of an increasingly warm bias in the surface temperature record."

    http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NOAAroleinclimategate.pdf

    You do however raise an important point - the water vapor content of the atmosphere and the 5% growth rate you noted. What is important with this is that water vapor has a much higher forcing factor when it comes to the greenhouse gas effect than CO2 does. Furthermore with water vapor representing 1 to 2% of the atmosphere and CO2 representing only 0.038% and the fact it contributes up to 75% of the total greenhouse gas effect, it would seem that the growth of water vapor since 1980 played a much more significant role to increased global temperatures than any increase in CO2 during the same period. Hence any discussions involving increased temperatures associated with increased atmospheric CO2 are meaningless without a discussion of increased water vapor in the atmosphere during the same time.

    Finally water c vapor also plays a role in cooling the environment through condensation (clouds reflect radiation back to space) and precipitation which cools and cleans the atmosphere.

    As for this past winter, a lot more has happened than simply increased precipitation - it snowed in places where snow has never fallen before (lower temperatures) , areas of the Baltic sea have ice up in a manner not previously observed (again lower temperatures) There is a lot more happening to this planet than can be attributed to warmer temperatures dues to increased CO2 from man's activities on this planet.
  • Excellent post Dana. With the caveats you've noted, I think you're pretty close to being on target. Now how well can we predict how the skeptics will respond to a new record warmth in he next few years?
    My guesses as to what they'll say:
    1) It was all ENSO and Solar
    2) Continued recovery from the Little Ice Age
    3) Reduced cosmic rays caused less clouds
    4) The uncertainty monster had a fever
    5) Urban heat island effects
    6) Residual effects from the 1998 super El Niño
    7) Mars is warming too
    8) Can we talk about "Climategate" instead?
    9) Who cares? Plants love it!
    10) Isn't Monckton an awesome debater!

    Finally, while over the long-term, there is little doubt as too the direction of tropospheric temperatures in the 21st century, with or without a new Maunder- type minimum, and also little doubt as to the cause of that increase, I am still more interested in watching ocean heat content, and certainly hope we can get more readings at deeper levels very soon. The troposphere can be quite fickle with such a low heat capacity compared to the ocean. Whereas the ocean is both s better record of the past and is key to dictating how warm we'll be getting from our antropogenic experiment on our planet's energy balance.
  • Excellent rebuttal. I especially like Figure 3, showing that Loehle and Scafetta's model of 60 year cycles only fits Loehle's own temperature reconstruction for about one-half cycle, after 1920.

    Correlation may not imply causation (xkcd comic) but lack of correlation plainly implies lack of causation.

    I'm awaiting an equally scathing review of the L&S; paper at Climate Audit. I suppose that critical scrutiny of climate science has to be put on the back-burner while they continue to deal with Climategate.
  • Fascinating developments indeed.

    It is important to note this is getting nasty. Heartland's Joe Bast is keeping busy hassling many online publishers, including harassment of a 71 year old veteran activities, it is interesting to see at that Col. Gary Wamsley is also being harassed by one “Dave Burton” who is passing himself off as “IPCC AR5 WG1 FOD (First Order Draft) Expert Reviewer” and “Member, NC Sea Level Rise Impact Study Advisory Committee”.

    This from a guy who has one self published paper sea level rise and a long post promoting climategate on his site, and with 41 hits so far for cut and paste comments appears to be a ‘paid by the post’ blogger for Heartland.

    Anthony Watts of WUWT has also claimed to have been accepted as an Expert Reviewer on AR5 WG1 FOD.

    One is left to wonder how many other climate science denier Heartland supporters have been similarly admitted by the IPCC, and to hope the IPCC displays the same courage as Peter Gleick in blowing the whistle on these folks.
  • Finally found the list - here are some suggestions that make them more powerful for me (if you like the suggested wordking make sure the science make sense - I am perhaps better at communicating than climatology).

    1. "It's the sun." - Since the 1970s the sun is cooling and the earth is warming

    2. "Climate's changed before" - The natural changes that completely explain past climate change do not explain warming now.

    5. "Model's are unreliable" - Climate models from the 1980s successfully predicted today's temperatures.

    *** I think the skeptics don't care that the hindcast is good, they like to say no model has EVER predicted the future, which, according to skepticalscience, is wrong.***

    11 "CO2 lags temperature" - CO2 accelerates warming.

    *** Sounds good. Can that be said truthfully? ***

    14 "It's cosmic rays" - Cosmic rays DO NOT correlate with the current warming.

    21 "It's just a natural cycle" - Natural cycles cannot explain the current warming.

    29 "Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy" - Emails do not melt ice, warm the earth or acidify the ocean.

    *** I realize that is a different take, but I try to bring it back to the physical evidence, rather than defend Mann and Jones ad nauseum.***

    30 "Climate sensitivity is low" - Multiple lines of research indicate a 3C warming for each CO2 doubling.

    *** I don't know if the science is that strong. I personally think this is the best denier argument (most of them do not make it...). The current wording doesn't really counter the point.

    35 "It warmed before 1940 when CO2 was low" - Early 20th century warming is largely attributable to the sun.

    *** I like to show that the solar changes DO matter and ARE in the models ***

    48 "Neptune is warming" - And the sun is cooling

    *** Huh? I don't have any suggestions here, but this is NOT a good argument for AGW - if we can't explain Neptune warming with a cooling sun, what business do we have claiming we know why earth is warming with a cooling sun. Maybe I am being obtuse?? ***

    52 ditto above

    60 "Arctic sea ice is back to normal" - Artic see ice volume is shrinking.
  • For anyone who wants to see a reasonably detailed deconstruction of Bob Armstrong's arguments, I recommend his and my exchange at S&R; here, down toward the bottom: http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2009/11/20/climategate-not-likely/

    Furthermore, I dealt with the bulk of his arguments using physics (complete with the math, calculations, derivations, etc.) in three documents also available at S&R;:

    http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/BobArmstrong.pdf

    http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/emissivity.pdf

    http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Venus.pdf

    Bob never responded after I posted the last two .pdfs, yet here we find him making some of the same wrong claims that I am pretty confident I disproved.

    The only argument he made at my site that I didn't take on is his MgO sphere example from above, but I'm pretty sure that he's misunderstood it badly. I think that the power in the interior of his hypothetical room should be constant, so the MgO ball ends up being the same temperature as the room no matter what it's albedo is (power density drops as r^2 as you leave the walls of a spherical room and move toward the center, but the area of the sphere drops as R^2 too, leaving the power constant). But I didn't prove it rigorously with calculus.

    If anyone reads those docs and sees major flaws in my math, please let me know. I'm planning on using the Venus doc as a baseline for a "debunking this bad argument" post at some point (or maybe John can. :)
  • For the Netherlands you can add lots of politicians to the database. I commented upon the statement "we can not rely on scientists who don't speak the truth" once made by Jacqueline Cramer in my blog: here

    The bad thing is, Jacqueline Cramer is from labour and from that part in the political spectrum you would expect support for climate polities. Climategate left a lot of damage, and in this case some politicians (such as Jacqueline Cramer but also RIchard Mos) simply repeat that the IPCC is lying, to put it bluntly. So where does this fit in the arguments database, perhaps that temperature records are inaccurate and that tree-ring proxy temperature series were manipulated?
  • For those here (and elsewhere) who insist on defending Mr. McIntyre's repeated harassment and intimidation of certain scientists.



    [Mr. McIntyre]

    Surely if you have been paying attention to this sorry saga you would know in your heart of hearts that it is an establish fact, a truth, on the public record even that Mr. McIntyre is in the unfortunate habit of frequently promulgating misinformation and much worse too. It is not even a matter that is up for debate anymore. That Mr. McIntyre seems to believe in his letter to Dr. Karoly that he has never "promulgated misinformation" demonstrates that he is either being incredibly disingenuous or is out of touch with reality and needs to re-read everything he has written. I'll provide a few examples, there are many more:

    1) Mr. McIntyre has said that:
    "However, as CA readers know, the resulting Yamal chronology with its enormous HS blade was like crack cocaine for paleoclimatologists"

    As DeepClimate shows, this accusation/insinuation is not only inflammatory, but it is also simply not true, and as such Mr. McIntyre is promulgating misinformation. Dr. Karoly is correct and has nothing to apologize for. There are many paleo reconstructions out there that do not use dendro data, never mind the much contested Yamal data. RealClimate also addressed McIntyre's misinformation on this issue.

    2) McIntyre also repeatedly accuses pale climate scientists of "cherry picking" (ironic given how his code identified only those chronologies that have hockey-shapes to falsely claim that Mann's method produced a hockey stick even when fed persistent red noise).

    3) Mr. McIntyre has also misrepresented facts about Dr. Trenberth. DeepClimate exposes Mr. McIntyre's distortion of facts and misinformation here.

    4) Mr. McIntyre made false accusations about one of the figures in the Third IPCC assessment report-- that is, misinformation. Again, exposed by DeepClimate.

    5) Here is an example of Mr. McIntyre being exposed for misleading readers in the Mail on Sunday.

    6) Here is Mr. McIntyre exposed for promulgating misinformation and false claims to none other than the UK parliamentary committee investigating the theft of emails from UEA. Mr. McIntyre misinforming a parliamentary committee...!

    7) Here is Mr. McIntyre exposed for cherry picking and quote mining text from the stolen emails to fit his narrative. That is misinformation on the part of Mr. McIntyre.

    8) Here Mr. McIntyre is exposed for promulgating misinformation about Dr. Briffa's work and using it to (wrongly) insinuate fraud and misconduct.

    9) McIntyre exposed for spreading yet more misinformation about Dr. Briffa, misinformation that was happily gobbled up by some denier pundits in the media.

    10) "Here is Mr. McIntyre being exposed for falsely claiming that he had not been provided data and that pale scientists were withholding data from him, when in fact he had been in possession of the data for almost 5 years!

    There is much more of course, for example Mr. McIntyre being exposed for quote mining-- the net result being misinformation, by Deltoid

    Now Mr. McIntyre and his defenders of can choose to ignore such inconvenient facts, but that will not disappear them. As I show din my posts above, Dr. Karoly has nothing to apologize for, Mr. McIntyre does, and a lot too. If anything this whole saga shows Mr. McIntyre to either be incredibly disingenuous or completely out of touch with reality.

    As for the Gergis affair, even McIntyre himself advised his readers noted that the problem/s with the Gergis paper may not be of much consequence, or something to that effect. So once again, we have what is probably an inconsequential error that will not dramatically alter the paper's primary conclusions being elevated and spun as something much worse by "skeptics" and those who deny the theory of AGW.

    But that has not stopped McIntyre from trying to squeeze something to his benefit out of the Gergis issue. It is actions, such as this letter by Mr. McIntyre to Dr. Karoly, that have forced the formation of the climate defense fund. Ludicrous as this is, it is sadly the truth.
  • Frankly, I think the question stacks the deck so the 97-3 is meaningless. If Climate Gate showed one thing, its that there was a "siege mentality" held by the scientist at the heart of the controversy. They proved a pattern of not only black listing publications that disagreed with the conclusions of AGW, they willingly to publishing in the IPCC report many fallacious claims that went unscrutinized but supported the AGW agenda. Of course they later needed to be pulled.

    Corruption of the "Peer Reviewed" publication process was the real crime of climategate. The impact of the "Siege Mentality," they were willing to censor data they didn't agree with, while not questioning conclusions that they did agree with.
  • Full marks to Hadfield and thanks to John Russell for that great commentary from Tom Chivers.

    In The Telegraph!

    What truly disturbs me is that The Guardian performed as badly in this as they did over the CRU hack / 'Climategate' (where they were very bad indeed! And learned nothing, it seems.)

    As I noted on the other thread discussing this they even managed to turn this global satellite research into 'the Himalayan Glacier Study' and somehow ignore their own reporting of the manifestly evident lower-altitude glacier melt! And then run a sort of agony column about whether we should still believe in Global Warming and Glacier melt after this...

    Really, The Australian could scarcely have spun the tale more to the anti-science brigade's benefit!

    And I completely agree - if AGW were to ever be 'disproved' (or, more likely - but unlikely nonetheless - sensitivity was to be revised significantly downwards) it'll be real science that produces the research, not the fake-skeptics who only specialise in muddying the waters!
  • fydijkstra #15

    Let me fix that first sentence for you:

    Has Climategate changed the understanding of AGW? No! Climategate has revealed what climate realists already knew for a long time: while the broad scientific consensus is solid, much of the detail is in a continual state of refinement.

    Unfortunately this initial correction of your sentence renders the remainder of your post incorrect, so it must be deleted ;)
  • fydijkstra:
    "Climategate confirmed that the science is not settled and that the e-mailers were highly in doubt."

    No it doesn't.




    fydijkstra:
    "e-mail 0983566497 Chris Keller..."

    The email you refer to is firstly misquoted by you, hence I assume you have taken it from a doctored or rewritten version from a skeptic web site (a bad one).

    The email dates to 2001, not 1999. That is a millenia as far as climate science goes.

    Firstly you have cherry picked the email, here is part of the original:

    "...This may be the nubbin of the disagreement, and
    until we answer it, many careful scientists will decide the issue is
    still unsettled and that indeed climate in the past may well have
    varied as much or more than in the last hundred years."


    One obvious difference is that you have replaced 'nubbin' with 'nub'.
    Nub means 'the core'.
    Nubbin means 'small or underdeveloped'.

    You can not replace words in a quote. By doing so you are forcing your meaning on the text and misleading the reader.
    The full email is quoted totally out of context, because we do not know what emails preceded or succeeded it. Also unless you understand the author, you will never understand the text.

    You seem to read what you want to see fydijkstra and then mislead people purposefully. One would like to think it was because you didn't fully understand the subject.
  • Galloping camel wrote:

    "Ten years ago the Hockey Team was supreme; anyone who dared to question their views was branded as stupid, venal or even evil. The "science was settled" was being trumpeted throughout the "Main Stream Media" and woe betide any brave soul who dared speak against AGW. You talk about "ad hominem" attacks but have you forgotten how dissenters were treated? If you need reminding, the Climategate emails may help. Take a look at the ones mentioning Patrick Michaels or Fred Singer. "

    I don't recall this series of events. As I recall, folks wanted to argue with Al Gore about whether warming was happening. In the context of whether CO2 causes warming (ie is a greenhouse gas, and is being released ed by humans) he said "the science is settled." 10 years later it still seems that ALGORE was correct.

    Can you point me to the emails that are melting the arctic or Greenland? Emails showing people being people do not change the science, nor most people's opinion of the science.

    Tom
  • Geo Guy,

    It would be long and boring to cover everything in your screed, however I was struck by the "Moscow Institute of Economic Analysis" one. What has they to do with Global Warming? The trail led to this Daily Telegraph article:

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020126/climategate-goes-serial-now-the-russians-confirm-that-uk-climate-scientists-manipulated-data-to-exaggerate-global-warming/

    Unfortunately, the particular journalist, James Delingpole, is notorious for being a rampant denier, and for being (to use a roundabout way of saying it) "economical with the truth". It turns out there is no disagreement between Russian data and Hadley data.

    http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/russian_analysis_confirms_20th.php

    To the best of my knowledge, the claims that the CRU, NASA and NOAA had picked stations specifically to highlight warming has been shown to be totally without foundation.

    http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/message-to-anthony-watts/

    Please investigate your claim further and get back to us.
  • Great resource.

    Two suggestions for improvements:

    #28 "Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy"

    "Several investigations have cleared scientists of any wrongdoing in the media-hyped email incident."

    I'd suggest focussing on the data as the average contrarian will dismiss investigations as part of the lizard man conspiracy anyway. How about:

    "Independent analyses of the data reach the same conclusions as the CRU, revealing this to be media hype"

    #30 "Climate sensitivity is low"

    "Net positive feedback is confirmed by many different lines of evidence."

    Whilst I understand this, I don't like it as "net positive" implies runaway whereas the radiative emissions always ensure a net negative feedback.

    How about

    "Ice ages cannot be explained without relatively high sensitivity" which focusses on well known phenomena - the other lines of evidence can be used as follow-up.

    And how about, on the 4-5 words challenge:

    #28 "Independent analysis agrees with CRU"
    #30 "This makes ice ages impossible"
  • Happy Birthday to SkS and Congratulations on the new job.
    I discovered SkS after Climategate and I am so glad I did. You and all the regulars do a fantastic job of making the science accessible to anyone who is interested in learning it.
    Every scientific discipline should should have an equivalent. Thanks to all who contribute.
  • Has any thought been given to what seems to be the emerging denier tactic of claiming interest in Climate change is 'dying out'? This claim was advanced in the Telegraph the other day ("the fading belief that the world is in the grip of runaway man-made global warming"), and soemthing similar was regurgitated on the radio here in New Zealand by a rightwing propagandist, Matthew Hooton. There have been couple of other recent examples as well. Sounds like a meme that denier propagandists are trying to plant in people's minds, hoping it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think we'll hear a lot more of this "old story, last years problem" in the future, as Climategate2 failed so miserably.

    Funny how the Other Side (pokes Daniel Bailey in the ribs) act in unison like this - while we're tearing big chunks out of each other over ice cores. Almost like we have real, if occasionally divergent opinions, whereas they all read from scripts. Surely not?!
  • Has Climategate changed the understanding of AGW? No! Climategate has revealed what climate realists allready knew for a long time: the science is not settled at all, and even the hard core of the IPCC supporters is highly in doubt.
    Climategate has certainly changed the understanding of how these hard core climate scientists do their utmost to hide the uncertainty and to prevent that other views are published. And that fits perfectly to some of the recommendations of the IAC report about the IPCC:
    "3. Characterizing and communicating uncertainties, particularly with regard to the level-of-understanding and likelihood scales used in the IPCC reports;
    5. Increasing transparency, including explicit documentation that a range of scientific viewpoints has been considered;

    So: has Climategate changed anything? Yes! It has revealed, that the IPCC hides uncertainties and that not all scientific viewpoints have been considered.
  • Has it been determined, scientifically, if the ClimateGate (Hide the Decline) emails were hacked, or leaked ?
  • Here are what I consider are strawmen or your weakest arguments.

    12. Al Gore got it wrong. Well he did, and while you acknowledge that I don't think having Al Gore back up AGW is very impressive.

    15. Hurricanes. The evidence is that warming does not lead to increases in hurricanes. All the experts agree, and again I think you should note that.

    20. Sea level accelerated rise. I think this is a dodgy claim - significant experts would not agree

    22. Hockey Stick. Anyone reading Andrew Montford's 'The Hockey Stick Illusion' will feel that yes the Hockey Stick graph is a crock. I think it would be better to say it is not relevant.

    41. CO2 not a pollutant - this is an odd one as it is obviously not a pollutant. Mankind might be inconvenienced by a change climate but I think the plants will benefit.

    47. Climategate. Again better to fess up than paper over the cracks. Read the Institute of Physics submission to UK Parliament

    http://www.publications.parliament.uk/.../uc3902.htm

    They are not at all skeptical about the science just about CRU.

    66. MWP. Weak argument. Although evidence is sparse I think there is good enough evidence that it was global.

    70. Phil Jones. This is absolutely correct but begs the question if the warming is so insignificant then what is the problem?

    78. CO2 being the main driver of climate. No evidence just a presumption.

    80. Its not happening - looks like a strawman, but I am not even sure I what it means. Do you think that skeptics say the climate does not change?

    83. CO2 is not increasing - sorry, who says this? Strawman argument.

    89. Tree rings. This does not adequately cover the point at all. If tree rings in the samples used diverges after 1960s it means that they are highly ineffective proxies before that. You only need one car crash to show you have a faulty car (Toyota).

    Question - have you left out clouds on purpose or do you feel it is in there as water vapour and albedo effect?

    Observation: your tone is to support climate change science and AGW whatever the counter argument which as I said before makes it look more like a belief than a 'skeptical about skeptics' argument.
  • Here is a 2006 article in Pravda (English version) that quotes Andrei Kapitsa on global warming.

    http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/21-12-2006/86045-ozone_hole-0/

    This article was first published in another Russian paper. Pravda is now a nationalist publication with a lot of girlie pictures. They publish a lot of scientific conspiracy theories. For example, they published an American 9-11 Truther's Climategate conspiracy theories and also his theories about a coming ice age. The Truther was cited as a "Russian scientist" by American right-wing publications, but the author was really an American conspiracist who is not a scientist.
    I read he is a male nurse.

    Pravda observes:

    "Professor Andrei Kapitsa, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, believes that the issues of global warming and rapidly increasing ozone holes are myths disguised as scientific revelations."

    In Russia there is a very powerful gas company called Gazprom. It used to be the Soviet Gas Ministry until it morphed into Gazprom. It is majority owned by the Russian government and pays the bills for the Russian government. I imagine they know perfectly well that the permafrost is melting, but they want to sell gas.

    The CATO Institute's "expert" on climate change, Andrei Illarionov used to work for Chernomyrdin who ran Gazprom.

    President Medvedev used to be the head of Gazprom. I think Putin put him there.

    Medvedev said global warming was a "trick," but after the fires last summer he said it was really happening.

    Pravda tells Kapitsa's conspiracy theory about money:

    Prof. Kapitsa believes it would be wrong to maintain that the ozone layer has been largely depleted over the last ten years. The question is: Why do people keep talking about the dangers relating to the decrease of the ozone layer?

    “I’m afraid the money is a key word in this case,” Prof. Kapitsa said. “Chemical companies producing the so-called healthy Freon refrigerants make lots of money once the refrigerants are replaced at a nationwide scale. The replacement of refrigerators and air-conditioning systems in the U.S. alone cost the consumer a total of $220 billion last year. Former president of the U.S. Academy of Sciences Frederick Zeitz said a long time ago that all the theories relating to global warming were far-fetched and couldn’t be proven correct,” Prof. Kapitsa concluded.

    http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/21-12-2006/86045-ozone_hole-0/
  • Here is Mclean et als reply to the Foster comment. Warning: this is not peer-reviewed (this becomes obvious very quickly). It also contains reference to the climategate emails which I know some people are a little sensitive about.

    http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog

    http://icecap.us/images/uploads/McLeanetalSPPIpaper2Z-March24.pdf
  • Hi All,

    I totally agree, if Muller is referring to the Mann 1998 reconstruction then he has his facts totally and utterly wrong as the "climategate" affair is to my mind entirely proven as relating to the Briffa not Mann reconstruction and its inclusion in the WMO article.

    I assume therefore that from Mullers POV, ANY reconstruction that follows the Mann 1998 basic shape is fair game as being a hockey stick graph.

    My concern is whether by getting into this level of detail you are getting drawn into the debate over the minutia rather than the keeping the discussion where it belongs on the overall big picture.

    I completely get that this site is here provide good scientific evidence to refute deniers. You do an excellent job of that, but as a 50/50 skeptic I look to you to provide me with a balanced logical aproach so that I can make informed judgements and decisions.

    I look to the deniers/skeptics to ask questions, many of which should be asked I look to the sites such as this to provide answers. Getting drawn in on these minor issues to my mind dilutes the argument until we end up with a witch hunt on who said what when and how.

    Anyway, just my thoughts.

    Regards
    Wolf
  • Hi folks, Lord Monckton chaired the meeting I attended in the UK's Palace of Westminster (22 Feb) at which Professor Lindzen regurgitated his ICCC4 keynote address from May 2010. Unfortunately, there were so many misrepresentations of fact in this, I was foolish to try and address one of them before asking a question (and so was not allowed to ask it). However, it would seem that my 1800 word email to Professor Lindzen is getting noticed, because none other than Lord Monckton joined a discussion on the website of the UK's Independent newspaper a couple of hours ago in order to mock me then disappear again (in typical style).

    You may be amused to see the ongoing (mostly insane) discussion. I must say I am disappointed by the piece by Simon Carr and the insanity of many contributors to the discussion (I always thought the Independent was a sensible paper); but at least they sent someone to report on the meeting.

    I will publish my 1800 word email (critique of Lindzen's talk) on 28 Feb. (24 and 27 Feb are already taken up with 'James Delingpole - and ideological sceptic' and 'Climategate 2.0 - the first nail in the coffin of climate change denial' respectively.
  • Hi guys , Ive been reading this site for ages now using it to counter deniers claims all good but , these small mistakes means an even greater effort is needed in the wider press to show the science is not weakened .
    the denier arguement now where i work (basic blue collar industry ) is that all the data is corrupted or faked and he is the proof .I try but my memory fails me and my debating skills :( .
    We have Monckton here in Australia and hes useing climategate and the glacier 2035 plus something about Darwin temp data being changed to show a warming trend to basically debunk AGW as either a great socialist /facist conspiracy and or scientists on the make for more funds .
    He will go down a treat here as most average australians dont trust politicians and dont really understand science .
    Its great all you guys debateing each other here but all this never get out to the general public , the counter arguement is never seen these people like Monckton never really get pulled up and shown to the people how they are misrepresenting the facts .

    Still this is a great site just wish i could take it with me all the time .
  • Hmmm... let's see. In the past Bob Carter has said;

    "The Climategate files have demonstrated the scientific malfeasance of an influential and internationally well networked segment of the climate research community. A small group of scientists and computer modellers - with the aid of an enormous supporting cast of environmental activists and organisations, self-interested business groups, and crusading journalists - have managed to turn the global warming issue (which in 1990 was an entirely sensible matter to have raised) into the scientific scam of the century, if not the biggest ever."

    Carter's "Kill the IPCC" article

    So, Carter claims the people at HadCRUT are guilty of "scientific malfeasance" and "the scientific scam of the century"... and therefor he holds their results above all others?

    Are we sure he knows what 'scientific malfeasance' means? Cuz... that'd be it.
  • Hopefully. the fact that both the Kremlin's Russia Today English-language TV and the Russian Geographical Society did not mention Kapitsa's claim that warming causes a rise in CO2 shows that the Russian political and scientific officials don't want to be associated with this ignorant theory any longer.

    During Climategate, Russian scientists were mostly silent. Only one--Professor Sergei Kirpotin of Tomsk State University--said that the Climategate hacking was a provocation against the Copenhagen meeting. Kirpotin's words were only reported on the Russian Greenpeace site, not in a major Russian paper or in English.

    Still, only a few famous scientists in Russia denied global warming; but these were given access to the media in English.

    I think Kirpotin was brave. He spoke truth to power, and hopefully, Russian politicians will respect his sense of responsibility to his country and the world.

    President Medvedev is no longer calling global warming a trick. He says it is happening. Perhaps he now realizes that climate change is not a "trick." Still, all the Russians have right now is gas and Gazprom pays the bills.

    I write about Sergei Kirpotin on my blog pretty often. He said the theft of the CRU emails was a "provocation" that was clearly "ordered" by someone in order to create doubts about the science behind the theory of global warming.

    http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/01/tomsk-scientist-sergei-kirpotin-has-few.html
  • How does this jive with what Phil Jones is saying now that there has been no warming since 1995.

    Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995 http://tr.im/O7vd

    How can it be both?
  • HR #1, DW #7 and Ned #10

    All good comments gentlemen.

    Although Dr Pielke puts his case a little clumsily, his basic point is right. If you can't find an increase in OHC between times T1 and T2, then as oceans are the main store of heat in the Earth system - there is no warming imbalance between T1 and T2.

    Where else are you going to store the heat energy?

    Dr Trenberth reckons on a yearly imbalance of 145E20 Joules. He puts 2E20 Joules into land heat up, 1E20Joules into Arctic sea ice melt, and 2-3E20 Joules into Total land ice melt.

    Thats a total 5-6E20 Joules/year out of 145E20 Joules of supposed imbalance which must go somewhere in the system. Total ice melt and land heat up is only 4%.

    So where is the other 140E20 Joules/year?

    Dr Trenberth accounts for only 20-95E20 in the oceans (a wide range), 16E20 in reduced TSI (which should probably be deducted from the 145 to start with), and a "residual" of 30-100E20 Joules which is unaccounted for.

    It could be in the deep oceans or 'exited to space' - ie. it was never there to start with.

    So in answer to Ned - the oceans have a storage capacity at least 30 times that of all other combined sinks - thats about 96% - so I would think that what happens in the oceans is crucial to the whole AGW story.

    Willis: DW #7

    I must admit that I was unimpressed by the story of the Willis 'Eureka' moment. Argo is not anywhere near a complete story for measuring OHC - but I would expect a helluva lot better than what preceded it (XBT etc). See my next post.

    Von Schukmann:

    BP produced a comprehensive demolition of the Von Schukmann chart - pointing out the impossibilities of the bumps in the curves in terms of TOA imbalances. This is similar to the the Lymann chart above which has similar impossible jumps coinciding with the Argo-XBT transition

    I noted that Dr Trenberth started quoting von Schukmann to Dr Pielke Snr in an email tete-a-tete as a 'nice analysis' in April this year.

    Well Dr Trenberth was unaware of the Von Schukmann paper in February this year, and had expressed frustration with the inconsistency of the OHC measurements in his Aug09 paper which came to light after his now famous 'travesty' in the Climategate emails.

    As far as snapshots go - Dr Pielke Snr might have been reading my July 15 post revisited below.
  • HR #12

    "I'm pretty sure McIntyre et al do not prioritize publication"

    That's essentially because a lot this group's motivations appear political rather than scientific, which is why they end up in the mainstream (political) press rather than in the scientific press. When they do publish stuff (e.g. Carter's recent nonsense) it's always or at least very often rubbish in substandard journals like Energy and Environment. You can see this from McIntyre's point of view if you listen to the admittedly polite and softly spoken, but misinformation ridden statements at the Guardian's climategate debate. Plimer, Watts, Monkton et.al. are even worse.

