Global Warmers having a bit of a meltdown...

[HonestChieffan]

This should be fun to watch...
Another source who will be all over this is: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/1...iles-released/



Global Warming Fraud
Posted by Dan Karipides

http://wizbangblog.com/content/2009/...ming-fraud.php

Published: November 20, 2009 - 9:45 AM The University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has had its email system hacked and a large amount of data released to the internet. The director of the unit (Dr. Phil Jones) has confirmed the leaked emails are genuine. The real story is the suspicious content of the emails. For example:


Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.
I've spent a majority of my life working in the sciences. Phrases like trick of adding in the real temps and hide the decline should never occur in relation to honest science. From another email:

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.
Note the bias in the view. With lack of evidence of increasing temperatures the conclusion is that the observation system must be wrong. It has to be warming, we just can't measure it. Hot Air has much much more.

I can promise you I will continue to follow this story. Details to be posted as they are uncovered.


Another source who will be all over this is: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/1...iles-released/

[tiptap]

Be careful. How do you know that the released e-mails are truly intact and not added or tampered with in their release. An admission the their mail was compromised is not the same as saying every e-mail is correctly posted.

[HonestChieffan]

All I said was it will be interesting to watch. I will be as big a skepic on the emails as I am on the phoney data that GW's always use.

However as you saw in the posted info "The director of the unit (Dr. Phil Jones) has confirmed the leaked emails are genuine. "


Damn it all.

[tiptap]

The leaks yes but take your scary wording above. How do I know from so little in the Email that this isn't an attempt to match the equations to the actual data sets. So that the equations can be refined to match the data, just like someone in oil would use real measurements to get an emperical equation. Those are easier to store with less memory in programs on computers for in running initial points for Differential Equations. That is different, quite different than tweaking the data sets.

[ClevelandBronco]

Good. tiptap's here.

What's the weather supposed to be like at Invesco this Sunday?

[tiptap]

I don't do weather, though I have had two graduate classes in meteorology. I will predict that the Broncos will still be slipping in performance against the sunny Chargers.

[ClevelandBronco]

Originally Posted by tiptap

I don't do weather, though I have had two graduate classes in meteorology. I will predict that the Broncos will still be slipping in performance against the sunny Chargers.

Dude, you only do weather.

[tiptap]

Ok lets see Denver. Cold nights moderate day temperatures. And I hear great skiing conditions. Of that we are all happy.

[tiptap]

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

There are of course lessons to be learned. Clearly no-one would have gone to this trouble if the academic object of study was the mating habits of European butterflies. That community’s internal discussions are probably safe from the public eye. But it is important to remember that emails do seem to exist forever, and that there is always a chance that they will be inadvertently released. Most people do not act as if this is true, but they probably should.

It is tempting to point fingers and declare that people should not have been so open with their thoughts, but who amongst us would really be happy to have all of their email made public?

Let he who is without PIN cast the the first stone.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...ack/#more-1853

[HonestChieffan]

the search for plausable deniability

[tiptap]

Well like teabaggers, some know nothing of discernment.

[Bootlegged]

Sorry, tiptap......THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS

[Stewie]

This is rather disturbing if true. Our R&D group fired two people about 10 years ago for manipulating/falsifying data. That's a serious, serious issue of integrity that has no place in science.

As for the non-warming of the climate over the last 10 years, I personally think no one has an understanding of something so complex. They try to make it out to be something as simple as levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and use their most authoritative voice. I don't buy it. It may sound feasible to the layman, but not this engineer.

For people with some scientific knowledge:

The "absolute" stance of CO2ers reminds me of when the R&D group I am a part of was doing research on a complex chemical reaction in a product we developed and now manufacture. We were perplexed by reactions not behaving the way we wanted. During most of the development we went crazy trying to solve the problem. Impurities? Surface area irregularities? Measurement problems? What was it? We were baffled.

We ran thermal analysis, surface area analysis, and x-ray diffraction ad nauseum. We finally concluded that surface area irregularities increased or decreased activity during the reaction. It was a consensus and we could prove it, surface area was the problem. We wrote a paper for senior mgt. with solid data and a perfect explanation of the anomalies. The problem is we were COMPLETELY WRONG! Of course, senior mgt. didn't have the education or understanding to refute our findings.

Fast forward about six months. While doing more research with a couple of chemicals we used in the previous development the problem was solved. One component (barium peroxide) is used to maintain rheology in our reactions, BUT, as we found out, it is also slightly catalytic in our reactions. Bingo! Square peg meet square hole! It blew our entire previous theory out of the water even though we were convinced we were right at the time. We had to explain our embarrassment to senior mgt., but they didn't mind since it wasn't a big money mistake. It did increase our yields, which is the goal in any chemical manufacturing endeavor.

My point is that we were convinced we were right. Only by accident did we solve our problem. We were myopic in our approach to understand the cause, not stepping back and looking at other options. CO2 is the climate changers "surface area problem" that they can prove, but the "barium peroxide" answer is out there and is a much more elegant.

[Saul Good]

Originally Posted by tiptap

The leaks yes but take your scary wording above. How do I know from so little in the Email that this isn't an attempt to match the equations to the actual data sets. So that the equations can be refined to match the data, just like someone in oil would use real measurements to get an emperical equation. Those are easier to store with less memory in programs on computers for in running initial points for Differential Equations. That is different, quite different than tweaking the data sets.

Sounds like you're twisting the evidence to make it match your previously held view instead of adjusting your view in accordance with the evidence. It's very similar to what these scientists did. What line of work are you in by the way?

[Saul Good]

Here's some excerpts from the emails:

From Michael E. Mann:

Dear Phil and Gabi,
I’ve attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people.


From Nick McKay:

The Korttajarvi record was oriented in the reconstruction in the way that McIntyre said. I took a look at the original reference – the temperature proxy we looked at is x-ray density, which the author interprets to be inversely related to temperature. We had higher values as warmer in the reconstruction, so it looks to me like we got it wrong, unless we decided to reinterpret the record which I don’t remember. Darrell, does this sound right to you?


From Tom Wigley:

We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.


From Phil Jones:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.


From Kevin Trenberth:

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.


From Michael Mann:

Perhaps we'll do a simple update to the Yamal post, e.g. linking Keith/s new page--Gavin t? As to the issues of robustness, particularly w.r.t. inclusion of the Yamal series, we actually emphasized that (including the Osborn and Briffa '06 sensitivity test) in our original post! As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.


From Phil Jones:

The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here! ... The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate! Cheers Phil
PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !


From Michael E. Mann:

Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC [RealClimate.org - A supposed neutral climate change website] Rein any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.


From Phil Jones:

If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them.