Climategate: Skeptics Can’t Relax Yet — Real Fraud Is Measured in Dollar Signs, Not Degrees
The Climategate files have led to a reexamination of the science behind climate change, and the arguments of the so-called climate skeptics have been vindicated. It’s time for them to take a deserved victory lap.
But skeptics can’t afford to get cocky.
Elsewhere in Pajamas Media, there are a number of reactions to the bombshell interview with Dr. Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and one of the first people to feel the consequences of Climategate. Those other PJM articles cover, in much greater detail than I will, the implications of the interview in which Jones begins to come clean about the machinations of the climate clique. Clarity regarding the science is important, but it’s not the science that has made “climate change” what it is today. To understand that, we need to look at what has really driven the issue into prominence.
To understand that — as always — we must ask: Who benefits, and how?
Start with the scientists. An academic scientist rarely gets wealthy. There have been a lot of mistaken comments over the last months about how specific academics have gotten rich from million-dollar grants, or from half-million dollar “stimulus” awards.
Academics don’t function like that. The principal investigator doesn’t take home the grant. The money is instead split with the university, and the remainder allocated under strict accounting rules to pay for graduate assistantships, post-doctoral appointments, research expenses, and things like travel. (See a discussion of this at PJM: “Climategate: Who Benefits when the IPCC Lies.”)
The academic scientist’s reward isn’t directly from the money. The grants mean more opportunities for research, more publications, and more press coverage, all of which contribute towards the quest for the Holy Grail of academic life — tenure at a well-known institution.
Increasingly, universities cut out indirection and simply let it be known that tenure doesn’t come unless you bring in a large dollar amount of external support.
When the issue of climate change became politically charged, publishing a paper on global warming put you on a fast track: There was grant money to be had, lots of it … if you supported the apocalyptic CO2-driven model.
There were publications to be had, if — as we saw from the Climategate emails — you supported the climate clique’s theory. (If you were a journalist, as we say with Andrew Revkin at the New York Times, it helped to be known as “reliable.”)
There were conferences to speak at. Those conferences, centered on a popular topic with UN support, tended to be in places like Tahiti, the Canadian Rockies, or Swiss ski resorts. But you’d only get invited if you were contributing to the Cause.
Express any note of skepticism — as, for example, the Pielkes have — and you could expect a spanking. First you would lose access to the good journals; eventually you would suffer from glaring ad hominem attacks.
Once the theory of anthropogenic, CO2-forced global warming was politically established, it’s no wonder that the “scientific consensus” leaned in that direction.
So how did the theory become politically established?
Some true believers among the scientists, like James Hansen of NASA, had been pushing the notion that humans were ruining the world since long before the AGW theory was popular. These true believers pressed their agenda with politicians, and found plenty who saw it as important.
The politicians tended to be on the left side of the political spectrum. There is a natural confluence of interests among believers who feel people should be forced to reduce their environmental impact and politicians who feel that industry is inherently suspect and must be controlled by government.
Excellent piece, Charlie. Don’t overlook the “Investors Group on Climate Change (IGCC)- where the BBC has invested much of its pension fund.
But then don’t overlook the naked politics in play, either: it might be worth a look into Former ERA chief and current Climate Czarina Carol Browner’s incolvement with the Socialist International’s “Commission on Global Governance.”
The intersection of big money and power politics is where one finds Mussolini-style Corporatism.
Mr. Martin is correct. Until the people who financed and hoped to profit from this evil scheme are behind bars, and their ill-gotten gains confiscated, this situation will continue. While we are fighting AGW alarmism on the scientific field, we need to bring in lawyers to address legal issues, and put pressure on corporations supporting this hoax to withdraw their financial support. Consumer boycotts against companies advocating for cap and trade would make CEO’s think twice about associating their corporate name with this hoax.
Mr. Martin,
The appropriate model to follow here might be that defined in 18 United States Code section 1961, et seq. The collective “group” of scientific institutions doing so-called research into global warming seems to constitute a racketeer-influenced corrupt organization (RICO) with the predicate racketeering acts being interstate wire fraud (emailed fraudulent misrepresentations).
“The academic scientist’s reward isn’t directly from the money. The grants mean more opportunities for research, more publications, and more press coverage, all of which contribute towards the quest for the Holy Grail of academic life — tenure at a well-known institution.”