    Another litmus test for this. Lindzen's recent writings have been misleading op-eds in the right wing press, not quality scientific reporting.
  • http://www.skepticalscience.com/climategate-2-in-context-solar-warming.html#69163

    Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre are not on the public dime, Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre are not advocating regulation on me or anyone else. Everyone knows what Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre think about climatologists and climate change.

    But, let's have everyone's email record released. John Cook's would be a good start.
  • HumanityRules writes: Here is Mclean et als reply to the Foster comment. Warning: this is not peer-reviewed (this becomes obvious very quickly). It also contains reference to the climategate emails which I know some people are a little sensitive about.

    Hmmm. It looks like McLean et al. went through the CRU emails and found the anonymous reviews of the Foster et al. comment.

    They quote a couple of sentences allegedly from one of the reviews ("But as it is written, the current paper almost stoops to the level of 'blog diatribe'. The current paper does not read like a peer-reviewed journal article. The tone is sometimes dramatic and sometimes accusatory. It is inconsistent with the language one normally encounters in the objectively-based, peer-reviewed literature.")

    I'm a bit disturbed by the idea of going through someone's email to find and selectively quote comments from the peer review process, which is supposed to be anonymous and confidential.

    If McLean et al. are going to do that, I think that they ought to make the reviews of their own (rejected) comment similarly public. And in both cases they ought to show the full text of all the reviews, not selectively chosen snippets from one review.

    What else did this reviewer have to say about the Foster et al. comment, besides a couple of sentences complaining about the tone? It's hard not to suspect that if there had been any more substantial criticisms, McLean et al. would have quoted those parts, rather than the fairly mild complaint they did quote.
  • I agree, but ... since the last post on this subject, I would like to summarize:

    I. "Practices" used in line: the CRU - the IPCC; has been criticized not only by the scientists global warming skeptics.

    II. They have undermined confidence in other than a hockey stick - the MWP, the findings of the IPCC.

    For example, many here (by the way) said of the independent lines of evidence that climate sensitivity to changes p.CO2.
    Skeptics immediately after Climategate - in January - March 2010, once again, as the main argument against AGW (which is still interesting, "literally" lack of it on the list Sc. S., unless it indirectly, 33 and 88) “raised” objections to the ice core : Does Algae Reduce the Ice Core CO2?, Ice Core CO2 Records - Ancient Atmospheres Or Geophysical Artifacts ?
  • I am not sure if Roy Spencer promotes bad-science accidentally or on purpose, but this is not the first time he has blundered. Recently I was searching through a database of the stolen emails from East Anglia colloquially known as Climate Gate. I found an email where researchers Mears and Wentz are mentioned as the discoverers of major mathematical errors in the algorithms used by Roy Spencer and John Christy. One error was the wrong algebraic sign. It turns out that the bad-science published by these researchers from the University of Alabama has been the primary reason why the climate models were questioned by the public at large. The errors where published in SCIENCE in 2005 with Spencer and Christy acknowledging the errors in the letters section of September 2005 issue. So why do Spencer and Christy continue to deny the science?

    Click the following link to see the details.

    http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/climate_science.html#climategate
  • I am the author of the AT piece. First off let me tell the website admin (John Cook) that I really like this website. This and Realclimate.org are the two main sources I go (daily) to see the science debated and talked about. as I stated in the article, I’d rather debate the science than talk about the IPCC, Climategate, Jones, Mann, etc. All of that makes good news stories but it doesn't get to the heart of this issue which is the science. And the fact that I frequent these sites and join in the discussions means I’m comfortable with criticism and having an open conversation about the science. I appreciate the comments/questions already posted and let me see if I can answer those who have asked something specific of the author (me).

    First off, I never stated in the article that I was disproving the greenhouse effect. My aim was to disprove the AGW hypothesis as I stated in the article "increased emission of CO2 into the atmosphere (by humans) is causing the Earth to warm at such a rate that it threatens our survival." I think I made it clear in the article that the greenhouse effect is not only real but vital for our planet (since we'd be much cooler than we are now if it didn't exist).

    Also, my aim was NOT to misrepresent the conclusions of the authors of the original 3 papers. I tried to be very clear in the article that the authors came to very different conclusions than I did and the authors were very clear as to why they came to those conclusions.

    There were three links to papers in this article and John chose to talk about one of them here (which happened to be the 2nd link) so I’ll take that one first. It is true that there is a spike down of about -1K in the region of 700-710 waves/cm but the rest of the range which extends to about 780 waves/cm, shows a the delta either zero or positive. The CO2 absorption range that is covered in the paper - as John pointed out and many know - extends further to the left and peaks at around 667 waves/cm so we don’t know what the data showed below 700 wave/cm. But if someone were to take this data - as given - and convert the BT measurements to OLR flux numbers (W/m2) I believe we'd see an increase in OLR flux (1997 vs. 1970) since the delta over the majority of this range (again, not the complete range but the range in this paper) will contribute positively to that delta. I didn't go through this exercise and plug this into the Planck function, integrate between the absorption wavelengths as listed in the paper and then compare the 1970 with 1997. I don't have the real data and to try and grasp that from a graph would be silly. Visually, this apparent lack of decline of OLR seems pretty obvious to me (when looking at the actual measured data).

    I suggest you take a look at the first link in the article as well. When looking at the graphs of the actual measured data in this paper, it becomes even clearer that there is an increase in OLR from 1970 to 1997 in the range where CO2 absorbs IR.

    The third link is the more updated Harries paper that several have posted about here so I did include that in the article as well (this compared OLR 2006 vs. 1970). In my opinion, this data falls into the same category as the paper reviewed here by John - a small -1K spike in the lower frequency OLR (again, it's not really the 'lower' frequency since the graph starts well to the right of the peak absorption for CO2) but then back up above zero for the higher frequencies in the CO2 absorption zone (which is also nicely grayed out in the more recent Harries paper).

    My point in this article was to show that you can see from the actual measured data that OLR is not decreasing in the area where we'd expect it to because of all the extra CO2 we've been spewing into the atmosphere (and just for the record, I am not arguing this CO2 rise - the Mauna loa data is easy to interpret). I was also pointing out the question that puzzled me - why the authors put so much value in the graphs that they produced via models - which showed a very large, significant drop in OLR in the CO2 range. We have increased the CO2 in the atmosphere about 17% from 1970 to 2006 (328ppm vs. 383ppm) and the OLR appears to have remained constant when you look at the raw data from these three papers. Does that mean water vapor is generating OLR that doesn't get absorbed by CO2?

    As John alluded to in his Q/A with Harries - I’d really like to see this data extended out to the 600 waves/cm to see what happens at the peak absorption wavelength of CO2.

    I’m fairly swamped at work this week and will check back if there are more direct questions you want to ask me. I only mention this so that no one takes my non-response as non-interest. If you have questions regarding details of this article I’ll try and respond as timely as I can. If there are no questions I’ll just sit back and enjoy the conversation and criticism.

    ok, let me have it.....
  • I apologize for possibly misleading someone who knows even less than me. Because obviously there is plenty of tree ring data on the CRU servers, and much of it is related to Mann. Here is comment regarding Mann data.
    http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/crus_source_code_climategate_r.html
    scroll halfway down. I think you will find that this tree ring data, proxies etc. is EXTREMELY complicated to reproduce, even for an expert, I am sure even for a like-minded colleague. Dhogaza - since 11/20/09 the game has completely changed. We are going to now start to play fair. Truth is the child of time......
    ---------------------------------------
    Climate Audit, can be found throughout the source code. So much so that perhaps the most ubiquitous programmer's comment (REM) I ran across warns that the particular module "Uses 'corrected' MXD - but shouldn't usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures."

    What exactly is meant by "corrected” MXD," you ask? Outstanding question -- and the answer appears amorphous from program to program. Indeed, while some employ one or two of the aforementioned "corrections," others throw everything but the kitchen sink at the raw data prior to output.

    For instance, in the subfolder "osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog," there’s a program (Calibrate_mxd.pro) that calibrates the MXD data against available local instrumental summer (growing season) temperatures between 1911-1990, then merges that data into a new file. That file is then digested and further modified by another program (Pl_calibmxd1.pro), which creates calibration statistics for the MXD against the stored temperature and "estimates" (infills) figures where such temperature readings were not available. The file created by that program is modified once again by Pl_Decline.pro, which "corrects it" – as described by the author -- by "identifying" and "artificially" removing "the decline."

    But oddly enough, the series doesn’t begin its "decline adjustment" in 1960 -- the supposed year of the enigmatic "divergence." In fact, all data between 1930 and 1994 are subject to "correction."

    And such games are by no means unique to the folder attributed to Michael Mann.

    A Clear and Present Rearranger

    In two other programs, briffa_Sep98_d.pro and briffa_Sep98_e.pro, the "correction" is bolder by far. The programmer (Keith Briffa?) entitled the "adjustment" routine “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” And he or she wasn't kidding. Now IDL is not a native language of mine, but its syntax is similar enough to others I'm familiar with, so please bear with me while I get a tad techie on you.

    Here's the "fudge factor" (notice the brash SOB actually called it that in his REM statement):

    yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]

    valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor

    These two lines of code establish a twenty-element array (yrloc) comprising the year 1400 (base year, but not sure why needed here) and nineteen years between 1904 and 1994 in half-decade increments. Then the corresponding "fudge factor" (from the valadj matrix) is applied to each interval. As you can see, not only are temperatures biased to the upside later in the century (though certainly prior to 1960), but a few mid-century intervals are being biased slightly lower. That, coupled with the post-1930 restatement we encountered earlier, would imply that in addition to an embarrassing false decline experienced with their MXD after 1960 (or earlier), CRU's "divergence problem" also includes a minor false incline after 1930.
  • I don't really understand how to submit articles, but the Telegraph had a real sour-grapes article. Mostly, Gerald Warner predicts that the e-mail Review is about to be published, but he also makes snide, ignorant remarks about "hide the decline."
    Here is the article:
    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100043200/third-climategate-report-imminent-expect-a-shortage-of-whitewash-in-stores-this-weekend/

    He got his scoop from a blog, but the Review said they would report in the spring, and it is almost summer. I wrote my opinion here.

    http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/06/uktelegraph-predicts-that-independent.html
  • I don't think that I will buy this book. I wonder who are the real deniers: those who studied the full body of evidence and are unconvinced, or those who deny that there is conflicting evidence? Those who are not impressed by 'scare them to death' and 'hide the decline' or those who deny that the official Climategate investigations were a whitewash? I don't want to play a pot and kettle game. This way of name calling is not useful. Unless you want to put your head in the sand.
  • I dont think the CRU team were blameless in the FOI requests. I think its shades of gray. That being said the in the febrile atmosphere of climate gate I dont think there was a lot of space for nuance. Stuff like 'hide the decline' were in many ways spectacular own goals by the contrairians as they were easily shown up as being overhyped. They polarised the debate and motivated the more vocal sceptics but I strongly think that it made scepticism appear to be hyperbolic and politically motivated, precisely what people accuse mainstream climate science of being to the lay public.

    It was amplified by the surge to the right in the UK and US politically and the cold winters, but in the long run served to make sceptics sound shrill by giving the loudest voices to the least capable of making a scientific case for low climate sensitivity.

    The real damage of climategate was the press seeking to sell a controvesy rather than explain science. Amist one of the three strongest la Ninas for the past 60 years and very low solar activity we are still smaking straight into the 30 year average on the UAH dataset
    http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
    (as a measure of mid troposphere temps UAH and RSS tend to show a bigger swing through ENSO cycles)

    By the peak of the next el Nino, in all likleyhood any loss of public confidence will have been reveresed as the data continues to pile in. I strongly suspect that pressure on governments from the public, the scientific comunity and increasingly business (who will see that they need to understand how governments will tackle CO2 levels so they can make long term planning decisions) will break in the favour of taking action as the data piles in.

    My personal hunch is that the trend for 2011 will see political comentators and bloggers making it clear they were always luke warmers and never disputed sensitivities of up to 2C (perhaps even 3C). McKintyre has been on this for a while (and he is one of the sharpest of the contrarians).
  • I don’t want to create more work for you, but maybe I can suggest some low-hanging fruit that you could tackle. There are several arguments on the full list which you have already discussed in some form on Skeptical Science, but do not have a page of their own. Perhaps you might like to look at adding separate pages for some of the following:
    • Antarctica is cooling (in a recent post on sea ice)
    • Southern sea ice is increasing (also in sea ice post)
    • Mike’s Nature trick to ‘hide the decline’ (on Climategate page)
    • IPCC overestimate the danger (on IPCC page)
    • 500 scientists refute the consensus (in an old 2007 post)
    • Outgoing longwave radiation hasn’t changed (on CO2 effect page)
    • It’s part of a 1500 year cycle (on natural cycle page)
    • Mauna Loa is a volcano (on CO2 measurements page)
    • CO2 emissions do not correlate with CO2 concentration (in a 2009 post)
    • Models exaggerate projected temperature rise (on models page)
    • Hansen’s 1988 prediction was wrong (also on models page)
    The following have been at least briefly mentioned:
    • Institute of Physics doesn’t support AGW (listed on consensus page)
    • Springs aren’t advancing (mentioned on evidence for global warming page)
    • Greenhouse effect does not exist (partially explained on CO2 effect page)
    • Temperature has fallen while CO2 was rising (discussed in several contexts)
    • Triton is warming (briefly discussed on other planets page)
    • Ocean acidification isn’t going to happen (mentioned on positives vs negatives page)
    • Earth hasn’t warmed as much as expected (alluded to on models page)
    Again, my suggestion is not intended to create unnecessary work, but is more about gathering together info already on the site into a more obvious location.
  • I found the Wikipedia on Climategate interesting reading as well. Gives a good description of the event, and what we've learned about it.

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

    Chris Shaker
  • I got a 60 page report with ove 228 points of legiminate criticism (with propoer citation) why the trial and questioning may be fuzzy.

    Link to criticism of the comitees
  • I got a 60 page report with ove 228 points of legiminate criticism (with propoer citation) why the trial and questioning may be fuzzy.

    http://thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/Climategate-Inquiries.pdf
  • I had an interesting experience in my town recently. A local radio station switched from bad pop music to talk radio. Rush/Hannity/Beck. Now it is often said "stop getting your news from Rush and see what the scientists say."

    But I've taken the opportunity to listen to these guys. The format is make a bogus statement (something like): "Even Phil Jones, the author of the most disturbing of the Climategate emails, says there has been no warming for the last 15 years." - then the process is to support this for the next 30 minutes with callers saying "yup" and "these marxist liberals think they can hijack the country based on bogus science" and on and on.

    Now this is obviously false and intentionally deceiving. But the folks who are listening to these programs, either because they already agree, or without a critical ear, are very vulnerable to eventually accepting this as the truth - they hear it for 18 hours a day, day after day after day.

    I was stunned at how bad it was. I haven't heard Beck or Hannity before, and Rush not since the 90s, when it was entertaining to listen to him rail against the Clinton's.

    The stakes just seem higher now.

    Anyways, this isn't "media" per se, but it is how some folks form this ironclad, bedrock belief in the anti-science.
  • I have a few more suggestions about the argument list (nothing too major – it’s mostly nitpicky stuff, so don’t worry too much about it):
    • One argument recently added is “Global warming does not cause volcanoes”. This is grammatically incorrect – something can’t “cause” an object. Perhaps it could be reworded to something along the lines of “Global warming does not cause volcanic eruptions”.
    • A while ago I added the arguments “Proponents don’t attempt to falsify AGW” and “It’s not 100% certain”. On second thoughts, I think both belong under “The science isn’t settled”, as both arguments have to do with the nature of science.
    • “It’s the gulf stream” should probably be in the “It’s the ocean” category.
    • Doesn’t “CO2 measurements are suspect” belong under “CO2 is not increasing”?
    • I would also suggest that “It’s ozone” be categorised under “It’s CFCs”, because they caused the ozone depletion.

    There are some other proofreading-related things which I’ve noticed:
    • Strangely, the main arguments in the categories “It’s not happening”, “It’s not us”, and “It’s too late” are bold, but not those in “It’s not bad” and “It’s too hard” – why is this?
    • There’s a full stop after “CRU lost temperature data”, whereas none of the other arguments have a full stop.
    • In the links for “Climategate was whitewashed”, a article called “Climate-Gate Gets A Whitewash” was counted as pro-AGW, but it seems to be actually a skeptic link. (BTW, is there a possibility of making each resources page show all the links for that argument, rather than just the latest 25?)
    • Oddly enough, once or twice when I’ve submitted a new skeptic argument, I’ve noticed the list of arguments to check includes “I would really like to see the EPA-OBD II Annual Vehicle Emissions Inspection Law closely examined and changed.As it stands right now, it is entirely possible for any Gasoline powered Vehicle from 1996 to the present to fail it's Emissions Inspection”. Why is this?
    • Is there any order to the contradictions page? It seems disordered.
  • I have a few questions...

    Where in Ternberth 09 does it state that satellites indicate an energy gap? In fact it says '[the ceres data]were adjusted to an estimated imbalance'

    Also, what do you think the author meant when he says 'or the warming is not really present?'.

    Finally, if the 'climategate' emails were written on public computers, as part of publicly funded studies, how can the author's have any expectation of privacy? And what is the basis of your claim that the emails were stolen?
  • I have been watching the Russian media on the subject of man-made global warming.

    A lot of popular media are owned by the Russian fossil fuel interests such as Gazprom. When Climategate errupted, the nationalist tabloid Pravda sounded just like Fox News. As a conservative voter, this really shocked me. Sometimes Pravda even quoted Fox.

    Recently, the government press agency RIA Novosti is carrying articles about man-made global warming and Russian discoveries in this field. They are having a terrible heat wave of over 100 in many places. The crops are dying. There is also a drought and drinking water is in danger. The writer quoted a Western source that it is global warming. http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/07/ria-novosti-blames-global-warming-for.html

    Of course, I know that you can't attribute a specific event to global warming--as the Russian weather expert Bedritsky also said in another article--but Novosti seems to be talking about global warming quite a lot.

    Maybe the line is changing. Russians often end up denouncing conspiracy theories because the government does have to deal with reality. They can't be totally in denial.

    Sometimes Russians are in denial. Stalin couldn't accept that Hitler attacked him. They denied Chernobyl. They claimed doctors were taking American money to kill Soviet leaders. They claimed AIDS was made by US Scientists. Finally, they have to take care of their people, so they get real.

    RIA Novosti also carried an article about how much pseudoscience they have in Russia and how politicians are manipulated by charlatans. They quoted a physicist who is in the Russian Academy of Sciences, Eduard Kruglyakov, the head of the Pseudoscience Commission at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

    http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/07/ria-novosti-criticizes-russias.html

    I hope this is as favorable development as it appears to be on the surface. The fossil fuel interests are very powerful there, but there are other constituencies, too.
  • I have some suggestion for you, Michael H Anderson

    1) Stop making false accusations, like that accurate data like that published by NASA GISS, which is consistent with every other global temperature data set, is "discredited".

    2) Stop making gross generalizations based on the actions of a few individuals.

    3) Learn the definition of the term "statistically significant".

    4) Learn about the reality of Climategate.

    5) Try to stay on topic at hand instead of repeating every long-debunked myth you can come up with.
  • I looked at your Handbook this morning I liked it for the first production draft. I agreed with much of the constructive critique in the above posts so didn’t add anything.

    Being the kind of guy who's always trying to get inside the thinking of others, I found myself at the jonova website and have spent the last couple hours being frustrated and I will admit getting a bit overwhelmed. Especially, after down loading and looking over that masterpiece poster "Climategate: 30 years in the making" Quite the profession production... but with one thing in mind - to win their point of view.

    The spooky part is when "winning" becomes everything, where does that leave learning and adapting. When so much of the story must be ignored to prop up ones own point of view, where is the value in that?
  • I posted a similar comment on the Spencer Thread but, again, you can see what sort of rubbish Inhofe believes in when you look into the 'sources' he brings out at the beginning of the interview - the "liberal" British Telegraph (actually columnist-in-denial Christopher Booker in the famously right-wing Telegraph); the Financial Times (actually ex-blogger Clive Crook in the pro-business Financial Times); and the UN and IPCC, or some blustering, incomprehensible combination of the two, somehow (actually Hal Lewis's resignation letter from the APS, and Dr Philip Lloyd, MD of Industrial and Petrochemical Consultants company).

    As for the Newsweek 'condemnation' and the study (the link here is a response to Inhofe's assertions) in the "liberal" Nature : Inhofe is seeing exactly what he wants to see, rather than what is actually there in real life. What a surprise...
  • I really wish an editorial decision to not use the word 'climategate' was made. It implies malfeasance and therefore primes the reader to assume the worst. It plays in to the Deniers' hands.

    'Stolen CRU emails' - not 'climategate'.
  • I remember seeing this used as "proof" of global warming. The Media grabbed it with glee and it became a sensation world wide - the fact that it was "cobbled" together from proxy results and real data received no cover and why would it given today's media is sensation driven.

    Whether the sensational reception it received was intended by either the author or the IPCC is a point only they can answer.

    My view is that it suited the message the IPCC wanted to portray at the time. It was exploited for their propaganda purposes whilst it had usefulness.

    As such it is irrelevant whether it has any scientific validity - the fact is it was portrayed to be "proof" of a relationship that the IPCC has been trying to validate for decades in a deceptive manner - not by hiding the issue of the decline but by the cynical reasoning that the public wouldn't care about an argument over the worth of the graph when a simple viewing "proves" we are on a path to thermal hell and any idiot can clearly see that.

    This cynical use of this graph explains the huge backlash after the so-called climategate affair. If the public held onto the idea of global warming and respected the graph and the "proof" it implies then no wonder the feeling of betrayal and loss of confidence when the "heart" of the belief is held up to public scrutiny in a negative way and people realise this graph may have been "concocted". Combined with the dropping of the term global warming in favour of climate change and you have sown the seeds of doubt inexoribly into the public consciousness.

    The sceptics have no problem in this - their point of view is seen as consistent - they always doubted and now they have been shown to have been not as stupid as portrayed.

    Again, I don't know if the reality of this graph was adequately disclosed at the time - I never checked myself - I trusted and believed - and this was clearly the intent of the IPCC.

    The mere fact that there was a data problem and the was overcome by adding a different data set to achieve a desired outcome is a difficult perception hurdel to overcome when all the pro side can say about sceptics is they are either stupid or corrupt.

    Nothing is more corrupt to the public than using scientific data to mislead and this is clearly what happened - no matter what the arguments about disclosure - the public see one thing as presented - few dig any further.
  • I remember seeing this used as "proof" of global warming. The Media grabbed it with glee and it became a sensation world wide - the fact that it was "cobbled" together from proxy results and real data received no media cover, and why would it given today's media is sensation driven - the story was a sensation.

    Whether the sensational reception it received was intended by either the author or the IPCC is a point only they can answer.

    My view is that it suited the message the IPCC wanted to portray at the time. It was exploited for their propaganda purposes whilst it had usefulness.

    As such it is irrelevant whether it has any scientific validity - the fact is it was portrayed to be "proof" of a relationship that the IPCC has been trying to validate for decades in a deceptive manner - not by hiding the issue of the decline but by the cynical reasoning that the public wouldn't care about an argument over the worth of the graph when a simple viewing "proves" we are on a path to thermal hell and any idiot can clearly see that.

    This cynical use of this graph explains the huge backlash after the so-called climategate affair. If the public held onto the idea of global warming and respected the graph and the "proof" it implies then no wonder the feeling of betrayal and loss of confidence when the "heart" of the belief is held up to public scrutiny in a negative way and people realise this graph may have been "concocted". Combined with the dropping of the term global warming in favour of climate change and you have sown the seeds of doubt inexoribly into the public consciousness.

    The sceptics have no problem in this - their point of view is seen as consistent - they always doubted and now they have been shown to have been not as stupid as portrayed.

    Again, I don't know if the reality of this graph was adequately disclosed at the time - I never checked myself - I trusted and believed - and this was clearly the intent of the IPCC.

    The mere fact that there was a data problem and the was overcome by adding a different data set to achieve a desired outcome is a difficult perception hurdle to overcome.

    Most of the criticism of sceptics is they are either stupid or corrupt - but this issue looks like "cooking the books" to the public - rightly or wrongly is not going to matter.

    Nothing is more corrupt to the public than using scientific data to mislead and this is clearly what it appears has happened - no matter what the arguments about disclosure - the public see one thing as presented - few dig any further.
  • I suspect this is causing John some anxiety, but for my part, I would ask him to rest easy, mostly.

    I comment anonymously because I fear the irrational behavior of, I guess, irrational people. But I think only a small set of people commenting/posting here would actually receive personal attention, and I do not think I am in that set of noteworthy people.

    I use different passwords depending on the nature of the material; ie, my password here is in the set of social media/I-don't-really-care passwords, which is distinct from my financial passwords, etc. So, even if the passwords are decrypted, I'm think I have little to loose.

    I work with databases and software; Andy Lee is giving good advice. My expertise is not in security or web hosting; his knowledge is beyond mine is this area, but my limited understanding jives with his advice.

    Kind of curious what is posted about me, but not so much that I want this site to post a link.

    If I had to guess, I would hazard that this is the work of a highly motivated, at least moderately skilled, but delusional person, and not the work of someone directly involved in the denial industry. I don't see what there is to gain for the professional deniers by hacking identities. Russian? Maybe, but I suspect whoever did it merely used a Russian site to post because of legal considerations.

    Honestly, what is to be gained by this hack? I suppose that it could be used to sway opinion (out of context or misunderstood quotes - same as climategate), but personal information does not change the laws of physics; so, I'm wondering what the hacker was hoping to achieve.
  • I think Harold's request for comments about peer review is on topic for this thread (A Database of Peer-Reviewed Literature on Climate Change), even if those comments are triggered by particular claims by McKitrick (("Circling the Bandwagons") about how he was treated by that process.

    But if anyone wants to discuss the climatological substance of McKitrick's claims in that paper, I think maybe you could do it over at Deep Climate. The most relevant parts are the comments starting with the comment by Paul Middents on April 2.
  • I think further discussion of McKitrick's claims might stray too far from the topic of this thread (A Database of Peer-Reviewed Literature on Climate Change), so if anyone wants to further discuss McKitrick's claims about his treatment, maybe you could do it over at Deep Climate. The most relevant parts are the comments starting with the comment by Paul Middents on April 2.
  • I think further discussion of McKitrick's claims might stray too far from the topic of this thread (A Database of Peer-Reviewed Literature on Climate Change), so if anyone wants to further discuss McKitrick's claims about his treatment, maybe you could do it over at Deep Climate. The most relevant parts are the comments starting with the comment by Paul Middents on April 2.
  • I think Phil Jones gave an answer which was correct, easily understandable and honest. The fact that those in denial used a version of his answer to try to claim things that Phil Jones did not mean or say ("Global Warming in Last 15 Years Insignificant, U.K.'s Top Climate Scientist Admits" from FOX NEWS, and "Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995" from the DAILY MAIL - both headlines are demonstrably false), simply shows how despicable and dishonest they are.
    No matter how Jones had answered, his words would still have been twisted and abused.

    Don't have a go at Jones for being naive, credulous or whatever - his answer would never have been perfect enough to have disallowed its use as propaganda by those who thrive on disinformation. Have a go at those who misuse and misinform.
  • I think the figures above which represent the public's views, are a little misleading because, although only 26% accept the fact that AGW is happening, 38% seem to think that it hasn't been proved conclusively, and a further 35% either think it isn't happening at all or is just propaganda. It seems that it is that 38% that is being misled by the media and which needs to be sought out and shown the facts. How ? That is the problem.

    It is interesting, though, that the survey shows slightly more people who were MORE convinced about AGW after hearing about things like Climategate, etc, although the vast majority didn't change their views at all.
    Full details here.

    From other polls, however, and considering all the noise there has been over the last year or so from the denialosphere, it is still encouraging that more people still accept AGW generally, than deny it - although many think it is exaggerated or won't affect them personally.
    More polls here, here, here, and here.
    (We need more up-to-date ones, obviously)

    Another problem, which I'm not too clear about with regard to its influence, is the blogosphere, particularly the denial part of it. During one week last December, the blogosphere had five times as much coverage of AGW as the mainstream media, mainly down to so-called Climategate, I suppose. That has to be taken into account when deciding how to get the media to concentrate on the facts behind the science because, no doubt, once the mainstream moves towards reality, the denialosphere will surely move more towards extreme denial, which will hopefully only convince those already convinced in their long-held beliefs in conspiracy, etc. Those non-committed at that stage will surely reject such denial sites then, the way most people reject the 9/11 Troofer sites now.
  • I tried to post this yesterday but it has disappeared so I try again.

    You should be interested in the alternative opinion of “physicist, computer Programmer, environmental activist, financial expert” John Droz presented in his January article “Climategate: The Perils of Global Warming Models” (Note 1). This requires no embellishment from me as it reflects my own opinion perfectly. QUOTE:
  • I want to thank Riccardo and doug_bostrom for their helpful comments. I think the temperature records are an excellent proof that the climate is warming.

    I didn’t really want to imply that the climate is not warming because there is much evidence that it is. If you look at the NCDC data set (ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.land_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat) it shows a 30 year period of stationary temperatures, then a 30 year period of a rapidly rising temperatures followed by a repeat of that cycle. While temperature highs and lows are good proof that the temperature is increasing since it includes the last peek of that cycle, the better evidence is the NCDC data set. Yes I know that there are some questions about that dataset that has come up lately, however I have read the skeptics arguments and don’t believe there will be any major change.

    Also I might note that the location where the warming is occurring could just be part of the NAO and PDO cycle we are in. You may have to go back 60 years to make that comparison.

    My big concern is this: We may be in one of those 30 year periods where the temperature will change little, however sometime in the late 2020’s the temperature will start to climb again and climb fast. The issue of what is caused by “Global Warming” and what isn’t is a side issue. What’s important is the issue of what percentage is natural verses man-made. Climategate seems to be drawing the debate into unhelpful areas and people seem to be using it at proof that all the Global Warming is natural. This is most certainly wrong.

    Anyhow that is what spurred me to make that reply.
  • I was out of the loop a lot yesteday so I just learned this news now. I haven't had a chance to read all the comments on this and hope I'm not repeating something here. There's a critical element to the clamor about the publicly-funded scientists' emails being made public (Climategate, Cucinelli's witchhunt, etc.) and this event that needs to be addressed.

    It's one thing to engage in junk science (e.g., NIPCC) at the behest of your anonymous donors, but to start a well-funded campaign that deliberately intends to change public education is an invitation to public sctrutiny at the same level of the work of public officials.

    A good example of this in these documents is, buried in the budget (p.20) is a tie in with ALEC -- the American Legislative Exchange Council -- a secretive organization funded by private corporations that, among other things, writes "model legislation" that is typically introduced verbatim by friendly legislators in U.S. state legislatures to engage in such "reforms" as privatizing public schools and prisons (guess who gets paid to operate them?), among many other proposals that have the direct effect of increasing corporate revenues. One Florida legislator recently introduced an ALEC bill and forgot to remove the reference that it was written by ALEC in the text. Ooops.

    If word really got out, Americans would be shocked to learn that corporations -- not the people they elect -- are actually writing their laws. The New York Times recently ran an editorial on ALEC's activities, but the group still operates largely under the radar.

    You can learn more about ALEC here: http://alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

    There is so much in these documents that demonstates that Heartland is not about science but rather corporate influence. I challenge any deniers who attack individual climate scientists as "leftist" or "environmentalists" with an "agenda" to explain how the relationship between Heartland, its paid consultants, and groups like ALEC should not also make Heartland's work suspect.
  • I was probably in the lukewarmer camp for most of my life, accepting that AGW existed, but not that the magnitude was anything to be worried about until November 2009.

    The catalyst for change? Ironically enough, "Climategate." As a science grad student, it was patently obvious to me that the hacked emails did not show the vast conspiracy alluded to by the right-wing media in the USA. So I wound up reading up on actual climate science from Realclimate and here (and a bit of tamino as well). The most scientifically convincing thing to me was the SkS rebuttal of the "Global warming=UHI" myth. The fact that climate scientists had tried and tested multiple clever ways of ruling out UHI convinced me that one side was making research and the other was making excuses.
  • I was surprised that Rachel did not mention the Berkeley study. I had emailed her several months ago about it, emphasizing that it was a vindication of ClimateGate, a confirmation of Global Warming, AND a defeat of the Koch Brothers - kind of a Climate Change hat trick. I thought the last one especially would get her attention, and she might do a story on it. I at least thought she would use it against Inhofe - "OK, maybe you don't trust the EPA, but how about the Koch Brothers, are they trustworthy?" Alas, I guess she doesn't read all her emails after all.
  • I wasn't going to comment on Denialgate just like I've never commented on ClimateGate, because I think it is pointless and really not about the science. But, it strongly appears that the "2012 Climate Strategy" document was faked. That is highly disappointing on the part of the entity responsible for producing it and those who believe it and continue to support it.

    The phrase "two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science" is painfully obvious as something that would never be written or said by a true skeptic. But, it could be written as disinformation by someone attempting to pose as an HI staffer. I've never seen that language used on WUWT or any other skeptic site, but have seen it used plenty of times on SKS and pro-AGW sites.
  • I will figure your system out when things calm down. I've just been finishing up the school year. I'm not so young or computer savy, and my eyes get tired.

    I am not a scientist, but I can see that some of these denialists are dishonest. The political repression of scientists really scares me. It's really disgusting. It's the kind of thing that goes on in Russia when someone smart says something the politicians don't want to hear.

    Climategate made me notice what was happening. I really am grateful the scientists are standing up for the truth and for each other.
  • I wish someone would translate the book into Russian. They just had an article in Russia called "Pseudoscientific Genius." The article discusses how gullible Russians are about scientific charlatans. During Climategate, Pravda was quoting Fox News.

    The article stated:

    "Rasputin-style infiltration into the upper echelons of power remains a problem even in post-Soviet Russia. 'In the Kremlin there were whole groups of—I’m scared of calling them charlatans—but mystics, astrologists. These were prominent people—generals. The 1990s were an analogue of Rasputin’s time,' said [Eduard Kruglyakov, the head of the Pseudoscience Commission at the Russian Academy of Sciences]. Several appointments made by Boris Yeltsin suggested that he sought advice from odd sources. For instance, Yeltsin made General Georgi Rogozin, an ex-KGB officer and star-gazer, the deputy head of his Presidential Security Service. Rogozin led a team of 12 astrologers who would draw on their expertise to counsel the president."---RIA Novosti (7-8-10)

    http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/07/ria-novosti-criticizes-russias.html
  • I would add that this documents, just as the climategate emails, were stolen. I would not condone this type of action and I think SkS and the rest of the (true) sceptical community should make this very clear.

    That said, Holly Sh*t
  • I would consider moving the Climategate to its one argument. I believe this played much bigger in the media than you give it credit for. Maybe someting like.. Climategate clearly proves that AGW is a myth invented by scientists looking to make a quick buck...

    I wouldn't of thought to look here for information discussing that information.
  • I'd like to thank Chip for taking the time to come here and discuss the paper that is the subject of this thread (FKM 2011). I'd also like to thank each of the contributors for their interest displayed and for their zeal displayed in the furtherance of science.

    Participants displayed keen interest and depth of knowledge; even when things got heated, restraint and decorum ruled. The passion for learning on display was gratifying to see. For that is why science is done: to learn things and to then share that learning.

    (I wish I could have participated more, but an ill-timed multi-day bout of BSOD kept me busy recovering from repeated system crashes. Fingers crossed...)

    It is that passion for learning and zeal for knowledge that finds it's embodiment in the advancement of the science through the formulation of hypothesis' and studies and experiments designed to test them.

    In the case of climate science and global warming in general, and the Greenland Ice Sheet in particular, glaciologists like Dr. Jason Box and Dr. Mauri Pelto (and many others over the generations) have built our knowledge of ice sheet dynamics based on observational data (what the various forces acting on the ice sheet are and how the ice sheet has then responded to them) which has then led to a robust understanding of the underlying physics of the ice sheet response.

    The meta-analysis of existing GIS data undertaken by Frauenfeld, Knappenberger, and Michaels was an interesting method of using existing data to draw various insights into past modeled GIS response to temperatures at various times in the past. A shortcoming of the methodology was the lack of context into the manifold forces acting on the GIS that help then determine the response of the sheet (for example: the effects of the loss of ice shelf buffering and reduced sea ice and landfast ice along the Greenland perimeter, the effect of each is to reduce backpressure along the calving/ice-egdge front, leading then to thinning of the ice streams due to increased basal melt resulting in ice also then moving more quickly along the glacial bed of the streams; this vector change then propagates upglacier, etc).

    This lack of context reduces the overall value of the FKM methodology to one of evaluating the impact of the new method itself, which (given the above mentioned limitations in this comment and others) is of little interest to those already aware of the state of knowledge of the GIS, such as working glaciologists and other interested parties. Why? Because to them, FKM 2011 adds nothing to the science and is thus obsolete.

    Where the authors truly missed on an opportunity to both add impact and also advance the state of the science was the record melt of 2010. By September of 2010, the melt season which was the focus of the FKM study (June, July and August, or JJA) was "in the can". Not only were glaciologists everywhere aware of the record melt, but the news had already penetrated the lay news outlets. Had the authors then obtained this data (which surely would have been available upon request even if in rough form only), incorporating it into the FKM study would have pushed the study to the forefront of the field.

    No, the data would not have been in the proper format the authors were accustomed to dealing with. But that is merely a technical limitation and could have been dealt with. After all, the Muir Russell Commission was able to replicate the entire "hockey stick" from original data in a mere two days (something the auditors still have not yet completed themselves), pronouncing it something easily accomplished (cf page 48 of the report) by a competent researcher.

    Given the providential opportunity to make a meaningful, lasting contribution to the science by stepping up and making the most of the opportunity, the FKM authors instead took the opposite tack, and further themselves relegated their study to the dustbin of science; of interest to statistics mavens only.

    That zeal for learning, the desire to increase the state of the science in a specific area, was critically missing in the final form of the FKM study: a 2010-shaped void left its mark by its absence.

    On the whole I'd say that most of what else I'd planned on saying already got said. Those of who said it must know who you are, so thanks for that. :)

    A few general observations, then. The regional warming notable in GIS data in the early-to-mid 20th Century certainly could only add little contribution to SLR due to the confining limitations of both the buttressing ice shelves, thick landfast ice and the widespread existence of heavy pack ice.

    A few illuminating historical charts of Arctic Sea Ice edges, courtesy of Patrick Lockerby's Chatter Box blog:


    [Source: Philips' Handy Volume Atlas 1930 Arctic map]


    [Source: Russian map of Arctic, 1955]

    Compare and contrast the ice edges defined in those images to this recent image:


    [Source: September/March ice edge(1995-2009 mean)]

    Left unexplored, and a topic of a future comment by me: The editorial and decision making process at the heart of the publication of an obsolete paper.

    Best,

    The Yooper
  • I've been visiting this site since it's inception. I love hearing both sides of the climate debate as I think it is interesting and constructive. Things are different now: there's no room for dissent here, skeptics are called "deniers", and any attempt to check or disprove the science is met with derision. Skeptical Science needs a reality check and needs to go back to it's roots: allow debate and don't deride anyone who has a different point of view.

    Climategate highlighted a corrupt peer-review process. Some things were taken out of context, yes, other things, not so much. Take it for what it is and stop denigrating everything that threatens the "climate change consensus."
  • If there was any doubt at all that "climategate" a year on is continuing to be used in the most blatantly dishonest way (down to quoting the "trick") by deniers, but with the pretense that it proves the "doubters" right, it is here, today http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/41326.html on ABC The Drum, by Sinclair Davidson. Read it and weep. Apparently it is all the fault of Phil Jones, oh and The Greens, that Australia doesn't have a CPRS, not, you understand, that we need one.
  • If you want to make a lasting impact, try copying tabloid newspapers. They always attach short adjectives to persons and things to give a image which is reinforced with repetition.

    Instead of "Former Vice-President Al Gore believes in climate change", how does "Fat, balding Al Gore (64 years old) believes in climate change" make you think? Constant repetition of a negative association, even if false, undermines the message that a highly intelligent former US VP has studied climate change and accepts the science.

    I am not advocating the attachment of demeaning adjectives to people ... rather to things. Leave the personal stuff to Marc Morano.

    Nearly everyone has heard of "Climategate", but the permananent attachment of an adjective like "the faux-scandal Climategate" has a better chance of sinking in to the consciousness of the reader, particularly with constant repetition.

    My own opinion was that the climate science folks were too defensive about the faux-scandal Climategate, and that the amount of blogging-inches devoted to it probably backfired. However, this pseudo-scandal has probably died out in public consciousness, so that if it comes up (and there are whole sites devoted to it), mention it in no uncertain terms as the farrago of fabrication and exaggeration it really was.

    Associating the word "Climategate" constantly with words like "faux", "pseudo", "farrago" helps get the message across. We learn most things by repetition, so continuous word-association will boost replacing myth with fact.
  • Imagine that the Watergate burglars had actually installed their bugging equipment in Democratic Party HQ in 1972. Suppose they actually taped some compromising conversations before they were caught (e.g. a senior figure talking to a wealthy backer, another making unflattering statements about senior Republicans, maybe some discussing how to "spin" news stories in their favour).

    Imagine, that in the aftermath, most press coverage focuses on the conversations, which are sensationally inflated into a theory of a conspiracy to subvert the whole political process. The illegality of the break-in and the conspiracy behind it are virtually ignored.

    A shocking dereliction by the media? No Woodward and Bernstein? But case for case, it is what happened in the instance of so-called Climategate.
  • In an attempt to suit actions to words and inform myself better, I have located and downloaded the zip file of the Climategate 2 emails. Working from the 'Read me file - formatted.docx' document, included by the hacker as a kind of guide to the naughty bits in the emails, I have started comparing the selected snippets with the original messages, to get the context.

    I am not a climate scientist, so much of the technical discussion goes over my head, but I am able to form my own opinion of the degree to which these emails should worry me. So far (and I have not worked through all 5000+), I see only robust discussion and the kind of peer review of papers that leads me to think the final versions are likely to be balanced and conservative in their conclusions.

    I also note that the vast bulk of the emails in the zip file are password protected and the hacker is unwilling (or unable) to release the encryption key. Smelling a rat, I am entitled to suspect that these locked messages detract from the sensationalism the hacker is trying to purvey.

    By hiding the raw data and highlighting supposedly salacious phrases that prove, on examination, to be taken out of context, the hacker has lost credibility, in my view. Having performed my own research, I am happy to state that I agree with the conclusions presented by Peter Hadfield in the video posted above.

    As one of the untrained majority this release of emails was supposed to confront, I find them a non-event and believe that anyone relying on them to support their pet conspiracy theory would do better to spend their time researching the originals as I am doing.
  • In August 2010, the Project on Climate Science produced a white paper on this topic, "Scientific Foundation of Climate Chage Remains Sound: Independent Studies Reject 'Climategate'" This white paper covers some of the same ground as James Wright's article. The two works are mutually reinforcing.
  • In one way, I agree with Ken Lambert. Climate scientists and climate blogs have probably paid more attention to Climategate than it merits.

    Most of what has happened since is unrelated. "Happened afterwards, therefore because of" (post hoc ergo propter hoc) is an old, old fallacy that has given rise to a heap of superstitions. Climategate's residual significance is that a lot of US states are suing the Federal government on the grounds that the data for global warming is faked. It is the old "hockey stick is broken" argument, and we know that leads nowhere.

    With so many investigations completed, it is time to move on. Responses on Climategate should be only as appropriate when it arises.
  • In response to @ 34. GallopingCamel, and anyone else who holds on to perceived failings of "Mann's Hockey Stick", or Al Gore, or "Climategate", I have only this to offer:


    Timeline of climate science.

    This puts the history of climate science, policy and media reports into perspective. If, for example, someone argues against "Mann's Hockey Stick", just look at year 1998, then work backwards. You'll see that Mann's work, good as it is, is only a small step in the understanding of climate change.

    Denialists nit-pick on small snippets of factoids, but they ignore all the other evidence that AGW/ACC is real. They certainly aren't "big picture" people.
  • In retrospect, perhaps Mr. McIntyre should proceed with legal action, if indeed such action is even plausible/possible. Because if he did, the discovery stage of proceedings would be, shall we say, very enlightening and damning, and by that I mean against the plaintiff, Mr. McIntyre.

    Remember, even the attorney general of Virginia (Ken Cuccinelli II) could not, even with all his influence and power, mount a credible and convincing case against Dr. Mann. But what his vexatious actions did seem to do were a) harass and intimidate Dr. Mann, b) by extension intimidate other climate scientists, c) feed/fuel conspiracy theories of "skeptics". Same goes for Republican Senator Inhofel's list of 17 climate scientists who he wished to bring to trial. Again, that went nowhere, but the message to climate scientists was very clear.

    Moreover, Christopher Monckton has repeatedly threatened legal action against climate scientists and those defending them but has not once followed through. Again, one has to wonder why? I'm seeing a clear pattern here. Threaten, intimidate...draw back...repeat.

    Despite all the fallacious accusations, the rhetoric, the threats of legal action against climate scientists nothing has come to fruition. No, that is not the result of some grand conspiracy, but the fact that the people making these claims and accusations ultimately have nothing.

    Keep in mind that in the past Mr. McIntyre has used his influence and his blog to mount/head a campaign of vexatious FOI requests against climate scientists.

    The comment's policy prevent me from speaking to motive for the actions of McIntyre, Inhofe, Cuccinelli and Monckton, but I'm sure that by now reasonable people reading this thread have some pretty good ideas of their own what is going on here and why.

    It is this steady stream of this baseless and mendacious acts by "skeptics" and deniers of the theory of AGW that have necessitated the formation of the legal defence fund. That is what the OP is about readers, please ignore the chaff being floated by those defending these heinous actions.
  • In the ClimateGate e-mails the hard core of the climate scientists complained 'it is a travesty that we cannot explain the lack of warming.'
    They needed 4 years, but now they found the solution: rewrite the HadCrut data, so that they agree with GISS. And be sure, that you do not publish all the models and the raw data, but only show one mysterious graph. It will last four more years before Steve McIntyre and others will have debunked the new tricks.
  • Indeed, Rosco - as Tom Curtis points out, do you have your graphs mixed up ?
    Whichever you intended, I can't recall the media "sensation" you mention. Do you have any examples you can link to ?

    But, some questions :

    What propaganda or message do you believe the IPCC were supposedly trying to put out "at the time" ?
    (You can respond here)

    How can the IPCC have been trying to validate anything "for decades" ("deceptively" or not) when it only began in 1988 ?
    (You can respond via the above link)

    What examples can you give, in the real world, of this "huge backlash" ?
    (You can respond here)

    When do you believe that the term "global warming" was dropped for the term "climate change" ?
    (You can respond here)

    What is the "consistent" 'sceptical' "point of view" ?
    (You can respond here)

    Finally, can I tell you what I think is "more corrupt to the public" ? Corruption.
  • Is global warming a conspiracy ? Did a group of scientists go to a back room and make up Global Warming to make a lot of money. Of course not.


    What exists is a “CONSPIRACY OF SELF INTEREST”. It is to the best interest of all climate scientists for enough plausibility be found in Global Warming AKA climate change AKA climate disruption AKA weirding weather to keep the lights on and their paychecks coming in. If global Warming were to be found to be entirely natural, funding and staffs would be drastically cut.

    Does it take a conspiracy with a central co-coordinator to assure us that human beings will act like human beings ? Many like the late Stephen Schneider think that exaggerating certainties and hiding uncertainties is justified for the good of the planet.

    Is the price of sugar a conspiracy or the result of thousands of people dong what they think is in their own self interest. ? The “invisible hand” works in all other aspects of human civilization, to believe it doesn’t in climate science is naïve.

    To be fair around 1998 when there had been many [20] years of continuous warming I can see why the climatologists were concerned. I would have been too. They projected the current temperature rise to mean 3 ° C by 2100. [They exaggerated the rate by about 3 X] They didn’t have a crystal ball to tell them that over the next 12 years temperatures would be flat or slowly fall. And they didn’t have enough knowledge of history to know this 60 year cycle was normal. Studying global warming seemed to make sense. Of course once the laboratories had been built and the scientists hired there was a “constituency “ for further research.

    Most scientist just want to study something and get paid for it and the best way to do that is to go with the flow. Climate change or global warming in the title of your study triples the chances of it being funded by government or Greenpeace or WWF. After you take their money you had better find serious consequences if you ever want to get any more $.

    In addition Climategate has proved that the CO2 mafia is so firmly entrenched that it would be professional suicide to try to do research into non CO2 based causes of our slight warming. Anyone without tenure would be a fool to go against the CO2 mafia and the hockey team. Those with tenure are the only ones in a position to deny the juggernaut. [Lindzen, Spencer, Curry withstand a ton of abuse and Ad Hominem attacks and are very brave about it ]

    There is a pile of money to be extracted from a gullible public. That is where the true conspiracy exists. Cap and trade’s only function is to make tens of trillions of dollars to companies like Enron and the Chicago Carbon Exchange [deceased]. Cap and trade or hideous taxes make no sense even if you believe in AGW because they export jobs to the coal powered factories of 3 rd world countries. So the worldwide emission of CO2 goes up.

    Then there are other one worlder types who didn’t invent global warming but are happy to let it be a battering ram to help them get a redistribution of wealth and a world government.

    Notice that I don’t claim these people invented global warming but they are using it for their own agenda.
  • Is this post it is really detailed and precise explanation, or rather, sometimes (by the amount of text) does not attempt to block out the problem?

    For example, MWP. Record is clear: Nature, 17.02.2010 - 'Climategate' scientist speaks out:

    “... the past 40 years of tree-ring data are unreliable temperature proxies, and some argue that using them in older temperature reconstructions, as Jones has done, could understate past warm periods, including the MWP (see Nature 463, 284–287; 2010). "It potentially does," admits Jones, but he adds that analyses using other methods — proxy temperature markers from ice-core samples, for example — still show much the same temperature change over the past millennium.”

    Jones, Briffa and author of this post. They still do not understand that we would have liked to know more precisely: how much the same temperature change over the past millennium, just enough, "more accurately" - not: “... absolute magnitude of the global MWP. ...”

    Conscious (?) the inclusion of old, improperly calibrated data series ...

    “Another outstanding problem in proxy research is the large range of uncertainty for temperatures from before about 1500. Studies published in 2004 (ref. 8) and 2005 (ref. 9), based on a combination of proxies of different resolution, suggest that fluctuations in global temperature during the past millennium may have been larger than initially thought. However, these studies still show late twentieth century warming to be unprecedented, says von Storch. And the most recent decade was warmer still.”(Nature463, 284–287; 2010)

    Only, that “warmer” von Storcha it’s not „warmer” “Mann and colleagues” ...

    “As long as we don't understand why the records diverge, we can't be sure that they accurately represent the past.”

    In the interview (20/02/2010 - in German language) von Storch criticizes the IPCC scientific procedures, and says - for MWP:
    „Ihr geradezu perfekter Verlauf sollte nachweisen, dass es in den vergangenen 1000 Jahren nie wärmer war als heute. Mein Institut und andere Kollegen haben mit eigenen Computermodellen früh nachgewiesen, dass in der Methodik unzulässige Annahmen steckten.“

    I do not translate this text - to not be accused of manipulation. Please use the Google option.
  • It is interesting that in a thread titled "Climategate a year later" Ken Lambert quotes Monbiot from a year ago. Soundoff then updates Monbots quote. Why can't the skeptics even keep up with what their own side says? The continual wack a mole gets tiring.
  • It seems that we all agree that sea level rise depends mainly on global warming. So will the sea level descend with cooling, I assume.
    Therefore it is very interesting to read the article “The mini ice age starts here” from David Rose in the Daily Mail, link:
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011

    Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the IPCC, together with Professor Anastasios Tsonis explain that we are entering a mini-ice-age for the next 30 years.

    Thus the sea level will even descend the next 30 years. Climategate and the above mentioned story will make the discussions easier about what is going to happen the next decades!
  • It's funny how the skeptics attacked Phil Jones credibility relentlessly, and still make snide references to "climategate," but they're only too happy to cite him as an expert over and over again for this one quote.

    It's just another bit of evidence that even they don't believe most of what they're saying.
  • It's unbelievable the way the so-called skeptics can't accept reality and continue to repetitively repeat and regurgitate what they were led to believe would be the final 'final nail in the coffin of AGW'. It used to be just the 'hockey-stick' graph and now it's 'Climategate' - both were promised (by the so-called skeptical gurus - their particular brand of acceptable authority, to whom the so-called skeptics give total obedience) as the final proof against AGW, and their followers are still hanging onto those faith-based promises because they can't face up to accepting that they were lied to/misinformed/used/shown up/gullible.
    But here we have them repeated again - twice from one poster, as if there was a need to make it appear more 'real' :

    "Climategate and the subsequent IPCC-gates have started an avalanche of scepticism among lay people around the globe."
    Pete Ridley (Part I)


    "Climategate wasn’t spin, it was a scandal exposed by the leaked files and the enquiries held so far were simply whitewashes but they don’t lessen the scandal of the general public’s recognition of it."
    Pete Ridley (Part II)


    "The difficulty with this line is that public confidence has been damaged by Climategate, and the exaggerated claims by advocates like Al Gore are not being believed by the great unwashed who will have to pay for the radical changes to their energy sources."
    Ken Lambert


    The difference now, I suppose, is that these so-called skeptics want to try to make it appear that the general public are on their side in their disbelief. The truth, I believe, is quite the opposite, but that will be hard to accept for some - especially those who think it was a 'scandal', followed by a 'whitewash'.

    For goodness sake, get over it (especially the Al Gore obsession) and move on to something else that might have more substance - if you can find anything...
  • It´s frustrating to see how flowers let themselves be influenced by media alarmism. Climategate has clearly proved that we´re not warming. Scientists hid the decline...

    Flowers should watch Fow news more often.
  • James includes a quote from Trenberth about extreme weather events and global warming. It's worth considering just how much further he has now gone six months down the line. I know this has got a lot of coverage on WUWT but his planned speech at AMS is laid out here.

    I'll give you the relevant quote.

    "It is worth considering whether the odds of the particular event have changed sufficiently that one can make the alternative statement “It is unlikely that this event would have occurred without global warming.” For instance, this probably applies to the extremes that occurred in the summer of 2010: the floods in Pakistan, India, and China and the drought, heat waves and wild fires in Russia. It likely also applies to the flooding in Queensland, Australia In January 2011."

    He seems to be making rather exaggerated claims about events that happened 2 weeks ago, we probably don't even yet have all the relevant data collated never mind any serious analysis made. Maybe things have progressed so much that the normal course of science is no longer necessary? This is opportunism not science.
  • James,

    Thanks for this. I'm afraid though it is probably a futile effort. Self-proclaimed 'skeptics' have had a year now to educate themselves on the facts, and yet we are still hearing people saying ridiculous things like this:

    "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! Don't you get it?"

    It seems that they are OK with skeptics simultaneously reviewing each others' papers at the journal of Climate Research. Well, credible and ethical scientists rightly objected to that. There were other issues too at Climate Research which rightly concerned scientists with integrity.

    Also, many papers by "skeptics" continue to be published (often in second rate journals like E&E;). How is it the fault of credible and ethical scientists that the research by "skeptics" is often sub-par and soundly refuted after being published.

    For example, McKitrick and Michaels (2004) was junk, still is and should not have included in the IPCC. Yet, in the end it was. So much for all the claims of gate keeping-- in fact the opposite seems to be true, junk science by "skeptics" being included in the IPCC the spirit of "balance" and fairness, not based on merit. Well, that is just wrong, and fails to advance the science and improve our understanding of the climate system. While the "skeptics" seem to be OK with that, people with integrity and interests of the advancement of science are not.

    There are other serious issues with the Wegman report James, see DeepClimate's most recent posts.

    I for one am looking forward to everyone focussing on the science again soon, especially the public release of the first Cryosat-2 data....
  • JC should stick to science. This thread is Orwellian double speak, attributing the faults of the Alarmists to their opponents.

    Most of the denizens of this site are living in a cozy cocoon where there is no Climategate.

    You are right to oppose junk science but most of that is coming from people like Gore, Pachauri and Mann. Your cause is doomed as long as you cling to false prophets.
  • Jigoro Kano 323 - this is a perfect microcosm of the whole denial problem. The pro-science crowd says lets look at the science and come up with a policy (if necessary) to deal with any problems.

    The denialist crowd ALWAYS avoids the real issues. Now you are claiming that if anyone disputes any of your list of untruths that you threw up that they are a "denier". Cute, but intellectually unsatisfying.

    Science and observed reality don't care how many semantic games you play. The world is warming, human activity is responsible.

    It is like I told all those climategate people a few years ago - emails are NOT melting the arctic, nor causing ocean acidification, nor warming the globe.

    If it helps - yes I absolutely deny the untruths you spouted in 320. I invoke reality.
  • JMurphy "Just how many studies would be enough to satisfy the so-called skeptics ?"

    JMurphy, you seem to fundamentally misunderstand the sceptical position. To answer your point, may I ask you how many times a politician has to tell you they saved the planet from global economic collapse for you to believe them? Repetition of the same assertions which are not believed do not and should not increase belief in those assertions.

    Moreover, science is on the side of the sceptic, because science is inherently sceptical and requires those making assertions to prove what the say; it does not require the sceptic to disprove it!

    But at a more systemic level, the climate community have systematically failed to address many of the concerns raised by the scientifically sceptical. Rather than accepting reasonable criticisms of the problems of the modelling, "unknown unknowns" and most importantly the abysmal temperature record (my speciality) there has instead been a nasty smear campaign against anyone who dared to be scientifically sceptical. Far from making us believe you are “scientists” this smear campaign smacks of blatant political propaganda and unfortunately anyone no matter how political they are in the subject, is tarred with the same brush.

    Moreover, the climate community have hardly done themselves any favours by their response to the behaviour revealed in the climategate emails. As some have said such things can go on in any academic field, but whilst a firm rebuke from the discipline would have given us some confidence that the behaviour in the emails was not deemed acceptable, the silence and (from our view) a whitewash of inquiries has shown to the sceptics what we now see as a community of academics with absolutely no willingness to bring the standards of their discipline up to the standards the sceptics believe is appropriate for such a high profile world-wide important and hugely costly area of research.

    So, much of the sceptical response to the climate community is self inflicted by that community. Most sceptics are not heartless animals. We are mostly people with real life experience or real life situations, where we have seen how people can be misled by statistics and a "bee in their bonnet" to come to the wrong conclusion.

    It is not the number of reports that matter, it is the quality and impartiality of those reports and so long as we continue to read reports that are clearly biased in that they fail to acknowledge simple things like urban heating, the poor siting of sensors or simple statistical facts like the cooling this century or that if there were warming it would have considerable benefits by reducing the number of cold related deaths in Norther latitudes.... basically so long as we can see the reports are obviously biased, it won't matter how many are produced because our training tells us that it is not scientifically appropriate to “believe” them.
  • JMurphy (#29) is shocked. But if he thinks again, maybe he can see that it was not a "shocking misuse of a quote", but instead a way of expressing a personal reaction, by openly using an excerpt of a quote.

    Of course "anyone can see the truth of by simply going to point 6" -- that's why I put the "6." in front of the excerpt!