I consider tenure as direct financial compensation. These scientists may not have acquired enough money to move next door to Bill Gates, but they are also not exactly living in poverty. We can only guess at the their extra earnings over the last twenty some years. Still, I suspect that the global warming crusade minimally added another $30,000 annually into their bank accounts. And if I am indeed right—that works out to roughly $600,000. It sure sounds good to me! They might not have been able to afford a $250,000 Bentley. Still, a $65,000 Mercedes Benz in the garage looks awfully nice.
Because the climate change band wagon has been adopted as the umbrella issue covering nearly all of the myriad environmental “concerns” we also have to follow trails through all sorts of “conservation” efforts.
Illustrative is the newly published (January, 2010) document, “Nature, Carbon and Climate change in British Columbia” wherein a group of major environmental organizations, including the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) Initiative call for the legislature of British Columbia to convert an additional minimum of 35% of the province’s land mass into “an interconnected climate conservation network” where land is managed for biodiversity and carbon sequestration.
If they succeed, it would mean that more than 50% of one of the most resource-rich Canadian provinces would be locked away from most productive use. Permanently.
Y2Y is the first implementation of a continental-scale wildlife and corridor buffer system in North America. At least four others are already envisioned by proponents.
The document is available at: http://www.y2y.net/data/1/rec_docs/726_NewClimate_Report_reduced.pdf
The global warming hoax may crash faster than you think. It is a lot harder collecting those trillions of dollars from people and corporations if they think they are being played.
- …the questions about the science have got to provide the examination of the financial and political machinery of the climate cartel.
Which had better include the fading Left Wing Media’s ongoing criminal complicity. Their blackout of Climategate exemplifies the same partisan suppression of information we saw with the John Edwards Scandal – openly acknowledged and reported by every information source other than the same lying shills in media who boasted of handing BHO and his marxist agenda a 15% advantage in 2008.
“Which had better include the fading Left Wing Media’s ongoing criminal complicity.”
I would not describe it as criminal. A lot of it had to do with outright laziness. I would bet money that these journalists were amply provided with ubiquitous “media packets.” This means in the real world that their articles were mostly written for them. They merely had to spend a few hours editing and collating the finished product. Also, how often were some of them paid an “honorarium” to participate in discussion groups devoted to exploring the “media’s response to the global warming crisis.” Tom Friedman reportedly is paid $75,000 per speech. He would most assuredly have earned a lot less money had he not jumped aboard the global warming express.
“The academic scientist’s reward isn’t directly from the money.”
Well, sort of.
No, the scientist cannot directly spend the grant money, but grant money can make life nice. First, grant money can be used to pay for equipment, and equipment can include better lab and office furniture. Grant money can be used to pay for research assistants, who occasionally just happen to be spouses or significant others. Grant money can pay for travel to academic conferences. Finally, and this is a big one, grant money can also be used to buy a researcher out of his or her teaching obligations. This extra leisure time allows the researcher to spend more time working on the grant…or maybe allows the researcher to spend more time on consulting and other projects which do generate direct income.
As I’ve said on this forum before, if you starve the beast, you starve the liberal/progressive/left/democrat agenda. And when I say starve Im not just talking about balanced budgets–I’m talking about a cessation of borrowing as well.
Low taxes, balanced budgets, and NO governmental borrowing… sounds like something what republican and independent voters could go for after the Obama debacle, right?
The problem is that in it’s current form the Republican party is about as believable as a schmuck telling the judge after his 2nd DWI that he’s gonna swear off the sauce… just don’t revoke his driver’s license.
The Republican Party need to be Reformed with it’s first rule being ZERO DEFICIT SPENDING AND NO BORROWING!
And when I say rule I mean this:Any Republican legislator or executive who violates this rule will be kicked out of the party with NO second chance, ever.
Who is with me?
A brief touch of jocularity on the subject:
http://www.freecarbonoffsets.com/home.do;jsessionid=8A22D58487A75370CC00D1A727C58FE5
That is all quite a wonderful theory about prosecuting fraud if the U.S. had an attorney general who was not a political hack. Until there is equal justice under the law for both elected officials and citizens then the perps will continue to be treated as rock stars and the next administration will forgive them.
Most everyone still dont understand your hatred of those that argue about whether or not there is global warming.
Is it something that means something? or is it something that this site is really upset about?
Just Wondering….
Thanks for the article….I think….
Sorry, folks, I was up late and back up early doing radio (call your local talk radio station and ask for me; what the hell, it couldn’t hurt) and I’m going to be a little more brief that usual.
#1,#2: I agree. There is more coming on the finance part of the story, and it continues to look to me like the really black stuff.