    To me, the selected and cited enquiries and investigations, presented here, are expected prevarications. Of course they will clear the scientists of any wrong-doing! But the public remembers -- what they wrote, they wrote.

    While I do agree with the thesis that:
    "There are many lines of evidence that humans are causing global warming. Independent measurements of different aspects of the climate using a range of techniques by scientists all over the world all point to the same answer. When we consider the full body of evidence, we see a distinct, discernable human fingerprint on climate change."
    -- I still think we have to be aware that many scientists are intriguing and competing sometimes, and that they are not infallible, which was shown by 'Climategate'. Maybe these scientists have to stand a "smear campaign" now and then, to remind them to be honest, correct, even in their emails.
  • JMurphy (#65),
    You call me an AGW "Denier". If I had to put a label on you it would be "Reality Denier".

    Enough of the name calling already. Let's get back to the science.

    Global Climate Models
    The GCMs help to improve our understanding of climate but at present they are not good enough to do a decent job of modelling the recent past even though we know what the answer should be. To think that GCMs can predict global temperatures in 2100 is nonsense or non-science.

    Hockey sticks
    Given that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 looks like a "Hockey Stick" the challenge for AGW Alarmists is to show a correlation between global temperatures and CO2 concentrations. This means that the global temperature plot needs to look like a Hockey Stick.

    Mann et al. obliged with their famous temperature "Hockey Stick" that disappears if you leave out the tree ring proxies. See Lamb, McIntyre & McKittrick, Loehle & McCulloch and others. Michael Mann would have us rewrite history without the MWP and the LIA. Nobody is buying that canard since Climategate.

    As Philippe Chantreau points out (#63) we all have a constitutionally protected right to our opinions but eventually reality and history will prevail.

    With regard to the station drop off problem, you say that the data is no longer being sent to NOAA. This would mean (for example) that the Canada Weather Office is now only sending data to NOAA for one weather station above 65N, namely Eureka and only three from 60N to 65N (thank you, Berenyi Peter).

    This is a testable hypothesis so give me a little time to get back to you. If it turns out that you are right I will eat crow and send you a bottle of a beverage of your choosing (maximum value $100). If I am right and data from a larger number of stations has been reported, are you prepared to send me 1,750 ml of 12 year old Glenfiddich? What kind of documentation will you need?
  • JMurphy (28)
    (1) Concrete examples that the Climategate e-mailers were highly in doubt can only be given from interpretations of the e-mails. We are discussing here the question whether Climategate changed our understanding of global warming. Well, as I claimed, Climategate confirmed that the science is not settled and that the e-mailers were highly in doubt. The knew in 1999 that their arguments that the present warming is unprecedented in 1000 years were weak. Just one example: e-mail 0983566497 Chris Keller about the temperature variations in the past: “what can generate large temperature variations over hundreds of years … If we can’t [explain] this, then there might be something wrong with our rationale that the average does not vary much even though many regions see large variations. This may be the nub of the disagreement, and until we answer it, many careful scientists will decide the issue is still unsettled, and that indeed climate in the past may well have varied as much or more than in the last hundred years.” Well, they did not explain this, but calculated averages of different series so that the variations were masked.
    And there are many more of such cases. You can give a friendly white washing interpretation of some of these e-mails (‘out of context’, ‘informal talk’ etc.), but not of all. There are too many of them!
    (2) Concrete examples that they wanted to hide uncertainty and prevent that other views are published. Again, we are talking about the interpretations of the e-mails: the e-mailers wanted to get the term ‘inconclusive’ out for conclusions with a probability of 34-66% and suggested the term ‘quite possible’ (e-mail 0967041809). And what would you think of ‘relaxing the criteria determining what agreement means would yield a greater agreement’ (e-mail 0968705882). OK, this was informal talk, and they did not publish it, but it was a serious proposal.
    There are many examples of attempts to prevent the publication of other views. You only need to visit climataudit.org to find many examples. Several of Steve McIntyres stories are confirmed by the Climategate e-mails.
  • JMurphy wrote:

    "Can I just say that this is sad, predictable, incomprehensible, bemusing, snide, cheaply insulting, baiting, etc., etc., conspiracy-theory distraction from the (indeed, any) subject in hand."

    The Yooper wrote:

    "However, the other hand is more compelling: we see in one comment the underlying thought process and motivations driving KL. So I say it would be more instructive to others, and serve as a lasting testimonial, if retained. KL and BP have torpedoed what cred they had with their recent comments"

    dhogaza at 07:36 AM on 11 November, 2010
    Ken Lambert spews:.....

    Well ladies and gentlemen - a KL spray would be more like it. I must admit to a little boredom with the SS threads in recent times and the paucity of some meaty new information - particularly on OHC and the WV-CO2 interaction and feedbacks - critical to the whole CO2GHG warming theory.

    The pattern is emerging of SS running recycled data using repackaged charts and argument which have already attracted some excellent discussion and some serious debunking - particularly on the part of BP who no doubt gets it wrong on occasion but has produced some potent rebuttals which I have studied and found have real merit.

    I am glad that Yooper thinks that BP and I have some 'cred' on the technical side - but one stray political comment and KL is in 'deep disgrace'.

    What was that joke about Joe the Bridgebuilder - "but suck just one ****!!"

    Well we are not allowed to talk about Climategate, nor some of the issues of extreme green politics which defy common sense or reason - but let me say that linking of skeptics with the smear of big tobacco and big oil is just as offensive for those such as myself who have no such connection in any way whatsoever.

    Finally let me say this: If a part time amateur (with applied science but no climate science training) like me can establish some 'cred' in finding real contradictions and weaknesses in the paid work of 'thousands of scientists' on a website dedicated to debunking climate skeptics in full view of anyone on the planet who wants to contribute - then that says lots about the weaknesses and uncertainties and dare I say 'quality' of that science.

    John Cook is right - real experts don't know everything.
  • Jmurphy, ref. comment #210, I suspect that you aren’t aware of a relevant statement by a senior executive of the Met. Office during the first of the UK’s whitewash enquiries into the Climategate scandal. The question put by a member of the Science and Technology Select Committee was “Is there a problem with scientific software? We have had emails from Professor Darrel Ince and from Professor Les Hatton saying that there are severe problems with scientific software. Do you think that is a general problem in UK or world science?”. Met Office Chief Scientist Professor Julia Slingo (Note 1) said “At least for the UK the codes that underpin our climate change projections are the same codes that we use to make our daily weather forecasts, so we test those codes twice a day for robustness”(Note 2). So the “codes” used for UK weather forecasting are the same as those used for global climate projections - shortly after that that the Met. Office discontinued its long-range forecasts because they were so useless. (The rest of that testimony is worth reading.)

    It is worthwhile listening to what Professor John Beddington had to say in January (Note 3), which included the gross understatement “..that scientists had perhaps not been as good at communicating the value of uncertainty to the general public .. ”. Professor Barry Brook of Adelaide University and scientific advisor to the Australian Government on climate change was less reticent when saying over a year ago (Note 4) “There are a lot of uncertainties in science, and it is indeed likely that the current consensus on some points of climate science is wrong, or at least sufficiently uncertain that we don’t know anything much useful about processes or drivers”. Brook is a staunch supporter of The (significant human-made global climate change) Hypothesis so then goes on to try to imply that 95% of the science is understood.

    As Boddington said in January (Note 5) “I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper scepticism. Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed”.

    Phil (Scadden), ref. comment #212, I am not enquiring here into the validity the design of the software or the validity of the underlying science of those climate models. What I am questioning is the extent to which the models have been validated and their starting parameters are “tweaked” and “re-tweaked” before a run produces an output that resembles reality. I do not have enormous confidence that those with a vested interest in convincing others that their research findings or software development skills produce useful models will present an unbiased opinion on the validity of any model forecasts. There are plenty examples in areas where the underlying sciences are much better understood than are those involved in unravelling the complexities of global climate processes and drivers where vested interest has resulted in false claims. There is no good reason to think that things are different for climate forecasting.

    Let’s not overlook the fact that scientists and software engineers not saints but humans with human failings. As the late Stephen Schneider said

    Your opinion of me is irrelevant and is bound to differ from mine. You are a staunch supporter of The (significant human-made global climate change) Hypothesis whereas I am a sceptic.

    Ref. comments #41/48 & 50 on the “Rebutting skeptic arguments in a single line” thread, you (and others here) ought to be aware by now that the IPCC shares Dr. Gray’s opinion that those models do not provide predictions of future global climates, merely projections (based upon that unsound science). If the global mean temperature estimates produced by the Hadley Centre etc. are to be trusted (“lies, damned lies and statistics”) we may have already had over 10 years of “flat or negative temperatures while GHGs rise” so may not have much longer to wait in order to “clearly invalidate AGW”. In your humble opinion “Hansen 1988 did very well for a model so primitive.”. In mine he hit lucky to get closeish with one of his scenarios for 10 years then failed miserably after that.

    actually (thoughtfull?). does that answer your questions in comment #195?

    NOTES:
    1) see http://www.nerc.ac.uk/about/work/boards/council/biographies.asp
    2) see http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387b/38724.htm
    3) see http://www.actoncopenhagen.decc.gov.uk/en/ambition/achievements/february/john-beddington-audio
    4) see http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/04/23/ian-plimer-heaven-and-earth/
    5) see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7003622.ece

    That’s enough for now. I’ll respond to others soon.

    Best regards, Pete Ridley
  • JMurphy, the thread Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy is relevant to your comment.
  • Jmurphy, you do what supporters of The (significant human-made global climate change) Hypothesis often do, distort what is said.

    What I said about the first UK whitewash hearing into Climategate and the Met. Office’s decision to stop its long-rage forecasts was “ .. shortly after that that the Met. Office discontinued its long-range forecasts because they were so useless .. ”. That is not the same thing as saying that the decision by the Met Office was a consequence of what was said at the hearing. That should remove one area of assumed disagreement between us. Others, such as the whitewashes, the validity of The Hypothesis and your belief that “code written to represent the Physical qualities of the make-up of potential weather would .. be useful not only for short-term forecasts but also as a basis for long-term climate forecasts”, will be much more difficult to clear up.

    Best regards, Pete Ridley
  • JMurphy--that's interesting.

    Does anyone ever mention what Gazprom may be getting up to? There is just NO WAY that Gazprom would NOT be trying to influence the global warming debate. (See example below) They do double duty for their government's influence activities. They own lots of media. They have lots of KGB guys who work for them, and not because KGB guys know how to drill oil. Gazprom's companies are all sort of hidden behind shell companies.

    The Cato Insitute's Andrei Illarionov used to be a Putin adviser and was also connected with Chernomyrdin--who ran the gas monopoly. Illarionov writes on global warming and says it's no big deal. Andrei Illarionov also has an "Institute for Economic Analysis" in Russia. He writes about global warming. Lots of graphs. The story goes that Illarionov had a falling out with Putin so he came over to the Cato Insitute. I think all that Libertarian propaganda is because these fossil fuel companies don't want any rules.

    When Climategate happened the Russian Greenpeace quoted a Russian scientist named Sergei Kirpotin who studies the thawing permafrost and the methane. The Russian media didn't say one thing about him. Kirpotin said that Climategate was done "on orders" and was a "provocation" engineered so people would not believe in global warming and to damage Copenhagen.

    If you look at my link, you can see the Russian skeptical scientist works for Gazprom.

    http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/01/tomsk-scientist-sergei-kirpotin-has-few.html
  • John and readers,

    Kate also has an excellent summary here.


    Stephen Leahy,

    Do you plan to write something about the latest shenanigans of Mr. Harper?
  • John Cook - original post.

    "At a time when Greenland is losing around 9,000 tonnes of ice every second — all of which contributes to sea level rises – it is time to hold accountable those who invert common standards of science, decency, and ethics in pursuit of their agenda to delay action on climate change."

    A piece of emotional claptrap John.

    You should mention that 90% of the planets's ice is in Antarctica - and there is serious debate about the proportions of mass or thermal components of Sea Level Rise.

    The reason you are so intent on attacking 'deniers' must be that AGW proponents are losing public support - they are losing the debate.

    In Australia, Tim Flannery was the popular face of AGW - and Tim just exaggerated too much. Rivers would never run again etc etc.. His credibility is now damaged goods.

    But the main tipping points where AGW started losing the public debate were Climategate and Copenhagen.

    Climategate needed only one phrase - 'hide the decline'.

    Copenhagen was a circus of green looney tunes and ratbags -who the Chinese took one look at and said NO, NO, NO - We are not hitching our future to this lot and the drop-in US President - nor that vain little prat Rudd.

    You need to accept that there are still great uncertainties in AGW science - and the latest Hansen is a revelation that AGW might not be following the script.
  • John P has placed his exact same comment on The Blackboard as comment 30360 of Lucia's GISS December Anomaly update. http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/giss-december-anonaly-0-59c-down-from-0-68c/#comments

    John from Mn submitted the exact same comment to Watts Up With That http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/15/uah-satellite-data-has-record-warmest-day-for-january/ post on UAH trends.

    John also placed the exact same comment on The Air Vent http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/1934-1998-gissmatic/

    Here's another: http://joannenova.com.au/2010/01/climategate-arrives-in-the-us/


    John P doesn't care about the topic, he justs repeats himself.

    Has anyone found John P or John from Mn repeats? Let's see how many we can find.
  • John's Original Post and Marco:

    "The evidence for human caused global warming is as solid as ever."

    Why don't we ask Dr Trenberth a lead author and recognized expert on the forcings and energy balances:

    This excerpt from the NP and Climategate emails:

    Quote:

    The 2001 Synthesis Report looked authoritative in its carbon and temperature outlooks. But one of the “lead authors” was Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

    Eight years later, Mr. Trenberth shows up in the emails. On Oct. 14, 2009, he wrote to Tom Wigley: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

    In other words, one of the lead authors of the 100-year climate forecasting exercise says there’s something wrong with the models —or the data.

    End Quote

    Ref: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/18/terence-corcoran-a-2-000-page-epic-of-science-and-skepticism-part-1.aspx#ixzz15pLvdnlg

    Before you all scream 'out of context' - please consider in what context such an opinion of a leading expert in this field and lead IPCC author would support the proposition that "The evidence for human caused global warming is as solid as ever."
  • John,

    How can this type of reasoning be broadly disseminated out to the general public, as a counter to the viral spreading of "climategate". In general those who read this blog need no convincing but the information serves to deepen our conviction, thanks for all you do. There is a desperate need to reach out beyond the bounds of this site and others that support the science, beyond a preaching to the choir, as public understanding and support for mitigation declines.
  • John,

    I beg to differ with you. I have observed and posted on WUWT and one of my first experiences was to have a poster say that if I could not correctly spell the name of another poster (Anna vs Ana) then I wasn't likely to have any understanding on the subject matter.

    While this was the worse example, there were plenty others who were nasty in proportion to the civil ones.

    Also the major difference between the rudeness of "Skeptic" vs "AGW's" can be very easily spotted on the commentary section of any site that has an article on GW or even You Tube.

    In other sites or in You Tube, whenever a video is posted on either side of the issue, the "Skeptics" come out in full force, overwhelming the number on "AGW's". And the majority of them range from rude to extremely rude.

    Take a look John, and you'll find that there is NO EQUIVALENCY whatsoever.

    By the way, MSNBC is taking a poll of people asking for their opinion on whether the British Panel's exoneration of scientists on "Climate Gate". Anthony Watts is on the warpath asking his readers to vote. Our side has been steadily slipping. From 42% in our favor and 58% against, yesterday to 39.1%<60.9% as of this moment.

    Some of you may want to put in your two cents worth. Sorry for the long link.

    http://msnbc.newsvine.com/_question/2010/07/07/4630892-are-you-satisfied-with-the-british-panels-conclusion-that-while-climategate-scientists-were-not-always-forthcoming-their-science-was-sound?pc=20&sp;=180&threadId;=1004983&commentId;=15443603#c15443603
  • John, I have some more suggestions about your list of arguments. I realize the list is not entirely your own anymore, so some of the things I point out may be other people’s additions that have slipped under the radar. (That’s the danger of allowing anybody to contribute!)

    In particular, somebody has added an argument with the rather unwieldy title “CO2 emissions/absortion rates from nature are largely unprecise. More unprecise than accounted emissions by humans. We can't be sure if it is all an accounting error.” Maybe this should be shortened to a single sentence like the other arguments? Also, “absortion” should be spelled “absorption” and “unprecise” should be “imprecise”.

    “Kilimanjaro snow does not melt because of warming” is also a bit unclear. Does it mean that Kilimanjaro snow *isn’t* melting because of warming (an argument that would belong under “Mt Kilimanjaro’s ice loss is due to land use”), or Kilimanjaro snow *wouldn’t* melt if it was warming (which would belong under “It’s not bad”)? Come to think of it, “Glacier melt is natural” itself doesn’t really belong under “Climate’s changed before” either.

    It seems to me that “Gulf Stream is stable” and “Conveyor belt won’t stop” are essentially the same argument – unless one is meant to refer to ocean conveyor belts generally and the other to the North Atlantic specifically, but that isn’t clear from the articles submitted. Also, I’m not sure what the difference is between “CO2 effect is saturated” and “Saturated Greenhouse Effect”. Does the latter mean that all greenhouse gases are saturated, not just CO2?

    I think “Freedom of Information requests were ignored” belongs under “Climategate”. And maybe “Corals survived during past periods of high CO2” should go under “It’s not bad”. (Incidentally, do you realise the “It’s not bad” link on the taxonomy page goes to an error message?) I also noticed you’ve separated the last category of arguments into two topics, “It’s too late” and “It’s too hard”. I suggest that “CO2 limits will hurt the poor”, “Famine and disease are a higher priority”, and “CO2 limits take money away from real threats” all belong in the “It’s too hard” category.
  • John, we defer to experts in the complex sciences underpinning heart surgery or aerodynamics because they have a track record of successful analysis, prediction and application. This has not been achieved by scientists trying to predict future climates because the processes and drivers of global climates are horrendously complex (verging on the chaotic) and are presently very poorly understood. Reliable analysis and prediction of global climates is impossible due to the significant scientific uncertainties. All that is possible at present is speculation about what might happen using fictitious scenarios and unproven hypotheses.

    As you say, “Scientific authority should not be confused with the authority of parents, or teachers, bosses or politicians”. Unfortunately the authority of the scientists involved in researching those poorly understood processes and drivers of global climates has been thoroughly undermined by politics. That is why lay people are becoming increasingly suspicious of the claim that our use of fossil fuels is driving global climates towards catastrophe.

    Climategate and the subsequent IPCC-gates have started an avalanche of scepticism among lay people around the globe.

    Best regards, Pete Ridley
  • johnd @82,

    Let me quote the great British statistician D.R.Cox, who is still writing and teaching in his 90s:

    The first question a statistician asks is "How was these data gathered?".

    Indeed, the Royal Statistical Society made a submission to the House of Commons enquiry on "Climategate" with some criticisms of the CRU methodology. It was all very fine, but did not make much difference - the correct methodologies gave the same results.

    Of course, the Daily Mail, a notorious denialist publication, trumpeted "Report criticises faulty methods of climate scientists!", leaving the key facts to the lower paragraphs. That is a good example of what the letter is warning about.

    From my own observation (as another statistician), the physicists have been teh key players in working out the physical models of how CO2 affects climate. The statisticians are useful adjuncts in getting the data analyses correct.
  • Jon Stewart is covering BEST on the the 10/26 Daily Show -- "Global warming is real: the debunking of ClimateGate got a total of 24 seconds of news coverage."
  • Joshua#16: "she believes "Climategate" created a "crises""

    That's a great observation, although it strikes me as an extreme overreaction to events. Crisis of confidence, perhaps; crisis in the observation and understanding of the science, no.

    I have to wonder how the 'denizens' would react to the conclusions of the 2006 paper. Conflict with their core beliefs (greenhouse warming is real? Does not compute!) is not tolerated.
  • Just a rhetorical question here:

    Why do "skeptics" always choose the temperature data most compromised by "climategate" over the NOAA/NASA/RSS/UAH data to support their claim that the Earth has been cooling over the past decade?

    Like I said, a rhetorical question.
  • Just in case anyone is interested (and sees this !), there was another good BBC programme on today, to do with Climate Change, the difference between what the public may believe and what the science says, and the role of 'Climategate'.

    It was a HORIZON programme called 'Science under attack' and is available on iPlayer until Sunday 30 Jan 11.
    (Don't know if it will work for those outside the UK but hopefully you'll be able to find it on YouTube or something. Definitely worth watching, for what could be the start of the scientific fightback...and for seeing James Delingpole make a fool of himself. As usual)
  • Just thought I'd pop in to remind skeptical lurkers/participants here that the entire raw station data-set which forms the basis of CRUTEM4 was released to the public nearly 9 months ago.

    You can download the entire ball of wax right here.

    Remember -- this is the data-set that skeptics wanted so badly that they buried the CRU with FOI demands about 3 years ago. This is the data-set that was the focus of so much of the "climategate" fuss.

    Now, given that the skeptical community has had this entire data-set in their hot little hands for nearly 9 months, the obvious question to ask is, "So, what have they done with it?".

    It would seem to me that if skeptics were really interested in performing independent verifications of the CRU's work (as opposed to abusing FOI laws to conduct a dishonarable campaign of harrassment), they would have put something out by now.

    Remember that the Muir Russell Commission was able to write its own software and compute its own global-average temperature results from the raw station data in about two days (using nothing more than publicly-available information about the CRU's processing techniques).

    So here we are, nearly 9 months after the data-set that skeptics had been demanding was released to them ... and AFAICT those skeptics have yet to publish their own analysis that either confirms the CRU's results or uncovers flaws in the CRU's methodology.

    What's taking those skeptics so long? They've had nearly *nine months* to perform a few days' worth of real work.
  • Karl_from_Wylie

    Bias.

    Increase in Carbon dioxide does not assure Global Warming. There are more variables to the equation.


    It is noted that you provided not one shred of evidence for your assertion.

    You overlooked this:

    Of course, this is a simplified explanation of global warming, ...


    Which rather demolishes the entire point of your post. Perhaps you should learn to read more carefully.
    Skeptical Science has debunked numerous claims made by a well funded denial industry.

    Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science

    Koch Industries Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine

    Crescendo to Climategate Cacophony Behind the 2006 Wegman Report and Two Decades of Climate Anti-Science - John R. Mashey
  • Ken Lambert, if you read the home page of this site you'll notice that Skeptical Science is here in large part due to the odd phenomena of so-called climate change skepticism itself; the properties of "climate skeptics" are a topic of investigation and discussion. Posts focusing on such specimens as Monckton are entirely in keeping with the mission of the site.

    Regarding threads reaching stalemates, I'd offer that we'd like better precision for many measurements while at the same time noting that such precision and harmony as we do have among various data is quite sufficient to inform us that we are looking at a significant risk of and from climate change.

    Your final points about public opinion and money are spot-on for this site.

    "Climategate" was a synthetic and hollow matter, as confirmed by multiple investigations, but is turning out to be an interesting topic for social science researchers and thus an appealing topic for those who perceive "climate skeptics" as an intriguing subject of perusal. Preliminary results seem to show that the dominant and more durable effect of "climategate" has been to harden existing beliefs among so-called climate skeptics. The same research indicates that surprisingly few persons were actually aware of the matter at all, with awareness being concentrated among those already following the subject of climate change. Acceptance of "climategate" as a valid matter of concern is strongly correlated with ideology. Research also indicates that fortuitous timing between "climategate" and heavy snowfall in parts of the U.S. and Europe last winter exaggerated the impact of the matter but this effect is not expected to be durable.

    Your connection between money, mitigation, uncertainty and fear of loss is whether by coincidence or not exactly as though it had been taken from the playbook of the political consultant Luntz in his memorandum of a few years ago to the GOP.
  • Ken Lambert:

    Another apologia intended to rationalize the clear meaning of 'hide the decline'. It means what it says.

    A lot of "skeptics" seem to feel that assertion is the same thing as evidence. It isn't. In fact, the statement in question "means what it says" within a context and tradition you refuse to understand, let alone acknowledge, because doing so would rob you of the flimsy weapon you're waving around.

    Clinging to this absurd narrative in 2010 requires logical contortions, wishful thinking and misinterpretations of data that go far beyond anything in the stolen, cherrypicked Climategate e-mails.

    It's also funny how "skeptics" always seem to ignore the Nature part of this "trick." Presenting one's methodology clearly in the pages of the world's foremost science journal seems like a pretty careless way to run a global conspiracy.

    As I see it, beating the dead horse of Climategate is simply an attempt to "hide the decline" in respectable counterarguments against AGW. It's a more aggressive, and sillier, way of saying "I got nothin'."
  • Ken wrote: "Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" was found unfit for use as an educational tool..."

    More fiction.

    An Inconvenient Truth continues to be distributed in the UK as educational material. The judge in the Dimmock case (which you presumably refer to) found that it was "substantially founded upon scientific research and fact" and thus allowed for use in schools. The judge did require that a 'guidance' document accompany showing of the film to inform students that a few parts of the film expressed views which were still disputed by some skeptical scientists.

    Seriously, don't you ever get tired of being lied to?

    As to Williams... you now argue that he has a closed mind because he didn't read the 'Climategate' letters. That's arguable... but very different from your assertion that he (among others) is guilty of outrageous claims and distortions. For which you have still provided no examples that are not demonstrably false.
  • Ken, as I noted, you are apparently rather ignorant on human nature. Scientists can get pretty fed up with continuous attempts to harass them, and taking everything they say out of context. If anything, climategate is very obvious evidence of taking things out of context by the 'dissidents'. McIntyre went as far as removing the middle part of an e-mail which completely destroyed his argument, put it back when called out by Deepclimate but kept his claim, but hardly any of his accolytes called him out on his narrative being wrong.

    Regarding human nature: when humans are very frustrated, they sometimes come with rash remarks, which they do not necessarily have thought through. It's not a matter of wishing to hide bad things, it's a matter of being frustrated with one harassing request after the other. Jones is just one of those scientists who wants to be left alone, and not continuously be accused of dishonesty, cooking the books, and whatnot.
  • KL #144, if I did that, you'd just move the goalposts, as The Skeptical Chymist shows in #146. We arrived at OHC via the debunking of your Trenberth comment, which followed the gish gallop and associated debunking through the previous >100 posts. Will you accept you were wrong about Trenberth's position on whether "human caused global warming is as solid as ever"?

    The 'meat and potatoes' of this particular thread is explained by the OP in two emboldened statements - the first is above, and the second is "Has 'Climategate' changed our scientific understanding of global warming?" The ongoing challenge of improving OHC measurements, including Purkey and Johnson's discovery of some of the 'missing heat', and more relevant on the other threads TSC linked to, does not affect either statement substantially. Many independent reviews confirm these points, which is to say that there are legitimate areas of research and debate, but that we are the cause of recent warming and that it is ongoing is as certain as it was 13 months ago (in fact, more certain, as further papers and data have confirmed trends and earlier findings).
  • KL #8

    "The fact that three quick fire threads have been run on Climatgate on this excellent blog in the last few days is an indication that Climategate (fairly or not) has does serious damage to the cause of AGW activism."

    Nope. I seem to recall at the time (one year ago), that so-called sceptics were crowing about what an enormous deal this was, being evidence of fraud etc. These days, we see that you're making the same tired claims, but are tacitly admitting that your claims are without substance.

    Worth examining as a case study of the psychology of delusion from the so-called climate sceptic if you ask me.
  • KL @ #82: "The argument then goes - if one bit of this 'science' is dodgy - how do we know that the rest is rock solid - it is called credibility - and that is what all the Climategate fuss is about."

    Except that is not a logical argument in any way, shape or form--and that's even if we assume for the sake of this post that the "Nature trick" does cast doubt on the reliability of tree-ring proxies. Baby, bath water, and all that.
  • KL: "clear attempts at suppression and manipulation of dissenting views of well qualified scientists".

    What a crock! This refers to the e-mails outrage at the pathetic Soon and Baliunas piece that was sneaked into a minor journal through Legates' connections. The entire review board of the journal later resigned in protest (even Von Storch), but I'm sure you'll present that as being also part of the conspiracy to silence "dissenting views." Whatever.

    There is nothing in the so-called climate-gate. Zilch. 3 independent investigations have concluded as much. Of course, Steven Mosher had to write a book on it and advertise it on WUWT, as further proof that he's less and less interested in science and more into spreading FUD. Looks like you're here to be his spokesperson. That doesn't give any more substance to the nonsense.

    The skeptic whining about being silenced is sad joke, considering how nothing of any consequence was ever done to silence even the worst buffoons spewing nonsense all over the media. On the other hand, when contrarians want to silence climate scientists, they go to the real means of doing so, like the gag order on Hansen or the DA attack on Mann. This is real stuff, unlike the belly aching on "climategate."

    Prof Mandia is entirely right. This is not like the VA DA attempt at shutting off Mann for no reason. Monckton misled members of Congress and deliberately misrepresented information while under oath. He should be called on it.
  • KR (#51)
    I looked at that link you sent. Pretty weird stuff. Here's one for you. At the top of this thread you will find a link to http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.com (The Copenhagen Diagnosis) which is also weird stuff.

    The Copenhagen Diagnosis repeats most of the "Catastrophe de Jour" scenarios that have created the IPCC's credibility gap. Climategate (Hockey Sticks, Figs. 20 & 21), Glaciergate, Amazongate, "Tipping Points" and much more.

    The trouble with "Crying Wolf" is that one day you will be right; there will be a real catastrophe heading our way but nobody will listen.

    The AGW movement is in big trouble because of the over reaching and exaggeration of the IPCC. It is no use blaming others; most of your wounds are self inflicted.
  • Looking forward to the Android app.

    The peer reviewed feature is great, though I notice that the classification isn't 100%. For instance, one of the 'peer reviewed pro-AGW' items is a BBC blogger sounding off about how the 'evils of Climategate' are being whitewashed.

    On the flags, I'd suggest translating the tooltips into the relevant languages. "View skeptic arguments in Portugese" isn't much help to someone who doesn't speak English and might not recognize the flag of Portugal, but speaks the language... like say, most of Brazil.
  • Looks like deniers are getting desperate. Is it because of recent wikileaked cables showing the US and China collaborated to make sure Copenhagen would be a failure?

    One thing's for sure: Cablegate has completely eclipsed Climategate, even as far as climate is concerned. To deniers and politically-motivated skeptics, I say: welcome to 2011. You've got your work cut out for you. :-)

    As far as nuclear goes, I can understand why some in the US would support China building more NPP. After all, that almost certainly means more money for Westinghouse.
  • Lord Monckton has appeared more than once on Russia Today. This government-owned TV channel belongs to the Russian government's press agency RIA Novosti and used to feature Western denialists, but on March 17, the famous climate scientists Michael Mann was interviewed.

    RT was very gracious to Dr. Mann, but they seem to have amnesia, because they blamed denialism on the American politicians and the Heartland and did not take responsibility for also spreading the Climategate lies.

    RT criticized the Heartland, but the Heartland has cited RIA Novosti's attacks on the climate scientists.

    Heartland and other denialists deserve our contempt, but the Russian government's press agencies were also spreading the same lies. Now the line has changed: The Heartland, Monckton, and others are tossed under the bus. Still, RT and its parent RIA Novosti were spreading the same propaganda as the Western denialists.

    Shouldn't the leaders of Russia also be held to account?
    I think if the Russians are having Dr. Mann on TV, they should also apologize for the lies they told about the climate scientists. I don't know if the Russian leaders will do this or not, but I think they are the leaders of a superpower and will do this before Inhofe or Cuccinelli apologize.

    Here are the details.

    http://www.legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2012/03/climate-change-scientist-michael-mann.html
  • Lord Monckton is on Russia Today (RT) TV.

    Just google "Russia Today" Monckton.
    Lord Monckton Disscusses ClimateGate On Russia Today Part 1 of 2
    http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=HUCwrlaRrD8

    Lord Monckton Disscusses ClimateGate On Russia Today 2 of 2

    http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=x18p6Hb_rXU&feature;=related

    Monckton claims that Russia is a democracy and UK isn't.

    Democracy in Modern Russia is 20 Times More Democratic Than British democracy - Lord Monckton

    http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=2-dDr-jzC8o&feature;=related
  • Many thanks, most illuminating.

    Heartland are also good enough to post their very revealing first quarter 2012 "Quarterly Performance Report" at their site, how long they leave it there seems like an open question. In case they do feel sufficiently embarrassed to remove it, here's some edited highlights, which I hope are of interest here.

    pp. 2-3 "Four Projects on Global Warming"
    "Researchers at The Heartland Institute recognized, earlier than most, that scientific uncertainty about the true causes and consequences of climate change makes costly efforts to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions unnecessary. In 2012 we are pursuing four projects on global warming.

    "The first is sponsoring and promoting the work of the Nongovernmental Interna- tional Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an international network of scientists who write and speak out on climate change. With Heartland’s support, this team of scientists produced Climate Change Reconsidered: 2009 Report of the NIPCC, and more recently Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report. Each volume is a comprehensive and authoritative rebuttal of the United Nations’ IPCC reports.

    "We are currently working on promoting these volumes and preparing for publication of a third volume for release in 2013.

    "The second project is creation of a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Many people lament the absence of educational material that isn’t alarmist or overtly political.

    "Late last year, we found a curriculum expert who is also an expert on the global warming controversy. We think he can finally break the code on getting sound science and ecoomics into classrooms.

    "The third global warming project is publication of a great new book by Rael Isaac, titled Roosters of the Apocalypse. Rael, a sociologist who has studied the origins and mo- tivation of apocalyptic movements, examines the global warming movement and finds it is rooted in irrational fears and beliefs that have no scientific justifications.

    "The fourth global warming project will change how weathermen report new temper- ature records, and in the process help wean some of them from the alarmist point of view. We are working to create a Web site that will access newly available temperature data from a set of high-quality temperature stations created by the National Aeronautics and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

    "Our new Web site will convert the data into easy-to-understand graphs that can be easily found and understood by weathermen and the general interested public. The result: fewer weathermen bamboozled into reporting fake temperature records, and one fewer tool in the toolbox of global warming alarmists.

    Hydraulic Fracturing

    "Hydraulic fracturing, popularly known as “fracking,” is a process whereby water, sand, and small amounts of chemicals (surfactants) are injected into oil and natural gas formations to make the energy resources easier to extract. Fracking has been used safely for more than 50 years.

    "Fracking became controversial in 2010 and 2011 because environmentalists, hoping to prevent the development of large reserves of oil and natural gas, invented charges that fracking poses environmental and safety risks.

    "Heartland has been one of the most outspoken defenders of fracking in the U.S. We expect to ramp up that effort and move to the front lines of the battle."

    James Taylor has a fair bit to say on Climategate 2 and Natural Gas too, but this from p.9 is of particular interest:

    "A Primer on Climate Realism"
    "Forbes magazine asked James to write an article for its print magazine explaining how sound science refutes global warming alarmism. His article was published in Forbes’ December 5 issue.

    "James explained, “The central issues in the global warming debate have little to do with whether or not temperatures have warmed during the past century. Nearly all scientists agree that temperatures have indeed warmed during the past 100 years, just as tempera- tures have warmed (and cooled) many times in previous centuries. The more important issues are whether current temperatures are abnormally warm in a longer-term perspective and whether present warming trends threaten disaster in the foreseeable future.”

    "James noted global temperatures for the vast majority of the past 10,000 years have been significantly warmer than today. He also documented how warmer temperatures always have benefited human welfare. “During the past century, as global temperatures
    have risen, forests have expanded, deserts have retreated, soil moisture has improved, crops have flourished and extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes have become less frequent,” he wrote.

    “Proponents of an imminent global warming crisis may present interesting theories about catastrophes that may occur if the Earth returns to the warmer temperatures that pre- dominated during most of the past 10,000 years, but such theories are strongly contradicted by thousands of years of real-world data and real-world climate observations. The Scientific Method dictates that real-world observations trump speculative theory, not the other way around,” James concluded.

    Why Forbes continues to give Taylor Op-Ed space to defend his organisation this week is beyond my comprehension, but at least they are good enough to let people respond in the comments. Perhaps SkS might like to seek a right of reply too?
  • Marcel (#127),
    Your remarks seem entirely reasonable.

    In my opinion it is not likely that much of the raw station data is irretrievably lost. In most cases there will be local files that could be used to rebuild the files at NASA, NOAA & CRU. For example you can be sure that Canada's Weather Office keeps copies of all the data it sends to NOAA.

    Rebuilding the raw data files is likely to require a large effort so would it be worthwhile?

    Most of the people on this blog seem to be arguing that the outcome would be the same with 6,000 stations as it is with 950. However, that assumes "facts not in evidence".

    To get back to the main subject of this thread, this discussion has clearly demonstrated all five of the "characteristics of scientific denialism". Unfortunately, the vast majority of the posts demonstrating these traits are from AGW Alarmists.

    The Alarmists display additional failings owing to their unwarranted certainty that has no place in science. Until Climategate they were often inclined to go as far as to claim "the science is settled" while personally attacking anyone who disagreed with them.

    Real scientists disagree over scientific hypotheses and then start looking for ways to test those hypotheses.
  • Marcus

    1) What FOX actually may put to air isn't even germane to this discussion. The BS #5 award in the above article was for a news editor advising his staff to offer balanced reporting. If the BS award had been for an example of actual biased reporting I wouldn't be typing this now.

    But while we're on the subject, what IS the "proof" of AGW anyway? Not GW, which has been observable, but "A"GW? Apart from some increasingly redundant computer models, where's the PROOF of AGW that all these "experts" are privy to?

    You refer to "climate scientists who can prove global warming is occurring and why it is occurring". Okay, hit me with the "proof" that it's caused by anthropogenic influences, and isn't just a continuation of a cycle that's existed since the last glacial.

    2) Again you avoid the issue. BS award #5 wasn't given on the strengths or weaknesses of the so-called "experts" from either side. It was awarded to a news editor who called on his staff to acknowledge there were, in fact, "sides" to the debate at all. See 1) above.

    3) Actually, "trends" in climate study are usually expressed in 30 year periods. In fact, many climate graphs and charts are measured in 30 year periods on the horizontal. There's a historical reason for that. It's because we recognised the 25 - 30 year warming - cooling "trend" a long time ago.

    4) No "white-wash" "investigation" of the climategate emails has even looked at the HARRY_READ_ME files. You know, the folder where we find a line of code that ensures the progam creates a "warming" trend even when random numbers are fed into it. A line of code appropriately labelled "fudge factor".

    No "evidence" that AGW "science" is "crap"?

    How about the "evidence" of observable fact?
    CO2 continues to increase in the atmosphere. Not only should it be getting hotter, it should be getting hotter quicker. It isn't. CO2 AGW theory disproved by observable fact.

    CO2 AGW theory requires a hotspot to have developed in the tropical troposphere. No observable hotspot. CO2 AGW theory disproved by observable fact.

    CO2 AGW theory requires that "winters warm faster than summers". This is actually stated in an article on this site as one of the "fingerprints" of AGW.

    And observable fact? Three progressively worsening, colder NH winters. CO2 AGW theory disproved by observable facts.

    But hey, why should anyone believe their own lying eyes when we've got all these "experts" to tell us what the real truth is?

    Like the latest "global warming causes global cooling" from Professor Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute.

    You couldn't make it up . . . .
  • Marcus #81

    There is a simpler explananion:

    After 1960, the tree ring data did not fit the rising thermometer record - so the tree ring 'decline was hidden' by truncation.

    Of course thermometer temperatures have been around since about 1860 (100 years prior to 1960) so why should the tree rings from 1860 to 1960 be included at all?

    Well clearly the reason is that they formed one of those 'multiple lines of evidence' right up until 1960 - when ...well they didn't any more so were simply discarded.

    All this shows is that tree rings were probably unreliable proxies - all through the time series and that they were used only to support the narrative of increasing warming up until they started to diverge.

    That is the dodgy part of the 'Nature' trick.

    The argument then goes - if one bit of this 'science' is dodgy - how do we know that the rest is rock solid - it is called credibility - and that is what all the Climategate fuss is about.
  • Might I suggest a prudent path of your own?

    1) stop publishing discredited data like the NASA GISS graphs
    2) stop following a path dictated by the ultra-rich as they fly about the world in private jets shilling for the implementation of policies that will make them still richer
    3) read this: Climategate U-turn - yes, Dr. Phil Jones himself admits to no warming in 15 years
    4) learn about Climategate - NOT the whitewash job performed by vested interests, but the actual emails and the vitally informative Climategate timeline. Only then can you claim you are more than a shill for vested interests yourself, or more pitifully, simply an unpaid dupe of the ultra-rich.
  • Moderator John:

    Response: "one man's heroic whistleblower is another man's thief"

    There is no evidence that the emails were leaked by a whistleblower. On the contrary, the current evidence available (which is scant because the investigation is ongoing) is that the emails were stolen from an external hacker. Combine this with the fact that the first public introduction of the Climategate emails was the Real Climate server being illegally hacked and the emails uploaded to their server - hardly the work of a heroic whistleblower. There were also attempted theft of other climate lab's servers at the same time. The coordinated nature of the Climategate smear campaign indicates this was an external job.

    OK John, hacking of a computer is a crime in some jurisdiction and it happens with things like Wikileaks - again it depends on what harm is done and to whom. Reputations - not human lives were put at grave risk.

    Had the hacked Climategate emails been found to be boring academic 'to and fro' with the occasional expletive all ending in happy agreement between the world's leading climate scientists - then they would have provided poor fodder for a deliberate smear campaign.

    The scientists involved could have pointed to their rectitude, honesty and professionalism, and to the perfidy of the hackers.

    Did not quite work out that way - and so the hackers crimes in exposure of these emails was on balance in the public interest.
  • More details on the peer review process in the particular case of McKitrick's complaints are in a new post on Deep Climate: McKitrick Gets It Wrong on IPCC. That's in addition to the comments on a different Deep Climate post that I linked to earlier.
  • More seriously, one thing I've noted about Climategate the squeakquel is how closed is the loop of information deniers allow themselves. FOIA 2011 links only to denier takes on the information, while there are almost no deniers bringing up emails in places where people know, or might try to find out the context. Despite all the noise they are trying to make, it is clear that they have no confidence in this release of emails as evidence of anything much.
  • More than anything else, the so-called "climategate" emails proved that climate-scientists can get very angry when journal papers containing freshman C-student errors are used as political weapons against them.
  • muoncounter #various

    Not being familiar with Dr Curry, I had a look at her publications. They seem far from the efforts of a fringe scientist.

    To say that her conversion from warmist to 'luke warmer' - to chronicler of the crisis of confidence in the 'standard theory of AGW' is somehow invalid is to miss the point.

    Climategate and Copehnhagen were gamechangers for the interested members of the lay public.

    Recent differences between Drs Trenberth and Hansen about the measured energy imbalances in recent years adds further uncertainty to the debate.

    "Motivated reasoning" is another term for 'advocacy science'. Cool rational apolitical thought and expression is the ideal to which a scientist should aspire - but such sights as Dr Hansen being arrested in a demo outside the White House would moreso read 'advocacy scientist' in the public mind and weaken the case for an overwhelming concensus which is required for effective action on climate change.
  • nasa has just admitted that its data is worse than cru's and ncdc's.

    so...

    'IF' cru's data is deleted, lost and manipulated etc and noaa/ncdc's are inaccurate (at best) as well...what does that make nasa's data? garbage in/garbage out from three sources.

    http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/30/nasa-data-worse-than-climategate-data/?test=latestnews

    does anyone know what group think is? it is a psychological condition where people in a 'group' think alike for a given situation. they slap each other on the back, give each other high 5's and tell each other how smart they are.

    this is a well studied condition that led to the bay of pigs/cuban missile crisis. seems like there is a lot of 'group think' going around here. naysayers are immediately refuted/deleted. there is no 'constructive' critical point/caounter point conversation. the only topic of conversation allowed is support for global warming.

    i praise those who continue top plow through with global warming belief. even president obama has stopped because of the constant and continual release of revelation that keeps pointing to horrific faulty data gathering and data manipulation. discuss all the 'results' you want. wrong data results in wrong results. the topic has been brought up time and time again...with full admittance from the centers themselves. heck,i can mathematically show how i can make a chicken from thin air if you let me 'interpret' data from a cereal box.

    remember, global warming is dead last on america's priority list of concerns for 2010.

    http://people-press.org/report/584/policy-priorities-2010
  • Ned @13,

    Yes, and that is just one of many examples of extremely poor scholarship by McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) and in the Wegman report. But there is a long and sordid history of incompetence by skeptics here.

    DeepClimate solidly refuted McKitrick's misinformation about the IPCC here.

    Gavin Schmidt soundly refuted McKitrick and Michaels (2007) here and McKitrick and Michaels (2004) is refuted here. The 2004 paper by M&M;, despite allegations of "gate keeping" by "skeptics" and despite the fact that it had been refuted was included in in AR4. In fact, there are also several papers by other scientists "skeptical" of AGW (or skpetical that the warming won't be bad) in AR4 , including papers by Douglass, Singer, Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, Pielke etc....and that is just one chapter in AR4.

    And as for "attacks" and spreading misinformation about climate scientists, McKitrick and McIntyre are more than happy to do that, see here for just one example.

    And McIntyre and McKitrick have close ties to the Barton and Wegman scandal too.

    The shoddy science and games repeatedly come from those claiming to be "skeptics". And look whose name keeps repeatedly coming up in that context....

    Here is a link to a list of papers by "skeptics" which have been debunked/refuted.
  • Ned (#112), you denigrate the IEA and anyone else with evidence that conflicts with your unshakable faith. If the IEA is wrong, their allegations will evaporate as soon as the UEA/CRU demonstrates they used and published the full data sets from Russia. Until the CRU does that you are "Whistling Dixie".

    Enjoy "Russia Today"
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElPunkm1zYQ

    In similar fashion you have completely missed the point about Tamino. If he has the full and truncated surface station data sets from NOAA, NASA or UEA he needs to prove it. Only folks who have not heard of Climategate accept the word of climate scientists or their statisticians "Ex Cathedra".

    I collect energetic photons for a living and the idea of discarding 80% of them before starting my analysis is beyond absurd. When "Climate Scientists" at NASA, NOAA, the UEA or the denizens of this blog fail to understand such a simple point, it is hard for me to take them seriously.

    You seem to believe that dropping stations makes no difference to the results of the analysis. You may be right but how you can prove it without comparing the full data to the truncated data?

    OK, so I am repeating myself but you keep refuting allegations I am not making.

    If it will help this discussion get out of a rut, I don't know whether the station drop out causes a warming bias or a cooling bias.

    There is some work (not peer reviewed) suggesting that the records have been biased in both directions:
    http://diggingintheclay.blogspot.com/2009/12/physically-unjustifiable-noaa-ghcn.html

    What I like about the above link is that it is specific enough to allow fact checking. Rather like post (#102) in this thread.
  • Ned (#14) and Archiesteel (#10): Yes, there is a pause in global warming since 1998. Showing a rising trend 1994-2010 or 1979-2010 does not falsify the claim, that there is no warming since 1998. Almost every trend from an earlier year than 1998 to 2010 shows a rising trend, but even the most hard core climate scientists admit the pause since 1998. Remember the remarks in the ClimateGate e-mails: "it's a travesty that we can't explain it".
  • Neither of Loehle's paper mention Hadley or CRU so I have no idea why it would be used. While GISS is mentioned for comparison in the correction. After Climategate and all the problem's surrounding CRU derived datasets I do not believe it is appropriate to use them until the raw data and methods are available for reproduction.
  • NewYorkJ(#28

    Thank you for that. I am neither a convinced sceptic nor alarmist - just an average guy trying to make sense of all this stuff as I have a professional interest in the application of this science. But it seems that one cannot be neutral in this debate - so at the moment I must err on the sceptic side as I am still asking questions and trying to keep an OPEN mind rather than trying to BROADEN it as John suggested rather tartly in his response to my post. I was thinking of Professor Ian Plimmer when I said eminent geologists, not the author of Geocraft who I would not know from Adam - apologies if I implied the latter. As a result of "Climategate" I am not sure whose information to trust - along with a great many other people on the edge of this issue I would imagine!
  • Nice piece.

    Question: Apparently I'm missing a "Climategate" inquiry. Dr. Washington mentioned that there have been eight inquiries, but I'm only aware of seven:

    - UK Parliament
    - Oxburgh
    - Russell
    - Penn State (two inquiries)
    - UK Government
    - US Commerce Dept

    What inquiry am I missing?
  • Not only the cartoon, but that title, "Nature did not Read the Hacked Emails" was right on the money.

    But I am surprised so few others have made the connection: the disastrous deluge of disinformation called 'climategate' is a perfect illustration of why Assange and all his puerile supporters are SO wrong when they glibly proclaim "sunshine is good". It is because people will read things out of context that some communications should be kept private. There is NOTHING shady about doing so.
  • Not to overburden you, Dr. Pielke, as I believe you have your hands full here in addressing the topics at hand, but what do you think of your colleague's work here? You are quoted in this document and I'm curious if you believe the conclusions on both the science and on the motivations of the scientists who manage this data are warranted. Do you believe this is constructive? Did your colleague send this to you for your review and what changes (if any) did you suggest?

    Surface Temperature Records: Policy-Driven Deception? by Josepth D'Aleo and Anthony Watts

    SPPI summary:

    "Authors veteran meteorologists Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts analyzed temperature records from all around the world for a major SPPI paper, Surface Temperature Records – Policy-driven Deception? The startling conclusion that we cannot tell whether there was any significant “global warming” at all in the 20th century is based on numerous astonishing examples of manipulation and exaggeration of the true level and rate of “global warming”.

    That is to say, leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century."

    The document's Summary for Policy Makers:

    "1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and uni-directionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.

    2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit signs of urban heat pollution and post measurement adjustments that render them unreliable for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.

    3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.

    4. Global terrestrial temperature data are compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once reported are no longer being used in data trend analyses."

    After the summary, the opening line begins "Recent revelations from the Climategate whistleblower emails"

    some other quotes:

    "These factors all lead to significant uncertainty and a tendency for over-estimation of century-scale temperature trends. A conclusion from all findings suggest that global data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or rankings or validate model forecasts. And, consequently, such surface data should be ignored for decision making."

    "Satellite data centers over recent years have not confirmed the persistent warmth of the surface networks in their assessments of monthly and yearly global temperature"

    "US STATE HEAT RECORDS SUGGEST RECENT DECADES ARE NOT THE WARMEST

    The 1930s were, by far, the hottest period for the timeframe."

    "NASA also constantly tampers with the data. John Goetz showed that 20% of the historical record was modified 16 times in the 2½ years ending in 2007. 1998 and 1934 ping pong regularly between first and second warmest year as the fiddling with old data continues."

    Do you find the above claims both robust and constructive?

    And as of now, you have not been able to support your contention of "ad hominen" statements by SkepticalScience on the topic of the UAH MSU temperature record. I therefore request that you retract it.
  • Oh, and just in case you are actually human, Neo, perhaps you'd like to read and move your comments to a more relevant thread.
  • On a preliminary skim of the "Petitions for Reconsideration", it is worth noting that all but one petition bases its argument on the so-called "Climategate scandal" (the exception being the Chamber of Commerce, which appears to be making an argument for industry self-regulation against EPA intervention).

    A quick perusal again suggests the petitioners' arguments are the same exaggerations and distortions that may sway Fox News viewers, but the EPA will need to make a considered and logically sound response. When that happens, I suspect it will be a very handy document for us all to read.
  • Original Post

    The fact that three quick fire threads have been run on Climatgate on this excellent blog in the last few days is an indication that Climategate (fairly or not) has does serious damage to the cause of AGW activism.

    Mass media always overshoots and exaggerates. The AGW alarmists had a very good run - here in Australia protagonists like Tim Flannery and our living science legend Robin Williams were talking catastrophe - the 10 year drought was definitely permanent climate change - rivers might never run again - Robin (100 metre sea level rise) Williams refused to even read the Climategate emails.

    Climategate swung the pendumum to the other extreme - the scientists (nearly all funded by you and me) were under the pump. Their socks rubbed harder on their sandals as they scrambled for clear air.

    Cries about criminal hackers funded by big oil, tobacco, rightist conspirators etc were heard. Panchuri cried 'voodoo science' as he denied ever knowing about objections to the preposterous 2035 claim.

    How things change in a year. The drought is broken over most of Australia - Tim Flannery has gone quiet and Robin Williams is airing a science journo who says that AGW scares have been exaggerated.

    Some balance might have been restored as the pendulum swung, and our hard working misunderstood scientist bretheren will take more care with their emails in future.
  • PC #72

    I respectfully disagree, and so did the report following the official investigation of Climategate, as it expressed dissapointment in the siege mentality.

    "If you don't want scientist to have a siege mentality, you shouldn't besiege them"

    They weren't under siege, they had all the power and misused it.

    Debate is required, and it is entirely inappropreate to react in a retalitory way, by black listing scientist and threatining publications that produce papers that don't support your conclusions. If the Soon-Baliunas paper is so scientificly flawed than address it in the debate, but they didn't stop there. Furthermore, the fact that they didn't even do Peer Review on several of the claims made in the IPCC report, clearly shows that these scientist suffer from group think and have a big blind spot.

    This is truley not justifiable behaviour, I am supprised you would defind it.

    As a result they by there actions completely corrupted the integrety of the
  • Pete Ridley at 00:17 AM on 24 July, 2010 said,
    "Climategate wasn’t spin, it was a scandal exposed by the leaked files and the enquiries held so far were simply whitewashes but they don’t lessen the scandal of the general public’s recognition of it."

    Besides the ironic spin in your comment, I wanted to point out that, as a member of the general public having no ties to the scientific community (every bit the layperson), what I recognize as scandalous is that private emails were obtained without permission (generally recognized as "stealing"), and released to the general public. I find criminal activity to be generally scandalous. I tend to find, based on personal experience, the view expressed by Doug Bostrom to be much more accurate. Those who were already in-the-know with climate science generally fall into two camps. Those who are self-described "skeptics" tend to look at the the "Climategate" non-controversy as evidence confirming beliefs they already held. Those on the other side of the fence vary a bit from seeing some perhaps inappropriate comments that have little bearing on the larger picture, to being irate at the crime committed and the ensuing death threats, etc leveled at those involved. Those with no knowledge (people who have never heard of this site, WUWT, RC, etc) of climate science have probably never heard of CRU. At least that's my experience. Perhaps there are some facts and figures to back up your "avalanche" comment and subsequent similar assertions. I will continue to wait for them.
  • Pete Ridley at 16:48 PM on 23 July, 2010 says,
    "Climategate and the subsequent IPCC-gates have started an avalanche of scepticism among lay people around the globe."

    That's a very strong statement. I'm skeptical, as you provide zero evidence to back up this extraordinary claim. Do you have extraordinary evidence which backs up your assertion that global skepticism amongst laypersons became an "avalanche" after the molehills you cited?


    @ Arkadiusz Semczyszak at 20:21 PM on 23 July, 2010
    I am with Philipe on this one. I simply don't comprehend the conclusion you have alluded to based on the out of context quote you cite. Could you elaborate?
  • Peter Ridley - but climategate stuff was spin. Just much easier to read cherry-picked quotes and say tut tut than it is to go to the hard work of getting the whole context.

    As to authority, you are agree you have to have skill to have authority but I fail to see how climate models have not earned that. Whether climate is chaotic is an open question - weather is - but regardless, we manage to navigate the solar system despite it being a chaotic system in the formal sense.

    "Reliable analysis and prediction of global climates is impossible due to the significant scientific uncertainties."
    This is an assertion that you must back with evidence. Sure, you cannot predict next new year's day temperature but that is not what climate is. Predicting a 30 year average within known limits for a given set of forcings is the what predicting climate is about.
  • Phil (Scadden) ref. comment #24, no, Climategate wasn’t spin, it was a scandal exposed by the leaked files and the enquiries held so far were simply whitewashes but they don’t lessen the scandal of the general public’s recognition of it. On th ematter of climatemodels, lets keep that to the debate on the “How reliable are climate models?” thread.

    Andrew (Adams), I don’t believe that I have ever claimed to have any authority with regards to global climate processes and drivers but if you think that I have then please show me where. I do have opinions on the subject after having read a lot about it and, like yourself, am at liberty to express them.

    Best regards, Pete Ridley
  • Phila, I take your point, but I certainly don't need you lecturing me on ethics. I raised legitimate issues that most of us were already considering and processing. I for one think the conversation is healthy, and prepares us for what is, for the short term at least, a political battle, and one that will be fought on perceptions as much as reality. If reality were the only issue - there would be no climate change "controversy".

    Don't undertake a circular firing squad rather than look at the issue and understand what the differences are, and where the similarities are. A small acknowledgement that yes, the whistle blown documents were taken against the will of the document owner (and then a smooth follow on tying it to the Vietnam war as you did) is much more powerful than sputtering that the this was done for the "good of mankind".

    Sadly, that will sound very familiar, as that is the self-serving malarkey offered by the deniers to cover stealing documents and cherry picking the contents.

    This whole episode confirms something that I formerly thought was a bit on the cynical side. Everything the deniers accuse of us doing has been merely projection for the exact things they are doing.

    If this gets even 1/2 the attention of climategate it will make a huge advance in the public's understanding of what is happening.
  • Philippe Chantreau #31

    There is plenty to Climategate. I can go find the exact emails and quote them here and risk being deleted as have two of my comments so far.

    The meanings are unambiguous - a clear attempt to suppress dissenting scientific views to present to the world a monolithic edifice of AGW concensus.

    It failed - the Chinese at Copenhagen said NO - a Liberal leader lost his job and an Australian Prime Minister was deposed by his own party after wimping the 'carbon pollution' issue because of its loss of voter confidence post the Copenhagen circus.
  • Phillipe,

    The reason that sceptics pick 98 is the same reason that Mr. Gore uses Mann's first hockey stick - for effect. Since 98, the temp rise has slowed quite a bit. Has it cooled? Of course not. That is why this decade may be the hottest that we know of, it is coming from a hugh peak. But the battle for minds continues on both sides of the debate. As I posted earlier, the majority of the people, in my opinion, are smart enough to get the basics of the science, most of us just don't have time to educate ourselves. So attention grabbers are the default argument. Simple.

    What intrigues me is that the pro side has not yet seen the real truth about the release of these "climategate" files and e-mails. The anti side is finally getting to debate the science, and it is very public, so more of the harried masses can now see what the pro side has contended to be the facts. Do you not see what a great oppurtunnity this can be? More people are Binging/Googling this subject (then even Tiger woods indescretions!). More people are looking for the truth. Finally, the pro side can climb out from obscurity and declare their side with logical and science backed facts! This website is a prime example. As more of my friends ask me about this, I always refer them here as the best place to get the pro side of the debate.

    Tell your leading lights to get off their talking points and celebrate the freedom that this leak has given them to finally explain the science to those who matter the most - Joe and Jane six pack!

    People don't want to be scared into doing the "right" thing, they want to walk with reason into doing the right thing. This leak is the best thing that has ever happened for CC! Dont miss the boat!

    Since I am not very good at pasting stuff, here is an attempt at getting some graphs from Greenland.


    http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/metadata/noaa-icecore-2475.html

    That is the info

    The graphs appear on WUWT in an article by J. Storrs Hall - here

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/

    more interesting material to help push us to a better understanding.
  • Pielke Sr., being 'constructive'

    "In conclusion, the EPA Endangerment findings is the culmination of a several year effort for a small group of climate scientists and others to use their positions as lead authors on the IPCC, CCSP and NRC reports to promote a political agenda."

    Here:

    "[T]he paper was received 11 August 2011 and accepted 29 August 2011. This is some type of record in my experiences as editor, and indicates that the paper was fast tracked. This is certainly unusual"

    Constructive is nice and the goal, but let's get it 'right' first.

    Here:

    "Of course, it is always pleasant to have documentation that these individuals are inappropriately using their senior positions to prejudice the scientific assessment and publication process, as I have reported on my weblog for several years. What is more important, however, is that the significance of this breach of the scientific method be recognized by the policymakers and other scientific colleagues who have requested climate assessments."
  • Poptech. If you use GISS it makes no difference whatsoever to the graph. CRU is something like 95% GISS and before climategate was much preferred by skeptics since it showed generally slightly less warming.

    The issue with MCA is not some as yet unexplained "natural variation" but whether the MCA is consistant with known forcings. Nothing to suggest it isnt and plenty to suggest you dont get current temperatures without including the CO2 forcing. If the global variation in MCA/LIA is stronger than current understanding it says sensitivity is higher and we are in more trouble.
  • Professor Phil Jones sums up (by “one sentence”), today, Climategate:

    “Hopefully they will remember me for the scientific papers I have written rather than the emails.”

    Errors must not be "intentionally manipulating" - in such an important case - simply should not be at all. I recall only the most important, what Professor Jones said earlier ( BBC. February, 2010):

    “He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics - a decision he says he regretted.”

    “... not cheated over the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process.”

    “He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made. But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period.”
    [Here I added: “Scientists agree that the past 40 years of tree-ring data are unreliable temperature proxies, and some argue that using them in older temperature reconstructions, as Jones has done, could understate past warm periods, including the MWP ... (Nature News)”]

    “He said many people had been made sceptical about climate change by the snow in the northern hemisphere - but they didn't realise that the satellite record from the University of Alabama in Huntsville showed it had been the warmest January since records began in 1979.[!??]”

    “His colleagues said that keeping a paper trail was not one of Professor Jones' strong points. Professor Jones told BBC News: "There is some truth in that.”

    “He strongly defended references in his emails to using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures.”

    “These phrases had been deliberately taken out of context and "spun" by sceptics keen to derail the Copenhagen climate conference, he said.”

    So much more or less significant errors, however, claims (not just a "trick"), as usual, Professor Jones (and “by” the professor - Sc. S.) was (to today) only to skeptics - guilty ! ...; and: “I [Jones] did wonder why they [scientists - colleagues] didn't go to the media and say the same things they were saying to me.”
  • Psychologists suggest that groups become gradually more polarised in their opinions as debates go on, so someone initially in the ‘don’t know’ category could be irreversibly convinced either way. Despite Kuhn’s theories, the peer review procedure, a dedication to the truth, and sometimes quite fierce competition amongst scientists should prevent ‘Warmists’ becoming over-partisan. However, the ‘Frosties’ have no such restrictions and will become more and more ideologically entrenched.

    There appears to be two sectors of the ‘Frosties’ camp. Those driven by political conviction and the less educated. Arguing with either camp appears to be a thankless task for different reasons. The former just insults, ridicules, or ignores you, whilst the latter are almost completely oblivious to evidence. Particularly lacking is the inability to distinguish trends from data, and the tendency to ignore anything other than what they physically perceive for themselves. These perceptions will be heavily distorted and magnified by the polarisation effects mentioned above.

    I have come to the view that about two thirds of the public either haven’t the time, conviction or the relevant education to participate in scientific debates, and a simple democratic vote will always be swayed by public relations manipulation and their own selfish interests, rather than hard evidence.

    A rather depressing picture emerges from public views of the ‘climategate’ enquiry. Despite the conclusions, this MSN poll suggests that 60% of people still believe the “scientists fabricated data to support their beliefs on man-made warming!” Hopefully more scientific polls will be yielding more hopeful figures, but this simply illustrates the magnitude of the problem.

    climate scientists poll
  • Re #15: I suggest you read a few more climate science papers, or if you live near a university that researches it, maybe pop in for a seminar if you have the time.

    It's my experience that uncertainties are generally explained very clearly. The Briffa 2000 paper from Quart. Sci. Reviews where the 'divergence problem' (the 'hide the decline' thing) is fully explained is a good example that's relevant to climategate.

    In terms of the most important part of climate research, calculating the climate sensitivity, there are entire papers devoted to the statistics of the uncertainty in it...
  • Re kdkd #16 Yes, there is broad consensus about the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. But there is no consensus about whether the feed backs by clouds and water vapour are positive or negative. And that makes the difference between almost no warming in the next century and 6 degrees of warming. If you like to call that a detail, that's up to you!
    Do you really think that the rest of my post is incorrect? Did the IAC make these recommendations unnecessarily?

    Re MarkR # 15. I have read many scientific papers and yes, they are sometimes honest about the uncertainties. But mostly these uncertainties are communicated in a very vague way. In the IPCC-reports the uncertainties are played down as far as possible: deeply hidden in the enormous texts, but not prominent in the summaries.

    By the way: it seems, that the wistle blower who leaked the Climategate documents is still unknown. This is a travesty! He or she should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Price!
  • Re: #14

    I've been reading Judith's blog quite a bit lately - and from what I've seen, her change in perspective is at least correlated to her interpretation of "Climategate."

    Judith has indicated that she believes "Climategate" created a "crises" in climate science - in the view of the public in general (although, interestingly, from what I've seen has yet to quantify the data that underlies her certainty about the impact of "Climategate"). My interpretation is that her view of a larger reaction to "Climategate" is more a projection (of her own reaction) - as she has stated often that "Climategate" deeply affected her own approach to the "climate community."

    I am sympathetic to Judith's concerns about the impact of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias in the debate about climate change; those basic psychological phenomena are fundamental attributes of the reasoning of people (scientists or otherwise) engaged in debate about controversial topics. Unfortunately, from what I've seen, ironically Judith fails to consistently apply similar scrutiny to her own reasoning processes, the reasoning of her "denizens," or the reasoning of other players in the "skeptical" blogosphere.

    Judith was concerned about phenomena such as "motivated reasoning" both before and after "Climategate" (even if the terminology she used to describe those phenomena evolved over time). I think that the dramatic shift in her own conclusions about the science of climate change, the related political context, and the reasoning process of people that she disagrees with, clearly lies in a shift in the "motivations” behind her own reasoning. I’m not suggesting anything particularly nefarious there; without knowing her personally it would be impossible for me to assess what lies at the root of her motivations. I think that it is “unscientific” for anyone to base conclusions about someones motivations based purely on speculation (although I will note that Judith seems unconcerned with the constant drone of many of her "denizens" attributing nefarious motivations to pretty much anyone who thinks that global warming is 90% likely to be anthropogenic). However, something fundamental changed with respect to what Judith is motivated to prove in her view of the climate change debate. As to whether “Climategate” or something else lies at the root of her shift in motivations may be a chicken/egg enigma – but perhaps the answer to that riddle could be found in “laying bare the underlying causal chain and potential approach to verification” evidenced in her reasoning process."
  • Re: NQuestofApollo (126)

    To summarize: You have taken issue with this statement I made earlier:
    "We have known about the GHG effect of CO2 for nearly two centuries - this is well-understood and not seriously questioned by any competent scientist anywhere. Google Tyndall, Arrhenius or Fourier sometime."
     Am I correct?

    Proceeding as if so; granted its been some 25 years since my college days, but it's my understanding that the GHE is basic physics, taught in high-schools these days. Please correct me if I'm wrong on that.

    It doesn't change the fact that the GHE is basic physics; numerous videos are available on Youtube attesting to and demonstrating that fact that you can replicate in your home by you, if so inclined.
    "It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid."
    ~ Albert Einstein
     I think I'll go out right now to ascertain how performable this is for the GHE; wish me luck...

    PS: To make the moderators life here a little easier, please keep in mind the topic of the thread you post questions on. For example, this thread is about "Are we heading into a new Ice Age?". For question other than the focus of this thread, such as your references to the Oregon Petition or Climategate, please use the search function in the upper left of each page to find a more appropriate thread to post those concerns on.

    Comments deemed off-topic will be deleted.

    Thanks in advance!

    The Yooper
  • Re: NQ/A

    (This is a reply to a comment NQ/A made on another thread, linked above)

    I presume you have been misinformed on this topic, else you would not have said this:
    "Daniel stated that GHG effect of CO2 is "not seriously questioned by any competent scientist anywhere". The only purpose in sending the link to the Petition Project was to show that over 31,000 scientists - surely some of whom must be "competent scientist" somewhere - provided a detailed explanation for their disagreement with AGW.

    I also took issue with his definition of "competent scientist" and provided links to support my position. It wasn't my intention to open a direct discussion on the petition project or climategate, but to offer those issues as causing legitimate doubt.
     Please read the main article that is the topic of this thread.

    My definition of "competent scientist" should be clear after reading the post. If not, then this should illuminate the remainder of the darkness remaining.

    The Yooper
  • Re: are these real? The fact that Carter, Taylor and also Watts (over at Bishop Hill) have addressed these without challenging their authenticity certainly suggests that at least their information in them is accurate.

    Also worth thinking about is this: All the documents except the "Confidential Memo" appear to been PDF's generated via the computer applications they were composed on. The "confidential memo," however, looks like it was scanned. There's a graininess to the document and shadows to the margin typical of when one photocopies or scans the document. This, to me (OK, I read too many spy novels) is that this was deleted from the computer it was composed on and someone scanned a paper copy. That suggests an inside job; you had to have a physical copy. OK, before I start sounding like one of the climategate conspirators I'll stop.
  • Re: cjshaker (81)

    Here's a link to the Muir Russell report. The relevant section is Pp 45-48. Links to the openly available datasets are therein, as well as the methodology used by the investigative team.

    In light of the multiple investigations (and exonerations in every instance) into this matter, your quote-mining of the WSJ piece you link (and others) reflects poorly on you.

    Here's the latest Skeptical Science post on this matter. Consider it a must-read for anyone maintaining to have an open mind.

    (-edit: fixed, thanks! -end edit-)

    The Yooper
  • Re: damorbel (70,71)

    (70) So, you're prepared to show, via evidenciary process, specifically how the WMO figure used led to the figure used in the TAR; and to specifically discuss those similarities in the figures themselves.

    After all, I'm sure you've done your homework to support your allegations of wrongdoing that would entail not only a 7th investigation into "climategate" but an additional investigation into the Muir Russell commission itself? Because that is what you're claiming, right?

    Or is it that all you have is a case for logic in absencia (and there's nothing saintly about that)?

    (71)

    This is what the Muir Russell report did not clear CRU of:
    1. Sloppy record keeping
    2. Having a kind of crappy attitude
    3. Failing to properly annotate or explain via comment the specific nature of a graph used on the WMO 1999 Report cover (where admittedly, from a graphic arts perspective, proper annotation would have played havoc with the presentation...perhaps the WMO should have repeated the graph in the report with the proper explanatory text...so it's all the WMO's fault!!!).

    So, whatcha got? If something substantive, I expect you to write it up & submit it (Tip: E&E; have a track record for publishing material like this, I'm sure they would make room for it) for publication. Fame and fortune await you.

    Or you've got nuttin'. Which is it?

    PS: I'm tired of the constant injection of unsupported innuendo and invective into this thread by those who see nothing but what they wish to see, instead of what verifiable sources actually say (this last bit not aimed specifically at you, damorbel, though portions of it certainly do apply).

    The Yooper
  • Re: fydijkstra

    It is certainly true that the repeated focus of "skeptics" on Climategate, despite multiple exonerations (truth be told: there exists no amount of investigations by no matter how impartial an arbiter that will ever acquit Mann, Jones, CRU or AGW in the mind of "skeptics") clearly indicts the "skeptics" of cognitive bias and your selfsame "inattentional blindness" charge.

    A continuing focus on a dead issue reeks of paranoia.

    Meanwhile the science of climate change is indeed as robust as ever. It is not immutable, but adapts to better understandings as they arise. Hand waving at that adaptation as proof of the falseness of AGW is revealing of the lack of understanding of science and the cognitive dissonance on display by the "skeptics" as well.
    "Which paper has definitely confirmed the warmist view?"
     Strawman argument. Where is the paper from "skeptics" overturning AGW? Anything physics-based explaining why anthropogenic-sourced CO2 doesn't act like a GHG when "normal" CO2 does? Where is the long-promised published analysis of the station drop-out issue? Where are the "skeptics" who are decrying the malfeasance already demonstrated to exist in the Wegman plagiarismgate?

    And your charge of hiding uncertainties is laughable. Rob Honeycutt has already shattered that myth of yours here.

    The reality is is that the science of climate change has moved on, and no amount of hand-waving by "skeptics" allows them to be true to the term skeptic.

    I would love for there to exist some mythical process that will allow the GHG effects of rising CO2 to just "go away". And I search daily for anything in the literature that is science-based that can demonstrate that it is even possible to be so. Diminishing returns is kicking in, though. Aside from espoused fantasies that are so wrong they're not even wrong, I find nothing.

    And hope fades.

    The Yooper
  • Regarding lines 127-136 (sorry for the delayed response - life got in the way)

    To JMurphy in particular, I appreciate the time you spent providing all of those links. And, I have to apologize, as it appears that I may have been unclear in the main points of my previous post.

    My points were only:

    1. to questioning the quality of the scientists and 2. questioning CO2 impact on temperature

    Your links to the hockey stick issue don't change the fact that two different sets of data were concatenated. AGW promoters find this acceptable, the rest of us do not. I'd like to discuss the urban heat effect, but fear we would just talk past each other.

    Daniel stated that GHG effect of CO2 is "not seriously questioned by any competent scientist anywhere". The only purpose in sending the link to the Petition Project was to show that over 31,000 scientists - surely some of whom must be "competent scientist" somewhere - provided a detailed explanation for their disagreement with AGW.

    I also took issue with his definition of "competent scientist" and provided links to support my position. It wasn't my intention to open a direct discussion on the petition project or climategate, but to offer those issues as causing legitimate doubt.

    JMurphy - most of your links regarding the IPCC back up what I said - the IPCC either lied or "misread" data. Furthermore, that happened because their reports were NOT peer viewed. Further promoting my point that they are not an entirely reliable source.

    That IPCC link represents meager 831 scientists. Additionally, my concerns remain about the quality of the scientists behind the IPCC. The IPCC states that their procedures provide for the InterAcademy Council to "assemble an international panel of experts". Now, you may trust that their basis of selection is unbiased and only considers the credentials of those selected, but I do not. Item 7 of this report gives me pause for concern on that topic as well.
  • Reporting of Wegman's plagiarism (and possible other issues) has finally made it into the 'mainstream media' with this piece from USA Today. Has been picked up by a few non-climate blogs and there are also pieces in Salon
    and UPI.

    Nothing compared to the 'Climategate' furor of course, but when all is said and done all those accused in that brouhaha have been cleared and Wegman... USA Today's independent experts say he's shockingly guilty.
  • Riccardo (@97), the first three links you provide are from John Cook's excellent postings. These are good arguments but I find Loehle and McCulloch 2008 more convincing. So let's "agree to disagree". This is a good illustration of the premise that "the science is not settled".

    The last link purporting to show that temperatures have not been dropping since 1998 is simply wrong. Even Climategate stars like Phil Jones admit this.

    James Hansen has a lot of explaining to do. His GHG theory was plausible for the "Runaway Greenhouse Effect" on Venus where CO2 accounts for over 96% of the atmosphere. When he tried to apply the idea to planet Earth where the concentration is ~380 parts per million he failed the sanity test.

    His latest attempt to maintain his crackpot theory are based on manipulated surface station data. There is a significant discrepancy between satellite data and the surface station data that he uses. A plausible explanation for this can be found at:

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/26/new-paper-on-surface-temperature-records/

    Don't give me an "ex cathedra" refutation of this paper as I have personally checked the main claims starting from the raw GHCN v2 data sets. If you have a working copy of MS Excel, I can tell you how to do this for yourself.
  • Riccardo writes,
    "Are you asking scientists (or anyone else) to go back to the 18th century?"

    No quite the opposite. For the benefit of the general public, I want a group of the worlds leading physicists brought together to devise experiments on radiative transfer with regard to atmospheric modelling. I then want them, using the best and latest ideas to write down their predictions as to the outcomes of those experiments.
    Then I want to examine those results and compare predicted with actual. This exercise isn't for the benefit of scientists but for the general public whose faith in the integrity of science and its current practitioners has been shaken by the climategate scandal.Why could there be any possible objection?

    "community of scientists"... we're a little commune are we? Very cosy that sounds. A lttle bit too cosy, for an activity driven by scepticism.

    "none of them would make such weird claims."
    None in italics for emphasis. Incorrect. Many do.
    "Weird". Weird to you perhaps, but reasonable to me,even if unproven or wrong.
  • Riccardo, (#116), your P.S. comment is puzzling to say the least. Are you talking about this document:

    http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/metoffice_proposal_022410.pdf

    Some see this as a PR or CYA exercise aimed at dousing the Climategate fire. Frankly I don't care what you call it as long as the data gets cleaned up and published in its raw state so that researchers can make their own decisions about what is good, bad or ugly.

    With regard to the UAH data set. The one I am looking at runs from 1978 to 2009. Over this 31 year period the trend is 0.05 degrees Celsius or 0.016 C/decade. In other words, not statistically significant.
  • Rob @3,

    Yes, frustrating isn't it. My post here (well parts of it t least) may be relevant to this discussion, follow the links.
  • scaddenp (#59),
    The idea that humans are a significant factor in raising global temperatures rests on a very shaky foundation as "Climategate" has shown. Unless better evidence is presented I will continue to believe that natural factors dominate.

    The "Copenhagen Diagnosis" mentioned at the top of this thread encapsulates the IPCC's over reaching and exaggeration of mankind's influence. This is what I call the "Catastrophe de Jour" approach which has damaged the IPCC's credibility beyond repair. The IPCC's Alarmist predictions for 2100 depend on climate models (GCMs) and Michael Mann's adherents who cling to tree ring temperature proxies.

    One of the many scientists who doubt mankind's ability to affect climate is Roy Spencer:

    QUOTE
    There is no question that great progress has been made in climate modeling. I consider computer modeling to be an absolutely essential part of climate research. After all, without running numbers through physical equations in a theoretically-based model, you really can not claim that you understand very much about how climate works.

    But given all of the remaining uncertainties, I do not believe we can determine — with any objective level of confidence — whether any of the current model projections of future warming can be believed. Any scientist who claims otherwise either has political or other non-scientific motivations, or they are simply being sloppy.
    UNQUOTE

    For more information check out:
    http://www.drroyspencer.com/

    On the weather station drop off issue, nobody has addressed my question. How can you justify throwing away most of the data?

    In my business there are thousands of scintillation detectors counting energetic photons. We could have saved millions of dollars by dispensing with 80% of the detectors but instead we squirelled away money to buy more!
  • scaddenp - obliviously diamonds are not emissions, but then neither is Carbon. I was being sarcastic to make the point that any reference to "Carbon" emissions is disingenuous. Unfortunately, this short hand is causing (otherwise intelligent people) to claim that "carbon emissions from cars are combining with ozone and causing a depletion in the ozone layer".

    Daniel, I appreciate all of the information you provided here and would like to challenge you on your definition of a "competent scientist".

    Remember Michael Mann's "hockey stick graph" - the one trotted out by Al Gore and the IPCC as proof positive that AGW exists? If in fact the Earth is warming - why did Mann feel the need to concatenate two different data sets? If I wanted to prove that sports scores have been increasing over the last 100 years and I take baseball scores for the first sixty years and plot them - then I take basketball scores for the last 40 years and tack them on the end of my graph, would my graph be taken seriously?
    Supporting articles here and here.

    Distressingly, this is the same IPCC that "misread" the year the Himalayan glaciers were "likely to disappear" due to global warming:

    Mr Cogley says it is astonishing that none of the 10 authors of the 2007 IPCC report could spot the error and "misread 2350 as 2035".
    IPCC error

    Equally distressing is the suggestion that they may have done so on purpose. IPCC error intentional

    Here's a question I literally cannot find an answer to: How many scientist work for the IPCC and what are their names? I've heard 1000, I've heard 2000 - yet, I cannot find a comprehensive list of the people involved in promoting AGW.

    On the other hand, here is a list of over 31,000 scientist that think AGW is a bunch of bunk. All their names are listed - right there. (I know, I know - they were ALL bought off by Big Oil.)
    Petition Project

    There has been some chatter on this site about not looking at thermometer reading to assess the global warming situation (too bad nobody mentioned that to Michael Mann) - I've been told to look at the sea ice extent. So, I have - it has increase for the last three years. The counter to this point is that the ice is thin - but, of course young ice is thin. The point is that the extent has NOT receded in the last three years. Now, how can that be with all of that accumulated, globe warming carbon?
    Sea Ice Extent

    Also, if accumulated CO2 definitively causes the globe to warm, why did they think the globe was cooling for the 30 years prior to the 1970s?

    But, this, I think, is the primary question: since CO2 will increase as the globe warms (due to melting, CO2 containing glaciers), why should I assume that CO2 CAUSES global warming?

    Sure the globe has been warming (for the last 10,000 years), sure there is more CO2, but what if you have your cause and effect relationship inversed?
  • scaddenp at 13:55 PM on 23 July, 2010

    As best as I can tell, the Deep Climate post deals with statistical issues as they relate to the Climategate emails and McIntyre's citation of these. A commentator writing in response to an earlier post indicated that discussion of these emails was off limits on this site. I don't know whether that is true or not. In any case the whole debate over who wrote what and why in response to what seems utterly Byzantine complexity and somewhat beyond the limited capacity of my prefrontal cortex :-).

    I hope I'm not violating rules by going over these issues but McIntyre's principal beef all along seems to have been with the validity of statistical methodology (very much his field of expertise) and reluctance to share data and code. The various enquiries have exonerated the folks at UEA of misconduct
    and upheld the integrity of their scientific work. However, some criticism of lack of interaction with the statistical community and willingness to share information seems a consistent theme in the enquiries.

    As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly where I would want to leave the issues. Indeed, my recollections of the Guardian debate if they serve me well suggest a consensus that in reality there nothing sinister to hide and that openness from the outset would have avoided an awful lot of unpleasantness.

    Incidentally, you say:

    'And as to media - well seeing the reporting about anything you have been involved in should give you a healthy dose of skepticism.'

    Incidentally, I've been involved in a number of matters which attracted substantial media attention (not much in recent years, thank God). The issues being reported on were not politically charged but related to some complex criminal matters. I was surprised at the time by the accuracy and fairness of some (obviously not all) of the media reporting.
  • Shawn @73,

    Perhaps some simple and direct questions are in order.

    1) Did Muller accurately and correctly reflect the content and true meaning of the emails to which John is referring? Yes or no.
    2) Do you agree with John Cook's assessment of Muller's errors? Yes or no.
    3) Do you agree with this statement by Cook concerning Muller's misguided understanding of events: "To conflate two separate techniques via the phrase "Mike's Nature trick to hide the decline" is adding to the glut of 'Climategate' misinformation."

    Muller could have easily avoided making the mistakes and perpetuating yet more Climategate/SwiftHack myths had he actually practiced due diligence, done some research, and read the reports on the Climategate/SwiftHack. Instead, it seems that Muller elected to source his "information" from notorious "skeptic" blogs. That is not acceptable on an issue this important, especially by someone of Muller's standing.

    And John has not even covered the myriad of other misleading statements made by Muller in his talk.
  • Since the rebuttal for climategate addresses the cynicism of the skeptics towards climate science another good rebuttal should debunk the argument "climate scientists exaggerate to get more funding". I know this defies the comments policy, but I see this argument everywhere in skeptic blogs and conservative op-eds. I would really like to see this argument get shot down. Do you think a rebuttal for this argument would be a good idea for Skeptical Science?
  • Singer is at it again in the American "Thinker." Perhaps somebody at Skeptical Science can straighten out this mess:

    http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/climategate_heads_to_court.html
  • Slightly off topic but the way that the Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre are hyping Climategate II calls for creative action.

    I ask that you go to http://climateaudit.org/ and http://wattsupwiththat.com and ask Steve and Anthony to release all their personal e-mails regarding climate change.

    Please!
  • Sorry I omitted this. batvette's full comment can be found over at "Climategate conspiracy"
  • Sorry---Here is the link for the Pravda article "Climategate Exposes the Global Warming Hoax."

    http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/110832-1/

    The Soviets spread the canard that crafty Pentagon scientists made AIDS to kill blacks. this was a very destructive lie because people didn't trust the health information.

    In 1987, a childhood friend of mine got sick in China with AIDS and was flown out by the US Air Force because nobody else would take him home. He saw his mom and dad and then died.

    A Soviet paper said he was a CIA agent/biological weapon against the Soviet Union who had been sent to China to give the Chinese AIDS since Russia has a long border with the Soviet Union.

    In 1987, the Russian Academy of Sciences distanced themselves from this AIDS falsehood right in Izvestia. Roald Sagdeev, who has signed the letter supporting the climate scientists wrote an article denouncing the AIDS propaganda in Isvestia on behalf of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

    The Russian newspaper Izvestiya (3-19-92) reported during the Glasnost' era:

    [KGB chief Yevgeni Primakov] mentioned the well known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists' 'crafty' plots were fabricated in KGB offices.

    I am waiting to see if the people who are responsible for oppressing climate scientists will come forward and take responsibility for stealing those emails. In Russia that is called kompromat.

    It is shameful to think Americans may have done it.
  • sout #30

    Indeed sout, there are many things to be learned not only from the owner of this site - but from the better informed contributors.

    I spent about 12 months reading many papers and engaging in heavy duty discussions on climte change and the science behind it before feeling competent enough to make comments in these threads.

    There are some very valuable technical discussions with many references to recent research made by others expert in their specialties.

    The last few months have seen these really top quality discussions degenerate somewhat into repetitive postings by the owner and more politicized and personalized themes which started with Climategate revisited and has continued with stalking horses such as Monckton.

    I will suggest this though - when an amateur with a HP calculator and reasonable grasp of thermodynamics such as myself, can find real inconsistenies and holes in the climate science information presented on this site - and not be effectively refuted by the resident experts and publishers - there is a serious question as to the quality of the climate science on offer.
  • Speaking of which. John, you may have noticed a commenter at the Guardian going by the nickname of PaulInOz1 who was highly critical of you and your article. Turns out he's Paul Ostergaard of Aeris Systems, the developer of Our Climate. There's another "contrarian" called PaulInOz at Guardian CiF who's been there for a while now, so it's not sure if he's the same guy, but PaulInOz1 only started posting on August 7th. Pretty low if you ask me. He's been banging heads with some of us (in one he kept repeating "Shame on you" at me), and one in particular called onthefence. Search through the Our Climate reviews at the Apple store and you'll find a review by an "on the fence" singing the praises of Our Climate.

    OurClimategate, as far as I'm concerened.
  • Sphaerica #17

    "Do you have any defensible examples of "outrageous claims and distortions" from anyone on the scientific side of the debate? "

    Yes, I started with yours, and my comment was deleted.

    Re; Robyn Williams - I could go back over hundreds of transcripts of the ABC Science Show and pick out comments relating to climate change. Suffice to say that Robyn declared he would not even read the Climategate emails which is pretty good evidence of a closed mind in this regard.

    Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" was found unfit for use as an educational tool for students by the British High Court due to its inaccuracies and distortions.
  • Sphaerica-I understand your frustration,but keep in mind that these Skeptics are not solely dealing with climate change.They have a very wide range of topics of all kinds of pseudo-science that they are tackling.Also,I think that there aren't too many that are actual climate scientists,so they do more reporting on current issues like so called Climategate,the BEST report,and such,but leave the analysis to those who do the science.I actually found my way to this site from a link that a commenter on Neurologica gave,while arguing against a denier.
    Keep an open mind about the real Skeptic movement,we are your ally,not an enemy.We cannot help it if the 'skeptic' name has been hijacked by the deniers,and we do very much resent it,and reject their claim.They are pseudo-skeptics,and science deniers.
  • Stevee: Has it been determined, scientifically, if the ClimateGate (Hide the Decline) emails were hacked, or leaked ?

    I doubt they were leaked but it has been scientifically determined that they were deliberately misrepresented.
  • Suggested reading:

    Real 'Climategate' Scandal: UK Police Spent Measly $8,843 In Failed Attempt to Identify Criminal Hacker” DeSmog Blog, Nov 22, 2011

    Click here to access this article.
  • Suggested reading:

    “The Truth Behind the Emails of ClimateGate Parts 1 and 2” by John Austin., Decoded Science, Nov 26, 2011

    Click here to access this article.
  • Suggested reading:

    "Climategate 2.0?: New Emails Hacked -- Pay No Attention to the Energy Industry Behind the Curtain" by Shawn Lawrence Otto*, The Huffington Post, Nov 23, 2011

    Click here to access this article.

    *Author, 'Fool Me Twice'; science advocate; filmmaker; co-founder, Sciencedebate.org,
  • Suggested reading:

    “Top climate change stories of 2011” by Andrew Freedman, Capital Weather Gang blog, Washington Post, Jan 4, 2011

    Although Freedman plows some of the same ground that MarkR does in the above, there are some significant differences in the focus of the two articles. Freedman covers the following:

    1. Advances in understanding global warming and extreme weather
    2. Surface temperature record holds up to (another) review
    3. “Climategate 2” falls flat
    4. Congress Nixes National Climate Service
  • Thanks all for the insightful posts.

    Funny that just when the main post titled, "Who's your expert? The difference between peer review and rhetoric" was published, a renowned "skeptic" (Pat Michaels) came out with his rather inane (and at times juvenile) opinion piece in Forbes magazine (linked to @2 above). His diatribe shows that Pat Michaels is an expert in rhetoric and deception, and to that end is doing his utmost to sabotage the peer-review process by fabricating controversy and deliberately misinforming the public.

    One thing people ought to keep in mind about peer-review is that is is not perfect, never was and never will be, open review has its own issues (I have seen paper sin open review that have resembled food fights, not constructive). The beauty about peer-review is that is represents part of a continuum. Once the work is published it is then subjected to review by all those who read it, and anyone can submit a challenge. In this way, errors missed by the reviewers can be identified and rectified, or if the critique is without merit, the authors can defend their work. So time is the ultimate test, and thus far the physics underlying the theory of AGW has withstood scrutiny (aside from some bumps in the early days) going back to 1896, possibly even further back tot he days of Fourier in 1842.

    The same cannot be said for papers published by 'skeptics' like Michaels-- their sub par science and the fiasco at the journal Climate Research (when 'skeptics" were engage din pal review; funny how Michaels "forgets" that). In recent years 'skeptics' have had quite a few papers (or the data and methodologies used) overturned/refuted, some examples:

    Gerlich and Tscheuschner (2009)
    McLean et al. (2009)
    Douglass et al. (2007)
    Lindzen and Choi (2009)
    McKitrcik and Michaels (2007) (yes, Michaels again)
    Spencer and Braswell (2008,2009)

    I discuss this issue in more detail here, with embedded links. Ari has a long list of refuted "skeptic" papers here.
  • Thanks for a wonderful site.

    I do however have to take issue as I believe you are posting a strawman. The issue is not whether or not manmade CO2 is causing warming. It is whether or not it is going to cause catastrophic warming. No serious skeptic disputes observations 1 and 2. IE, manmade CO2 is indeed increasing and that increasing CO2, absent either positive or negative feedbacks, will increase the temperature of the earth. The consensus on all sides is that a doubling of CO2, absent feedbacks, will increase the earth’s temperature by one degree.

    The models assume substantial positive feedbacks and per the IPCC, predict 2 to 6 degrees of warming per doubling of CO2. We are told that the reason we should believe the models ability to predict the future, is because of their ability to predict (model) the past. IE, we should believe the forecast, because the hindcast is accurate.

    Up until recently, I was prepared to accept the models hindcasting abilities. Until I read extracts from the leaked Harry.Readme.txt file. For any of your readers who do not know. Harry was the University of East Anglia programmer who tried to make sense of the HADCRUT code. Here is my favourite extract.

    "Here, the expected 1990-2003 period is MISSING - so the correlations aren't so hot! Yet
    the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is
    supposed to happen here? Oh yeah - there is no 'supposed', I can make it up. So I have :-)
    "

    Now if ever there was a clear case for an engineering audit, not to mention a public inquiry, this is it. See this link for more examples of the code. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/climategate-hide-the-decline-codified/

    But let us put that aside and assume that the hindcast is correct. So the question then is how well have observations matched the forecast. Well to start with, I being skeptical, and having read the Harry.Readme.Txt file and looked at www.surfacestations.org, will not trust the surface measurements. That leaves me with the satellite measurements, UAH and RSS, and the ocean heat content measurements, as measured by the Argos buoys. The satellites give us 30 years of data and Argos buoys just 7.

    So what do they show. Well UAH shows that there has been no statistically significant warming for 15 years. See http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/no-warming-for-fifteen-years/. (This data can be downloaded and you can plot it yourself to verify it) RSS’s no statistically significant warming period is slightly shorter. For some reason 30 years is talked about as being the timeframe required to measure climate, so no statistically significant warming in half a climate timeframe, strikes me as important.

    What needs to be also pointed out in a discussion on the Satellite temperature record is that three major volcanos, two of them tropical, occurred during the first half of it. Mt St Helens, El Chichon and Pinatubo. These lowered the global temperature during the first half of the record. (Tropical volcanos have a higer impact on temperatures) This is best illustrated in a graph created by Bob Tisdale here http://i44.tinypic.com/3442jo9.jpg. What he shows is that the 1982 / 1983 El Nino was almost as powerful as the 1998 El Nino that made 1998 the hottest year in recorded history. However temperatures were masked by the effects of El Chichon.

    What is interesting is that, even with the volcanoes skewing the earlier part of the record, global temperatures only rose by 1.3 to 1.7 degrees per century depending on which satellite record you want to choose (and by slightly more if you are happy to use the surface records.) Having said that, Global Warming theory states that the lower troposphere, where the satellites do the measuring, should warm faster than the surface, (by about 20% per John Christy) so a 1.3 degree per century rise in the Lower Troposphere is equivalent to 1.1 at the surface.

    And now to get to Ocean Heat Content. I do not trust any measurement before the Argos buoys were deployed in 2003. Since then ocean heat content has remained flat See http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/01/nodc-ocean-heat-content-0-700-meters.html .

    It should be pointed out too that the thermal mass of water is a lot greater than that of air, so the variability of Ocean Heat Content is less. Therefore conclusions can be drawn from much shorter periods of Ocean Heat Content than Surface Temperatures. We have 7 years which is a quarter of a climate timeframe, and so far, no warming.

    So to summarise. I will believe it when 1) An engineering audit is done on the surface temperature records and they are revised or confiremed. 2) The models continue to accurately hindcast and 3) 15 years of satellite measured temperatures match the model predictions, or 8 years of Ocean Heat Content measurements match the model predictions.

    Or they find the missing tropical hotspot fingerprint of manmade catastrophic global warming, but that is another days discussion.
  • Thanks for the reply, actually the above question stemmed from reading a book by Sir Patrick Moore called 'Astronomy' where he briefly covered solar activity and the effects on the thermosphere (I am currently starting to study Astronomy and astrophysics as a past time and found it to be a great starting point!). The reason I considered the atmospheric effect is we have been undergoing a mild period of cooling over the last couple of years whilst the upper atmospheric altitude is apparently reduced. It occured to me that another effect of this is, if the atmosphere has a smaller diameter then is it logical that the planets solar foot print is also smaller meaning more solar energy just keeps on going through space rather than getting absorbed by atmospheric gasses?.. Another area I dont think I have seen mentioned on here is the question of why are the planet Mars Ice caps also receeding? is this in some way linked to our own warming or is it simply a matter of Mars orbit in realtion to the sun? has anyone been able to reference Martian Polar recession with our own warming cycles in relation to its proximity to the sun?... Im not 100% in favour of 'The sun did it' as there are many many other areas that affect global climate, Deforestation of the rain forests, Methane, CO2 Emissions, Atmospheric particulates, Atomic Testing infact a whole load of variables.. however, it does occur to me that perhaps CO2 is more an effect than a cause? eg CO2 release due to polar ice decay, Deforestation etc... I would hate to describe myself as a 'tree hugger' but from what I can tell perhaps everyone in both camps might be right here increased carbon gasses and solar activity may both have a role to play in global warming, amongst many many other variables!... another thought as well is the icecaps are receeding then doesnt that put alot more cold water at the bottom of the oceans too? and im guessing that might in someway cause for carbon release?

    Anyhow, looks like i have a few years worth of reading, experimenting and computer modelling to go lol... All I can say is Im half between 'Tax on Co2' being a government attempt to charge more for less resources (charge more for fuel and electricity whilst not having to invest in infrastructure for the ever growing global population,peak oil etc, after all Climategate has done the scientific community no favours at all either way) and a very serious genuine problem that needs to be addressed urgently yet is being cashed in on by unscupulous politicians and glory seeking scare mongerers!..anyhow, thanks for the excellent reply and will get thinking, researching and trying to test some ideas out!
  • thanks Paul D (re #9), I've had a look at some of Graham Stringer's statements re "climategate" and he does seem tediously ill-informed and way-over-the-top belligerent about this.

    ...how tedious...
  • Thanks Prof! Again very helpful but to me a trend is not at issue. I am a newbie here and like many this area of science has only become a really hot (pardon the pun) topic for me since climategate. Before then I accepted the general consensus.

    Most in the blogosphere seem to believe in global warming - it is the extent and the 'unprecedented' nature of the warming that I think (from what I have read on blogs so far) is the issue, which is of course linked to the anthropogenic part.

    This means actual temps do matter and trends in this particular instance dont, to me at any rate. If it is getting a bit hotter then, well that is not too bad, climate does tend to do that. But if it is getting amazingly hotter then, of course, we are all going to be in big trouble.

    So are the temps showing something dangerous or something not so dangerous

    I read this "Why Hasn't Earth Warmed as Much as Expected? New Report on Climate Change Explores the Reasons" from Science Daily. I think you can understand my layman's puzzlement.

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100119112050.htm

    Apologies if that is off topic.
  • The "skeptics" really do need to move on. "Climategate" was the mother of all ad hominem attacks on the climate science community.

    They will debny it of course, but Climategate was also an epic fail for them, and history will not document it in the way they would like to. It has also afforded us a scary insight into the tactics and behavior of "skeptics", namely their willingness to distort, misinform and manipulate information to suite their own ideology and further their campaign of doubt and confusion. Not to mention highlighting the desperate lengths they will go to to come by that information.

    Dismissing six investigations as whitewashes just does not cut it. The skeptics are in fact very lucky that, until now at least, criminal charges have not been brought against those who organized and oversaw vexatious FOI campaign or those who were involved with the theft of the emails.

    Posts by some "skeptics" here just go to prove the points made in the above post-- sad that they fail to see that. Also, it seems that said "skeptics" have not taken the time to read the reports from the various inquiries, especially the comprehensive (and at times rightfully critical) report by Sir Russell. But instead insist on parroting long debunked myths and misinformation that have done the rounds on various internet blogs and in misguided elements of the media.

    For example, as for the fallacious claims being parroted here about fudging code and numbers, please read this.

    Did "climategate" undermine the validity of the theory of anthropogenic climate change?

    No, not one bit. Now that is a very inconvenient truth for the "skeptics". And here is another, the extremely troubling revelations concerning the Wegman report.
  • The argument that we (I) have used ill-gotten documents has merit, as far as it goes. I personally have no knowledge of how the documents came to be exposed and accept that there may have been misbehaviour in their release. I considered that situation before posting my comments here.

    Having said that, I regard some of the content of the documents as being objectionable to a reasonable person. The objectionable information requires no spin, no quoting out of context, no contorted lying about what is said. I am satisfied that exposure of the activities of the Heartland Institute is in the interests of the public, both in the USA and world-wide. Action - or more accurately, inaction - on Climate Change by legislators in the USA has repercussions for all the world's citizens. We all lose when systematic and well-funded misinformation affects the quality and impact of education and political ideologies.

    So, have I compounded a possible misdemeanour by reading and commenting upon the leaked documents? In my own little way, yes. Do I claim the moral high ground? No. Have I scolded deniers for the theft of the Climategate emails? No, I have always attacked the misinformation spun from the stolen material, just as I am now attacking the information in the Heartland Institute documents. The leaks on both sides are a fait accompli and I am only interested in exposing what passes for the Truth in each case.

    Do I have any regrets? No. Do I place the future of mankind higher than the rights of the Heartland Institute to pervert the education system? Yes - unequivocally. Does that make me a bad person? Not for me to judge.
  • The article quotes Muller, "But no scientist could do that because he’d be discredited for lying with statistics."

    Yet, we've seen Curry, Pielke, Spencer, and many others doing this thing no scientist could do... frequently and vehemently. Pielke, at least, is still afforded some measure of respect and none of them have been widely denounced.

    Muller also infamously said that there were now a 'list of scientists whose research I will not read' over the fake 'Climategate' scandal. So where is the indignation and denunciation over this actual 'scientific malpractice'?

    I wonder if that even exists as a legal concept. Were the scientists who insisted that smoking was not harmful ever sued for it? Malpractice is a 'failure to follow accepted professional standards which results in harm'. That is an accurate description of what the denier scientists are doing with their "lying with statistics" (and what the tobacco apologists did decades ago)... but so far as I can see there are no real consequences for such behavior in the sciences. Indeed, some of these people are hailed as heroes and/or make a living off of it. Fred Singer has been doing it professionally for decades. Do scientists need to take a page from the medical and legal professions and develop standards and procedures for dealing with scientific malpractice?
  • The BEST confirmations, Climategate 2.0 looking like a squib, and now yet another bloody Hockey Stick!

    Not looking to be such a festive season for some, is it? ;-)
  • THE BS AWARDS – A SUMMARY

    FIFTH PLACE goes to a news editor who insisted his reporters
    – Report only the facts.
    – Don’t take sides in their reporting, and
    – Point out that in matters relating to climate change, some people question the claims being made.

    WOW – talk about BS. How dare a news editor demand fair, unbiased and balanced reporting from his staff. What next, equal air time for skeptics?

    FOURTH PLACE goes to Patrick Michaels for misrepresenting the “facts” of human induced climate change to a senate committee. How do we know he did this? Because Ben Santer says so, that’s how.

    THIRD PLACE goes to every “climate denier” who ever pointed to a single cold weather event as “proof” that climate change didn’t exist. Well gee – I wonder where we learned that from?

    Here’s a link to TEN YEAR’s worth of increasingly extreme cold weather events. I wonder how many “singular” events it takes to suggest a “trend”?

    http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/andrewbolt/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/winters_are_sure_colder_than_they_predicted/

    SECOND PLACE goes to all those people who found something untoward suggested in the climategate emails.

    You know, like all those folk who took offence at destroying material subject to legal FOI requests, plotting to ruin other people’s reputations, and stuff like that. Not to mention of course, the HARRY_READ_ME file, or the “fudges factor” line of code that ensures one gets a hockey stick even when random numbers are input.

    FIRST PLACE goes to anybody who dares to suggest that maybe whatever was happening as far as warming went, has now stopped and maybe things are starting to cool off.

    I guess this could apply to just about any of the approximately 3 billion people now experiencing record and near record LOW temperatures, and record and near-record HIGH snowfalls.

    Yes, perhaps it’s time all us “deniers” started feeling a little ashamed of ourselves.

    What are the chances of this getting posted?
    Buckley’s – Now THAT’s “fair and unbiased” for you.
  • The Climate Skeptics Party has a list of websites. One link is to John Costella's "Climategate Analysis."

    http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/websites.html

    It takes you to this.

    http://johncostella.webs.com/

    But he still has it on his Assassination Science site.

    http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/
  • The Climategate hacker is clearly very misguided and misinformed in his misplaced motives for releasing these stolen emails. As a result, he's harming those he claims to want to help (poor nations). We'll have a post on this subject in the near future.
  • The discussions about ClimateGate on this site show an interesting feature: observations and interpretations of facts are never objective. Our interpretation of the facts is always coloured by our frame of reference, our theoretical background.
    There are people who believe, that human activities have changed the global climate, that the present global temperature is unprecedented in at least 1000 years, and that climate change will have dramatic consequences in the next century, unless we immediately stop using fossil fuels. Let’s simply call them warmists. This is not name calling, it’s just the use of a word to characterize a group.
    There are also people who believe, that the climate has always changed, that human activities do have a certain influence on the climate, but that natural climate fluctuations are dominant, and that we should not be too worried, because mankind has shown to be able to adapt to climate change during at least 100,000 years. Let’s simply call them sceptics. This is not name calling, it’s just the use of a word to characterize a group.
    Warmists and sceptics have a very different perception of the significance of the ClimateGate documents. We see it in the reactions on the 4 parts of this ClimateGate serial. Warmists claim that the 4 independent investigations of ClimateGate have fully exonerated the group of climate scientists around Jones and Mann. No conspiracy, no perverting peer review, no fraud. Nothing. And the message stands upright: the climate has changed unprecedentedly and will change dangerously, if we don’t act now. The evidence has become even stronger since ClimateGate!
    Sceptics consider the independent investigations as white washing. The investigations yielded some heavy critics on climate scientists and the IPCC, but this was hidden in very polite recommendations. Maybe nothing illegal has been done, but the hidden critical comments confirm that climate scientists should not hide uncertainties, and should be open for alternative explanations of the facts. Exactly what sceptics have been saying for two decades! And what is that evidence that has become stronger in the previous 12 months? Which paper has definitely confirmed the warmist view?

    The different perceptions of the facts that could be observed in the slipstream of ClimateGate are well-known in cognitive sciences. It is called ‘inattentional blindness:’ seeing only what you expect to see, or what you wish to see, because your frame of reference steers you in a special direction and makes you blind for other interpretations. Could it be, that both sides of the ClimageGate debate suffer from this kind of blindness? And could it be, that the truth is in the middle?
  • The Economist online has a good take on the Phil Jones misquote: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/02/climategate_distortions/.
  • The House of Commons report cited by JMurphy in #11 is the subject of a BBC article, “ClimateGate affair: 'Learn and move on', say MPs” written by Richard Black and posted on Jan 24, 2010.
  • The idea that the science or the energy budget is "settled" is blown apart by Trenberth. When asked by his colleague, Tom Wigley, “where's the Global warming?” Trenberth admits they
    can't answer the question. "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... Our observing system is inadequate." (Leaked Climategate email: Oct. 14, 2009: Filename:1255496484.txt)
  • The latest Guardian piece on this quotes a Heartland Institute spokesperson as saying: "At any rate, our standing policy is to not discuss confidential documents..."
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/15/heartland-institute-fraud-leak-climate?intcmp=239

    They seem to have conveniently forgotten about the emails. The same confidential documents which formed a "badly hemorrhaging climate alarmoscientists' scandal". A selection of which Heartland published on its own web site.
    http://heartland.org/policy-documents/presto-alarmist-emails-not-such-big-deal
    http://heartland.org/policy-documents/heres-selection-hacked-emails-climate-research-unit
    http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2011/12/28/climategate-2-reveals-further-scientific-misconduct-doubts

    Catch Heartland discussing private documents? Surely not!


    For 'tis the sport to have the enginer
    Hoist with his own petar; and 't shall go hard
    But I will delve one yard below their mines
    And blow them at the moon:
  • The name of the 9-11 Truther whom Pravda published on Climategate and the coming ice age is named Gregory Fegel. I write about him on my blog. He thinks President Bush and the US government are behind 9-11. He also writes conspiracies about Climategate and he thinks earth is on the verge of a new ice age.

    http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/06/gregory-ffegel-9-11-truther-is-on-thin.html

    Here is Fegel's Pravda article about Climategate.
    http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/30-11-2009/110832-climategate-0/

    Here is Fegel's Pravda article about a coming ice age. He doesn't understand that the tipping of the earth is weak compared to CO2.

    http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/11-01-2009/106922-earth_ice_age-0/

    I read on DeSmogblog comments that Fegel is a nurse, and someone claiming to be Fegel posted a rebuttal.

    http://www.desmogblog.com/drudge-and-pravda-state-owned-media-aligning-coverage
  • The prize to FOX News raises and interesting point. How do we determine who is a large enough "side" of a story to warrant media attention? How do we measure this?

    Something like 3% of climate scientists are AGW skeptics. Among meteorologists only about 64% believe in AGW. What's the metric to determine who gets a megaphone?

    #88

    muoncounter got most of the problems with this posting but, there's a few more.

    Billhunter made reference to the infamous climategate episode. This site and others have thoroughly debunked the idea that this non-event proved a criminal conspiracy to foist global warming onto an unsuspecting public.

    Here are some of the pages on this topic from skeptical science:

    Climategate CRU Emails Suggest Conspiracy

    CRU tampered with temperature data

    Peer review process was corrupted

    Skeptics were kept out of the IPCC?

    Climategate: Hiding the Decline?

    There are a lot of other pages for this, just type "climategate" without the quotes into the search field at the top left.

    Outside websites that pride themselves on their political neutrality and objectivity also found that climategate did not damage the evidence of AGW.

    So read:

    Factcheck Climategate

    Factcheck Climategate conclusions

    Politifact climategate debunks AGW

    Is global warming dangerous?

    That's a very multi-disciplinary question. Projections of changes in climate need to be provided to civil engineers, epidemiologists, and agronomists so they can analyze the effects on flooding, geographic ranges of diseases and crop yields. Then the economists need to say their piece about how that will affect society as a whole.

    From what I've read it seems like the economists regard AGW as dangerous.


    @96

    mars,

    Straw actually has no nutritional value, except fiber I guess. So, the strawmen could provide comfy bedding for your herd of elephants, but to feed them you would need haymen.
  • The proxies are inaccurate and do not respond solely on temperature, so there is no reason to hide any data. That is *not* scientific practise deleting adverse data. And for the same reason no thermometer readings are justified being plot on the same graph as I stated on several other topics elsewhere here.

    A graph from prof Müllers presentation:

    illustrates clearly, that there are similar "divergence" problems everywhere in the reconstruction.

    You can watch the hidethedecline part of his talk
    here.

    And the main point is, why that is misleading (even if its mentioned in the text) is that, most of the people who read it have no understanding on statistic techniques or the major uncertainities on such statistical excercises.

    Unless you will use a caption: "Warning. This data is baked to show us the result we wanted. It is purely an artifact of statistical excercises and only the temperatures which have been replaced with thermometers are somewhat reliable."

    I do not understand how people can still be defending the indefensible like "hide the decline".

    And Robert Way, please! That is ... . For the 2nd time in a short period of time I see you attacking Curry personally. Last time you used a link on ClimateProgress which is known to be propably the biggest disinformation & ad-hominem site on the whole field. You should be aware that neither you nor Joe Romm have absolutely none of the scientific credentials nor match the expert judgment in the subject. Nope.
  • The scientists in Russia are complaining about this kind of hocus-pocus:

    "Rasputin-style infiltration into the upper echelons of power remains a problem even in post-Soviet Russia. 'In the Kremlin there were whole groups of—I’m scared of calling them charlatans—but mystics, astrologists. These were prominent people—generals. The 1990s were an analogue of Rasputin’s time,' said [Eduard Kruglyakov, the head of the Pseudoscience Commission at the Russian Academy of Sciences]. Several appointments made by Boris Yeltsin suggested that he sought advice from odd sources. For instance, Yeltsin made General Georgi Rogozin, an ex-KGB officer and star-gazer, the deputy head of his Presidential Security Service. Rogozin led a team of 12 astrologers who would draw on their expertise to counsel the president."---RIA Novosti (7-8-10)

    http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/07/ria-novosti-criticizes-russias.html

    Russian media haven't said that denialism is hocus-pocus, but there are a lot of articles about global warming in RIA Novosti that actually sound pretty normal. They aren't like Pravda's denialist articles after Climategate.
  • The Skeptical Chymist #154

    Dr Trenberth expressed private doubts about the observation system and 'lack of warming' in the Climategate emails.

    He does touch on the central issue of 'missing heat' on pp25 of his Aug09 paper as follows:

    "Possibly the heat is being sequestered in the deep ocean below the 900mm depth used for the Argo analyses...........Or the warming is not really present? In this case the blame would point to the atmosphere and cloud changes, and it should be confirmed by CERES and MODIS measurements. However, preliminary estimates for 2006 thru 2008 suggest that net radiation heating increased, which if true exacerbates the imbalance identified here"

    The fact is that the 'imbalance identified' (0.9W/sq.m) is based on Hansen's 2005 models.

    Dr Trenberth goes on: "Accordingly another much needed component is the TOA radiation, but CERES data exist only through 2005 and are not yet long or reliable enough to bear on the question"

    While drawing a picture of an inadequate observation system, and expressing private doubts - he has defended the 'party line' on AGW - a line dependent on Mr Hansen's models.

    In short he has publicly used the 'its there but we can't measure it' argument.

    That does not detract from the technical issues he has raised and legitimate discussion of the probability that "the warming is not really present?" (at least for the last 10 years or so)
  • The tour seems to be hosted by the Climate Skeptics Party--"the world's first political party representing skepticism and objectivity in climate policy."

    The webmaster for Watts' tour is John Costella. He is a 9-11 Truther who wrote a very popular Internet article about Climategate. He writes about many different government conspiracies.

    http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/index.html [Skeptic Readings]

    http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/watts.html [See Costella listed as webmaster for Watts’ trip and the Climate Skeptics Party Letterhead at the top ]

    http://assassinationscience.com/johncostella/ [Costella's homepage]

    http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/ [Costella’s Climategate analysis]

    http://assassinationscience.com/ [homepage of assassination science—shows they are Truthers. They have conspiracy theories about the JFK shooting, too. ]
  • The truth about the investigations can be found here,

    The Climategate Inquiries (PDF) (52 pgs) (The Global Warming Policy Foundation)

    Understanding the Climategate Inquiries (PDF) (50 pgs) (Ross McKitrick, Ph.D. Professor of Environmental Economics)
  • The Ville at 09:33 AM on 20 November, 2010
    "BTW the UK has it's own FOI laws, they have nothing to do with the US.
    So to be honest it's not really any of your business!"

    AGW believers want to massively increase the cost of energy for all countries, and make us ration energy usage, and Climategate is none of our business?

    Cancun climate change summit: scientists call for rationing in developed world

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8165769/Cancun-climate-change-summit-scientists-call-for-rationing-in-developed-world.html

    This kind of political action makes the truth about Climate Change everyone's business.

    Cheap energy is what allowed members of society to specialize. Before that, most people were forced to subsistence farm. I grew up in Wisconsin. The idea of living like the Amish does not appeal to me.

    Chris Shaker
  • There have been five major investigations by experts into the climategate frenzy, and none of them found any evidence whatsoever of fraud, or misconduct. Yet the conservative media is still cherishes the nonscandal as if it is the latest news. I find this amusing and laughable.
    Why won't the conservative media stop? Its so irratating seeing this worn out climategate tantrum persisting.
    Does anyone have any explanations for this?
  • There is also the "Climategate CRU emails suggest conspiracy" argument, which covers this topic too and gives links to the inquiries or reports.
  • There is an excellent article in The Guardian - Attacks on climate scientists are the real 'climategate'.

    The reaction in the UK has been fairly muted - everyone, including the Daily Mail, is questioning the timing of this release. And everyone, from what I've read, has made it clear the work of scientists was found to be reliable following Climategate 1.0 even if there were problems with FOI requests. It looks like a spectacular own goal by whoever released this batch of carefully selected quotes.
  • There's an interesting Opinion piece in Nature called "Defeating the merchants of doubt" about the agenda behind climate change "scepticism" and what scientists can do about it.

    I wonder what climate scientists are supposed to do with this information? [I wrote a very short blog post on this here. Should they use it to attack their critics or just stick to the science? Is it just useful background info?

    Why is this agenda and funding for the "sceptic" industry not more widely known and reported, especially when the relatively small revelations from "Climategate" recieved blanket coverage?
  • Third try
    Is global warming a conspiracy ? Did a group of scientists go to a back room and make up Global Warming to make a lot of money. Of course not.


    What exists is a “conspiracy of self interest”. It is to the best interest of all climate scientists for enough plausibility be found in Global Warming AKA climate change AKA climate disruption AKA weirding weather to keep the lights on and their paychecks coming in. If global Warming were to be found to be entirely natural, funding and staffs would be drastically cut.

    Does it take a conspiracy with a central co-coordinator to assure us that human beings will act like human beings ? Many like the late Stephen Schneider think that exaggerating certainties and hiding uncertainties is justified for the good of the planet.

    Is the price of sugar a conspiracy or the result of thousands of people dong what they think is in their own self interest. ? The “invisible hand” works in all other aspects of human civilization, to believe it doesn’t in climate science is naïve.

    To be fair around 1998 when there had been many [20] years of continuous warming I can see why the climatologists were concerned. I would have been too. They projected the current temperature rise to mean 3 ° C by 2100. [They exaggerated the rate by about 3 X] They didn’t have a crystal ball to tell them that over the next 12 years temperatures would be flat or slowly fall. And they didn’t have enough knowledge of history to know this 60 year cycle was normal. Studying global warming seemed to make sense. Of course once the laboratories had been built and the scientists hired there was a “constituency “ for further research.

    Most scientist just want to study something and get paid for it and the best way to do that is to go with the flow. Climate change or global warming in the title of your study triples the chances of it being funded by government or Greenpeace or WWF. After you take their money you had better find serious consequences if you ever want to get any more $.

    In addition Climategate has proved that the CO2 mafia is so firmly entrenched that it would be professional suicide to try to do research into non CO2 based causes of our slight warming. Anyone without tenure would be a fool to go against the CO2 mafia and the hockey team. Those with tenure are the only ones in a position to deny the juggernaut. [Lindzen, Spencer, Curry withstand a ton of abuse and Ad Hominem attacks and are very brave about it ]

    There is a pile of money to be extracted from a gullible public. That is where the true conspiracy exists. Cap and trade’s only function is to make tens of trillions of dollars to companies like Enron and the Chicago Carbon Exchange [deceased]. Cap and trade or hideous taxes make no sense even if you believe in AGW because they export jobs to the coal powered factories of 3 rd world countries. So the worldwide emission of CO2 goes up.

    Then there are other one worlder types who didn’t invent global warming but are happy to let it be a battering ram to help them get a redistribution of wealth and a world government.

    Notice that I don’t claim these people invented global warming but they are using it for their own agenda.
  • This has been a PR disaster. I've been watching this unfold for some time, having started in our local paper (which has touting global warming conspiracy theories for years) and the problem with so-called "climategate" is that climatologists are letting the Denial community totally dominate the news. I hear talk of leaked e-mails, faked and/or altered/hidden data, politicians calling for investigations and claiming hoaxes. Honestly to the casual layman this looks really bad.
    Climatologists have to make the public understand, in simple terms, what's in these e-mails exactly, how many researchers are involved, what exactly the research they're talking about is, what it means, what it doesn't mean, and most importantly all the other evidence pointing to climate change. Otherwise the public is going to buy into the conspiracy theories and nothing will get done.
  • Those interested in local connections (to Australia, that is), don't forget SA's own Senator Cory Bernardi.

    He was funded for travel an accommodation by Heartland to speak at their 4th ICCC in 2010, and then had accommodation provided for him again later that year.

    For more (with video; get your head-vice out!) see my comment over at Hot Topic.
  • Thought I'd point out that the ever-dignified and responsible Bishop Hill has gone beyond merely linking to the leaked material (via Tom Nelson and the egregious Shub).

    Now he's made it the subject of a whole new post.

    First the man himself has a bit of a gloat and a 'you wish!' ramble -

    It looks like John Cook and co at Skeptical Science are in a bit of a tizzy because their secret forum has been exposed to public view. Their complaint is that they have been hacked though John Cook admits that their security is almost non-existent.

    What is interesting, in reading some of the excerpts from the forum posted here, is the similarities between the SkS secret forum and the Climategate emails - i.e. we know the facts don't support what we say but don't tell anyone!

    That's ok, guys, your secrets are safe with us ;-)


    He's christened the event 'Opengate' (zero for originality, but at least the troops will have an easily-remembered shorthand reference for making future snide remarks), has commissioned yet another 'hilarious' cartoon from Josh, and all the little muckers are having a grand old time cherrypicking to their hearts' content in the thread.

    Now, Watts opposed using the hacked material, and there are two very good reasons for this - principle, and enlightened self-interest, which are not distinct, anyway. As a good example, state leaders don't generally commission the assassination of other state leaders they are in conflict with, if only on the simple basis that sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander!

    The egregious Montford has effectively renounced any right whatsoever to complain should such an event occur targeting himself, or any of his similarly unprincipled cronies. It's that simple.
  • Thought that the citizen-science thread would be a good place to post this.

    Not enough material to justify a full guest post, so I'm just leaving a little note here.

    I've added some new features to my "Quick and Dirty" global temperature anomaly app. It now performs a simple gridded average (geospatial weighting) that produces results that are remarkably similar to NASA's "Meteorological Stations" temperature index (NASA results here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/ -- scroll down to the Global Temperature (meteorological stations) plot).

    The app now allows you to generate urban vs. rural results side-by-side (it reads the GHCN v2 metadata file to extract rural and urban stations separately). You can now debunk the "Urban Heat Island" talking-point in real-time.

    The all also allows you to generate ensembles of results, each computed from a different set of randomly-chosen temperature stations. You can throw out 90 percent of the temperature stations and still get results that are quite consistent with the results you get when you process all of the data.

    Here's a plot of the program's output vs. NASA's equivalent results (note: I used GHCN "raw" monthly-mean data):



    For those who are interested, the latest source-code can be found here: http://forum.signonsandiego.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=8142&d;=1297529025

    (Run the app without any arguments to get a semi-helpful "usage" message).

    Now, back onto the soapbox for a bit:

    It was surprisingly easy to implement the gridding/geospatial-weighting routine (much easier that I originally thought that it would be). The result posted above is what popped out on my first "full-up" run -- i.e. not tweaking or data-fiddling required. Only a few modest changes to my app would be required to perform all the temperature-data analysis/processing that Anthony Watts has been promising (but has failed to deliver) for years!

    Getting a crude version of this app up and running took something like a weekend in my spare time -- the bulk of the time spent was cleaning it up and getting it into a form where others might find it useful.

    The one major thing that I learned from this project is how breathtakingly inane and brain-dead the denialists' campaign against the surface temperature record has been. A major part of the "climategate" campaign against the CRU was based on the claim that nobody could verify the CRU's global temperature results because the CRU supposedly was "hiding" a small fraction of the data used in their global temperature calculations.

    That, of course, is completely absurd -- what my exercise demonstrated is that someone with basic programming skills and the ability to read documentation should have no trouble validating the CRU's results with just a weekend's worth of effort. There is enough public temperature data and plenty of free software tools to enable any technically competent person to debunk the entire basis of the so-called "climategate" scandal with just a couple of days worth of effort.

    The "climategate" campaign truly has taken "stupid" to unprecedented heights.

    I'm keeping my app handy so that the next time some loudmouth starts spouting off to me about NASA's/CRU's "cooked" data, I'll be able to whip out my laptop and shut him up. I've found that having someone see me generate results "on the fly" from my own app makes a bigger impression than handing him/her a link to a NASA web-page.

    Hopefully, others can find this app useful in the same way. I've given it a fair bit of testing, so I don't think that there are any "showstopper" bugs (but no guarantees!).
  • To be frank, Karl's posts are full of non sequiturs and logical fallacies.

    Your analogy is a poor one: what did you hypothetical men die off? Could they have lived to 100+ Was it cancers? What % of the population does that demographic apply to. What is the average life span? 40 years? 50? 90?

    Hence, it does not follow that it is an appropriate analogy.

    Re IPCC credibility and the so called "scandals" - those arguments won't fly here.

    Climategate investigation: no proof of fraud, better disclosure called for

    Mann, Jones et.al cleared of all wrong doing.
  • To NickD
    "Do you have extraordinary evidence which backs up your assertion that global skepticism amongst laypersons became an "avalanche" after the molehills you cited?"

    When I do get the chance to bore the uninitiated (i.e., "normal people") about AGW theory, they may not understand or remember any of the details, but what they do seem to know all about is an exaggerated version of Climategate, a molehill which seems to have stuck like mud.
  • Tobyjoyce #39

    I thought that Freeman Dyson was doing a pretty good job of: "stepping up to defy the conventional climate science wisdom from within".

    Interesting that the last 10-12 topics on this blog have strayed from discussions about the harder science and into all sorts of areas such as personalities like Monckton & Abraham , links to creationism, 97% of scientists in a room etc.

    I wonder what happened to the robust blockbuster arguments about the real effect of CO2, water vapour, aerosols, TSI, TOA, OHC, SLR, energy balance etc??

    Maybe it is because the deeper these technical discussions go, the more the lack of knowledge and robust measurement in vital areas of climate science are exposed.

    Several of these threads have petered out with a stalemate ending in something like: "we need better measurement and more years to find out what is really happening".

    When met with this situation, the fall back position of this blog and the 'AGW consensus' is to say we don't have all the answers, but need to take radical action just in case what we claim is right.

    The difficulty with this line is that public confidence has been damaged by Climategate, and the exaggerated claims by advocates like Al Gore are not being believed by the great unwashed who will have to pay for the radical changes to their energy sources.
  • Tom Curtis@32 I am very familiar with the papers you mention. Are you saying their data is based on scientifically acquired in situ measurements from calibrated instruments by fully qualified scientists? VOS data certainly is not.
    You need to put error bars on the SST data.
    Models are tuned with [ -snipped-] (OK call it diffusion factors) to fit the dataset so it can then be used for prognostication.
    If you input data with wide error bars then of course your model will struggle to adjust.
    I use SST in full knowledge that it used as the temperature of a supposedly well-mixed surface layer. There is no evidence of this well-mixed layer. Indeed, on the contrary, there is evidence, cited by me, of strong near-surface gradients in all the world oceans. Is this in dispute?
    If it is not well-mixed and there are substantial gradients and you took your sample from an unknown depth, just what is the heat content of the supposed well-mixed layer that isn't?
    Do you believe ocean surface layers are well mixed? Do you not believe the in situ evidence of temperature and salinity gradients in mid ocean?
    Do you have any in situ data on the correlation of Marine Air Temperature and actual SST?
    These are not strawmen. The papers you cite are all based on statistical data with no raw data available to check for corrections and are without error bars.
    I have looked at this in depth and this is real data-based skepticism.
    If the models based on this errorful ocean data were reliable, the predictions of warming would not consistently come out too low!
    The models are not working because they have been tuned to an error-prone oceanic dataset.
    Skeptics have trawled over the land data and there are no really serious problems with it (Climategate etc).
    This simply has not been done for the ocean data.
    I hope I'm wrong. If you know of detailed studies that have checked out bucket temperatures versus seawater intake versus satellite data and continuous data on salinity and temperature profiles from the surface down to 50m or 100m in all the oceans, I'd love to see them.
    I am a data-based scientist. Show me the evidence.
    Please do not quote evidence from models based on un-ground-truthed datasets with unknown error bars.
    Ocean heat from 1995 onwards shows a strong upward trend. Datasets for this period are more and more detailed and extensive though not in the near-surface layers.
    I believe if you tuned your full coupled ocean-atmosphere models for 1995-2008 period you would get more reliable results. We always need more ground truth. I know it is expensive.
    However, no amount of tuning models will substitute for detail accurate data from the oceans with known error ranges. Near surface dynamics are not trivial and require a detailed understanding of the dynamics from actual measurements.
    All the latest ground truth data from the oceans suggests they hold much more heat than the models suggest.
    Surely that is reason enough to check the original data for its validity?
  • Trenberth: "we can't figure out exactly *where*, in earth's atmospheric/oceanic climate system, the increase in heat energy as measured by satellite is going".

    Ken Lambert et al, somewhat misunderstanding what's being said, insist Trenberth is saying: "there's no increase..."

    Ken, simple enough for you? Understand your mistake? Do you understand why Trenberth has been so pissed off at being misrepresented by the Climategate disinformation machine? Did you READ THE PAPER ATTACHED TO THE E-MAIL THAT'S BEING MISREPRESENTED to understand what Trenbert was talking about?

    No. No. No. No.

    There, just saved you some time.
  • Truly a frightening, frightening web site. Their conclusion about Kegwin's study is - incredibly - that there was a MWP, and while we don't know what caused it, we know it is different from today's (fraud) global warming. Specifically they state, "the causes of Medieval warming are not the same as those causing late 20th century warming" - i.e., "we don't know what caused the MWP warming, but we know it wasn't what is causing it today." Of course, how they know that is never really explained.

    Basically, "it's the sun, stupid" (not calling anyone stupid, just using the old leftist phrase generically), as http://www.ctr-tech.com/fall07.htm illustrates points out. Also check out Kobashi's study at http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2010/sep/02sep2010a3.html for more evidence on the MWP.

    Basically, I am a skeptic about these purported skeptics who are skeptical of the skeptics, who have a RIGHT to be skeptical. Who knows if they are funded by the even BIGGER dollars of those with vested interests in AGW, such as Goldman Sachs and big finance, who have much more money than Big Oil. as well as Big Govt, who have even MORE money!

    I'll bid you all adieu here, as these leftist shill sites always throw folks citing facts off. Thankfully, whoever that hero was who let the ClimateGate info out has exposed the whole scam, and the puppets here can never rebottle the genie!

    Cheers, everyone!
  • Truthseeker, you have your facts backwards. The corruption of the peer-review process resides in the publication of such nonsense as Soon-Baliunas (the subject of the e-mails you allude to), or Carter et al or G&T.; The anger in the e-mails refer to that kind of paper. It is entirely justified.

    The siege has been on for quite a while and is still happening. That includes:
    Hansen being gagged by the governement. The oil producing countries holding undue influence on the formulating of the IPCC reports. The media frenzy around the non-existing climategate, and that same media lack of reporting on the 3 separate enquiries that concluded there is nos such thing as climategate. The attempts at shutting up Mann by a zealot attorney general. The lynch mob culture at WUWT, where Anthony Watts gives to his public the places of work of scientists he dislikes so that his crowd can harass them. The abuse of FOI requests in organized fashion for the sole purpose of harassment. Rush Limbaugh calling on scientists to be drawn and quartered. It goes on and on.

    If you don't want scientist to have a siege mentality, you shouldn't besiege them.
  • Two good rebuttals of the CRU "scandal":

    http://www.pewclimate.org/science/university-east-anglia-cru-hacked-emails-analysis

    http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/debunking-misinformation-stolen-emails-climategate.html

    BTW, I am working on an essay targeted toward conservatives that think we should continue to "do business as usual". I will be shopping it around at the various blogs I frequent in order to get feedback to make it better. The goal will be to get an essay that we can all use to convince those that ignore the science because they do not like solution. Stay tuned.
  • UEA's climate scientists have been hounded and falsely vilified because of the hacker's lack of understanding of basic scientific methods. Millions of decent people struggling to come to terms with climate change have been misled by his half-baked information. Most grievously of all, the billions of families who scrape by on less than $2 a day have had their lives put further at risk.

    What would most help these impoverished families is for the UN climate talks in Durban to result in a strong climate deal. This hacker attack, timed to derail the process once more by falsely undermining the science, is the last thing they need. If the hacker's moral purpose is to help the poor, then he has scored a spectacular own goal

    “Climategate Hacker Scores Own Goal” Huffington Post, Nov 29, 2011

    Click here to access this article.
  • Unfortunately hacking appears to be the new weapon (climategate anyone?) the anti-science crowd uses. If you can't win on the merits ......
  • Unfortunately, you can't have a rational debate with people who have already made their minds up because of their political/free-market viewpoint.
    This, recently, from Senator Inhofe shows what sort of people we are dealing with here :

    "I was actually on your side of this issue when I was chairing that committee and I first heard about this. I thought it must be true until I found out what it cost."

    That's right : he went along with AGW until he found out he didn't like what he believed it was going to cost !

    Listening to the rest of that interview, Inhofe is living in a world of his own creation, constantly battling against those whom he calls "liberals", i.e. anyone to the left of Genghis Khan, it would seem.

    You can see what sort of rubbish he believes in when you look into the sources he brings out at the beginning - the "liberal" British Telegraph (actually columnist Christopher Booker in the famously right-wing Telegraph); the Financial Times (actually blogger Clive Crook in the Financial Times); and the UN and IPCC, or some blustering combination of the two, somehow (actually Hal Lewis's resignation letter from the APS, and Dr Philip Lloyd Pr Eng, MD - Industrial and Petrochemical Consultants).

    As for the Newsweek 'condemnation' and the study in the "liberal" Nature : Inhofe is seeing exactly what he wants to see, rather than what is actually there in real life. What a surprise...
  • Until the "Climategate" scandal, I chuckled like a middle-schooler when witty, sarcastic global warming denialists on the blogs mocked "Al Bore" for being a fat, hypocritical moneybags. I didn't want to believe in the "inconvenient truth" of global warming. I was in denial. Still, I was kind of worried in the back of my mind that global warming might be true.

    "Climategate" forced me to face my denialism. I read those e-mails and the nasty and mocking commentary about them, and then I read what the scientists actually were saying in their own words.

    I think Phil Jones's infamous BBC interview shows how consciously dishonest these few denialist scientists and loud-mouthed journalists are. They knew that ordinary people wouldn't understand what statistical significance means.

    The denialists are the cherry-pickers. Once I saw that the Republican Party was spreading these (-Snip-), I became a Democrat.

    When the Republican politicians come to my door or call on the phone for my vote, I tell them that the Republicans deny climate change so I won't be voting for them any more.

    I tell them that I believe the National Academy, the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the CIA, the EPA, NASA, NOAA, OSHA, the Pentagon, and Al Gore.

    If I can read both sides and figure it out, the Republican politicians can too. They are just paid (-Snip-) who don't care about the truth at all.

    Climategate made me pay attention to climate change, and I learned that it's not the climate scientists who are trying to trick us.

    Al Gore is probably not a bore. He can't possibly be as boring as some of those conspiracists on Faux News like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. I don't believe them at all any more. Every day they repeat the same conspiracy theories over and over and over and over! It is so boring! They are so self-righteous! And there is never any news!

    Al Gore is trying to learn about climate change and share what he is learning with the rest of us. That's what leaders do. I'm sure he makes some mistakes when he tries to translate what the scientists say into layman's terms; but I don't think he is lying to me like Senator Inhofe, Joe Barton, Attorney General Cuccinelli, James Delingpole, Anthony Watts, Sean Hannity, or Glenn Beck.
  • Utahn@76,

    Not sure what the exact issue is regarding Pat’s figure in your linked Forbes article, but it seems to center around the fact that he didn’t include the USGCRP caption which some apparently thought was relevant because it added the caveat to the image that “The data shown include disturbances that occurred on the nation’s large-scale “bulk” electric transmission systems. Most outages occur in local distribution networks and are not included in the graph.”

    I’ll be the first to admit to not to know what constitutes the “bulk” transmission system, but according to the National Hurricane Center’s review of the impacts of 1995 hurricane Opal, “Opal downed numerous trees, knocking out power to nearly 2 million people in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas.”—that certainly seems like it would qualify as a “bulk” impact to me and it seems that a graphic showing ‘Significant Weather-related U.S. Electric Grid Disturbances’ would have included that event. So I don't think Pat's conclusion would be altered any had he included the caption...in fact, it seems as if it may even have been strengthened.

    I suppose I could step into Gavin Schmidt’s post-Climategate role and try to answer each inquiry that you all have about Pat’s presentation of figures—but just as Gavin’s effort didn’t do much to change the minds of the “skeptics” I doubt my service would change the minds of the folks here at Skeptical Science (if the current thread is any indication).

    -Chip Knappenberger
    World Climate Report
  • Various news site threads attached to articles on GW. It's like trench warfare in cyberspace. Yet it's also an opportunity to model a better way of communicating that draws a mighty contrast to the mass of condemnatory one-liners filled with beautiful frankenwords like "libtard."

    I'm professionally interested in how misinformation spreads--how it changes, the rapidity of the spread of a meme, how entrenched the beliefs are, etc. Comment streams are a rich source of information, even when trolled by the apparatchiks of opinion-making organizations. It's kind of a game for me, even though there are real-world implications. I pick a few commenters who seem badly misinformed and belligerent, and I work them patiently, evenly-keeled, until I get them to start asking questions and admit that neither of us has a handle on absolute truth, but that a blanket condemnation is clearly a bad idea.

    One common starting point presents itself when people say things like "the climate has been changing for millions of years." I ask, "how do you know that?" And that, of course, presents a lovely paradox for them. Some never respond. Some crack open their can of critical thinking just a little and admit the situation is not as simple as "all climate scientists are liberal commies and frauds (climategate proves it!)."
  • Well, saying you will accept the results of a scientific study is only an issue if you are unwilling to follow where the science leads. With Watts now fishing for any excuse to dismiss the results it is pretty clear he is not willing to do so. His sudden insistence that peer review is vitally important (though crooked!) is a fine example of this.
    I also find the skeptic reliance on HadCRU to prove the earth is not warming while simultaneously insisting that Climategate proved Hadley cooked the books to be delicious irony.
  • When climategate broke, I told friendly skeptics 'the hockey stick doesn't matter'. That's because the subject is global heating, not atmospheric heating. SURE the hockey stick is important, if you want to know how global heating might impact our atmosphere and hence, our climate. But GLOBAL heating must be proven in the oceans, where 95% of all Earth's thermal mass (influenced by radiative factors) is located. You can turn the celebrated 'hockey stick' upside down, and Earth is still heating, if the ocean's show heating.

    Its like you were standing on a scale with 10 other guys, and you say the scale is going to go down because you've been on a diet. But the other guys weigh twice as much as you, and they are gaining weight. Lose all the weight you want to, it doesn't change the uptick of the scale.
  • When it comes to reporting on the vast underhanded "plots" of scientists, the 1953 Pravda is not so different than the modern tabloid version. Actually, Pravda is not so different from much of our own media and some politicians. That is what is so disturbing.

    After the CRU emails were published, the tabloid Pravda (30-11-2009) wrote an article titled "'Climategate' Exposes the Global Warming Hoax":

    Climategate’ is not an ordinary case of falsifying data by a few rogue scientists. The fraudulent theory of Global Warming has provided the basis for an international political movement which has the stated goal of completely restructuring the entire global economy based on that fraudulent theory. ‘Global Warming’ is a con game perpetrated by dishonest scientists and the government and corporate leaders who provide the corrupt scientists with opportunities for advancement.

    If we fail to stop the further politicization and institutionalization of the fraudulent theory of Global Warming, we will most certainly experience a future of ‘science’ controlled by government decree and of a world government that facilitates the operations of corporate industries while imposing severe restrictions and arbitrary taxes on the general public.

    That is a future which would fully justify resistance and rebellion among the international populations who will be the victims of this massive global fraud. If we fail to stop this fraudulent enterprise by legal means, we will certainly have a future of global oppression based on fraud, with its attendant institutionalized crimes, and whatever popular backlash might eventually result.
  • Where can I find a crtical review of "The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science"?

    I entered "Montford" into the SkS seach engine and came up with zilch.

    DeSomg Blog does not have Monford in it's listing of individuals involved in the global warming denial industry.
  • Why has this huge amount of useful work had a lot more publicity instead of the storm in a tea cup that was so-called "Climategate"
    Very good to see it being brought to our attention.
  • William O'Keefe, CEO of GMI, was an executive for 25 years at the American Petroleum Institute.

    If people want to lean more about GMI, see Crescendo to Climategate Cacophony, March 2010, which includes funding flows, various key people at GMI & elsewhere, activities, etc. It overlaps a little with MoD, but is focused elsewhere.

    Fortunately, Naomi&Erik; had already covered a lot of the earlier material, so I didn't need to repeat that.
  • With "Climategate" now little more than an embarrassing failed misinformation campaign, the denialosphere has begun a co-ordinated attempt to chill academic freedom.

    We know from "Climategate" that they have no shame, but it's increasingly clear that they should be ashamed.
  • Without question, undeniably, replication is the essence of science. But replication is also the process of falsification - trying to prove something wrong, not trying to prove it right.

    (-Snip-)

    (-Snip-)

    KR: "Reanalysis of raw data and "audits" are usually the work of the lazy."

    The reviewers of the Gergis article (-Snip-)

    The first notice time anybody suggested publicly that the article did not do what it said (which was before the article was withdrawn) came from people reanalysing what raw data had been made available.

    People here might not consider that role to be important, but I'm happy that there are people who are willing to actually go to those efforts.
  • Wolf #88:
    "So I'm afraid your points are incorrect from my understanding."
    No, my points are correct. I clearly demonstrated where Muller's comments are factually incorrect.

    You're arguing something different entirely. You're basically saying that even though what Muller said was wrong, he was right about the underlying science.

    That's a different issue which we have discussed elsewhere. Muller appears to focus on an obscure WMO report cover, which we agree was not well documented. However, the divergence problem was well documented in academic research, and in the IPCC reports. Frankly nobody even knew about this obscure WMO report until the Climategate emails were stolen, and I don't particularly care about it. I don't know why Muller is so focused on this obscure report cover.

    Regardless, it's beside the point. Muller made numerous incorrect statements, period. The fact that there's some sliver of truth behind them does not make his incorrect statements any less wrong. And as we'll see in future Muller Misinformation posts, Muller has this pattern of taking a sliver of truth and distorting it with misinformation, as he did here.
  • Wow, this thread has turned into a textbook example of the gish gallop! It includes the full gamut of long-debunked skeptic arguments, including the 'it's not warming', 'it's not CO2', 'it's the Sun', quotes from non-experts pretending to be experts, nearly all the utterly debunked 'climategate' memes, and a collection of others.

    Each time one argument is patiently debunked (by Rob, Tom, Daniel, Philippe and the many other excellent contributers here), either by reference to material avaialble on this site, or at other reputable sources, then another allegation is thrown in and no acknowledgement is made to the failure of the previous skeptic argument.

    And of course each long-debunked argument, often relating to research/events/data >5 years old is presented as if it might be new or controversial, when the simplest research shows it not to be the case.

    So, skeptics... is that really all you have? Nothing new to add to the mix? No new research or data that changes the consensus on AGW? Just perpetual gish galloping? Looks to me awfully like the OP's point is demonstrated valid!
  • You know, Si, I wouldn't mind so-called skeptics holding pro-AGW Climatologists to high standards-even "impossibly" high standards-if they were at least a little bit CONSISTENT. Take the Contrarian Bible "Heaven & Earth" by Ian Plimer. This book is so riddled with factual errors & misconceptions that it really belongs on the Fiction Shelf of the local book stores-yet the contrarians won't bear to listen to even the most reasonable criticisms of it. To paraphrase you-if the contrarian case is so solid, then why does Plimer need to resort to so many deliberate errors to bolster his case?
    Similarly, the recent paper by McLean has been thoroughly debunked, but still fellow contrarians hold it up as the Gold Standard of anti-AGW research.
    When people like yourself are prepared to roundly criticize the obvious errors from your side of the fence, then perhaps your concerns about AGW research might bear some weight. Until then, it just sounds like partisan ranting against uncomfortable facts. Indeed, your partisanship is revealed in your side-ways remark about ClimateGate (which has proven to be a massive storm-in-a-teacup) & the rather minor "errors" of the IPCC. Yes the IPCC have made some minor errors about the future impacts of global warming, but more than 20 years of anti-AGW research, & outright propaganda, has failed to poke even the smallest hole in the underlying science of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
  • You should be interested in the alternative opinion of “physicist, computer Programmer, environmental activist, financial expert” John Droz presented in his January article “Climategate: The Perils of Global Warming Models” (Note 1). This requires no embellishment from me as it reflects my own opinion perfectly. QUOTE:

    If a model has not been proven to fully reflect reality, then it has very limited use and should be treated like a horoscope. ..

    Wikipedia’s explanation about computer programmers: The discipline differs from many other technical professions in that programmers generally do not need to be licensed or pass any standardized (or governmentally regulated) certification tests in order to call themselves “programmers” or even “software engineers.” .. computer programming is all about making assumptions, and then converting these into mathematical equations. ..

    Some uninformed parties believe that the user has control of all the variables, and can manually (and accurately) change scenarios. That is incorrect, as the user-controlled elements only represent a small fraction of the actual number of factors that are built into the computer model. A similar fallacy is to think something like “we know the assumptions that the programmers made, and are adjusting accordingly.” This is wrong.

    In writing a computer program of any complexity, there are literally hundreds of assumptions made. The computer programmer does not reveal all these to his customer, for much the same reasons that an accountant does not tell his client all of the assumptions made in preparing a tax return. He goes over a few of the more basic items, and then says “sign here.” ..

    .. writing a computer model is a collaboration between scientist and programmer. .. if the scientist (inadvertently) gives incomplete or inaccurate data to the programmer to use in his creation, the result will likewise be wrong. And neither party will know it.

    There is still one more significant variable .. to take into account. After a computer model is generated, there is an interpreter (e.g., IPCC) that translates the “results” for politicians and the public (i.e., the media).

    Here’s a surprise: These public interpretations are influenced by such factors as political, religious, environmental, financial, and scientific opinions. In their public revelations, do the interpreters explain all of their underlying biases? By now you know the answer: absolutely not.

    When these are introduced into the equation we obviously have strayed so far from scientific fact that it is not even in sight anymore. ..

    So we need to think very carefully before we take major actions .. that are almost entirely based on computer models. What to do? Should we just scrap all computer models? No, .. Computer models have merit — but shouldn’t be the tail wagging the dog.

    We should realistically see computer models for what they are — tools to assist us in organizing our thoughts, and producers of highly subjective results that are simply starting points for real scientific analysis. Because of their inherent limitations (which I’ve just touched on here) all computer models should be treated with a very healthy degree of skepticism. To insure appropriate integrity, all computer models regarding matters of importance should be subjected to the rigors of scientific methodology.

    If they can’t accurately and continuously replicate the results of real-world data, then they should be discarded.

    Unfortunately, that is not what is happening.

    We have gotten so addicted to the illusion that these programs are accurate — and some have become so agenda driven — that we are now adjusting or discarding real-world data that doesn’t agree with the model. This is insane.

    If a model has not been proven to fully reflect reality, then it has very limited use and should be treated with the same degree of consideration that one might give a horoscope.

    NOTES:
    1) see http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=498

    Best regards, Pete Ridley
  • Your characterisation of science puts me in mind of a recent book on the OJ Simpson trial by Vincent Buglosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson in the 1960s.

    OJ Simpson, almost everyone now agrees, was guilty of murdering his ex-wife and her lover. There was blood evidence, he fled when the cops tried to arrest him, he had a history of violence etc. Yet his defence team persuaded the jury of three simple propositions:

    - There was a chain of evidence which had to be strong at every link.
    - Any broken link destroys the chain, and therefore the whole case ("If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit").
    - The chain was tainted by an irredeemably racist cop, and you could never be sure that the cop had not "fitted up" all the other evidence.

    This is similar to the case against AGW - ALL the evidence must be beyond doubt, a single contrary piece of evidence "falsifies" the AGW case, "corrupt" scientists cannot be trusted ("Climategate").

    Bugliosi counters with another metaphor - the evidence is not a chain but a rope of many fibres. Some fibres may be weak, and even fail. But overall, it the combined strength of the fibres that make the case. One "falsification" does not destroy a case or a science - usually that fibre can be repaired. A jury may discount a single piece of contrary evidence if the remainder of the evidence is sufficiently strong (in their estimation). The can still make a decision "beyond reasonable doubt".

    Bugliosi's view is close to the science philosopher's view of science - only when evidence against a theory begins to accumulate (several fibres start to break) will scientists contemplate a new or alternative theory. These are what Thomas Kuhn called "paradigm shifts".

    Climate science has a pretty strong bundle of fibres comprising the evidence, which you set out here. The AGW paradigm is paramount in climate science, but of course is never 100% beyond doubt.
You are welcome to reuse this content in any non-commercial use with attribution. Skeptical Science is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. For commercial use, please contact me.

THE ESCALATOR

(free to republish)

THE DEBUNKING HANDBOOK

BOOK NOW AVAILABLE

The Scientific Guide to
Global Warming Skepticism

Smartphone Apps

iPhone
Android
Nokia

© Copyright 2012 John Cook
Home | Links | Translations | About Us | Contact Us