#3 Tom: One thing I’m not is A Lawyer; I’ll leave speculation about RICO charges to others, My horseback guess is that the prosecution would be tough going because you’d have to make the case that these people knew they were corrupt; mens rea might be an real issue.
#4,#8 David, #9 Paul: As I’ve said, I don’t consider a good tenured position as actual wealth; I know too many people — none of them me unfortunately — who have accumulated real wealth from startup companies and the like. That doesn’t mean tenure isn’t pretty cushy, especially if you are getting invited to conferences in five-star resorts in Tahiti and the like. David, your point about the media is a good one: Tom Friedman and Andrew Revkin keep their positions and access by being “reliable”, and when Revkin was threatened with being frozen out for being too critical it was a real threat.
#13 Poor: I’m having a bit of a tough time following what you’re saying; I’m guessing you’re not a native English speaker, so I sympathize. God knows my German is pretty fractured sometimes. (Or Fraktured, heh heh.) The one thing I think I can answer is that I’m a “lukewarmist”: I think it’s clear there’s been warming since 1600 at least; I think it’s possible that humans have had a hand in that warming, but I’m not sure that I think CO2 greenhouse is the primary reason and I’m not sure of the magnitude; I do think that spending trillions on CO2 remediation before we have a clear idea of magnitude and mechanism is bad planning.
I also increasingly think that the opportunity for some people to skim billions off carbon trading and good old-fashioned graft has become a pernicious influence on the science, along with the influence of radical true believers like Jim Hansen. Until we sort that out, it’s going to be hard to get clarity on the science.
Those other PJM articles cover, in much greater detail than I will, the implications of the interview in which Jones begins to come clean about the machinations of the climate clique.
Nice essay, Charlie. The “big” money was going to be made by guilt-tripping Western countries through the “soft socialism” and wealth redistribution…and letting the leftist Democrat insiders gobble at the trough …a trillion dollar worldwide enterprise. Actually…smacks of RICO in some ways.
And, I don’t want to hijack the thread, just a quick point if I may, Charlie. I’ve read that Phil Jones interview a few times, because I just couldn’t get my arms around what he was saying…and what might have been hidden between the lines.
He didn’t come clean, as far as I’m concerned. He didn’t even begin to come clean. He nudged his toes up to the line…and then weasel-worded his way out of nearly every answer.
He didn’t ever consider it a “settled” science…and doesn’t know anyone who does. Huh? They certainly fed that beast in every conceivable manner they could.
That interview allowed Jones to slither around the truth, but…this ought to be fully, honestly and independently investigated. From top to bottom.
Charlie Martin would do well to add:
a) the raw data used to generate global temperature records are, and always have been, publicly available from weather stations, university libraries, and in the scientific literature;
b) the methods of producing global temperature records from the data are and always have been publicly available in the scientific literature;
c) both NOAA and GISS have always made their code publicly available;
d) the three main climate science centers (GISS, NOAA, East Anglia) produce models and temperature records that agree with each other within the uncertainty of the calculations;
e) no climate skeptics have used the publicly available raw data to produce a global temperature record or a climate model that disagrees with any of the “mainstream” ones
I would also love to hear that Charlie Martin has bothered to read any of the papers published in the last thirty years by any of the “mainstream” climate scientists.
All’s fair in love, war, and politics. However, there are recognized institutional standards for doing science. If those institutions and their people gamed the federal grant system doing bogus science to get federal dollars for their cause, however well intentioned, there is a United States Code that applies to that state of affairs. 18 USC sec. 371.
“If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense
against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any
agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of
such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy,
each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than
five years, or both.
If, however, the offense, the commission of which is the object
of the conspiracy, is a misdemeanor only, the punishment for such
conspiracy shall not exceed the maximum punishment provided for
such misdemeanor.”
So Gabriel, if the data are so convincing then why ‘hide the decline?’ Why refuse to respond to FOIA requests? Why publish false claims about glaciers melting, amazon rainforests disappearing, etc? Who is kidding who?
When you get time, google Enron Corporation, look at their Business Model, Tax Dollars at work.
Note, General Electric Co. purchased the Enron Wind Mill division, and the Tax Payer money that funded the Wind Mill Manufacturing and application.
The majority of the Wind Mills funded with the Obama Stimilus Money, were manufactured in Europe. The American Companies did not participate in the “Jobs” program.
A couple of old thought come to mind:
There is no thing as a free lunch.
Follow the Money.
Finally: There is no difference between and Republican and a Democrat. They are both parasites upon the American Freedoms.
“…Which had better include the fading Left Wing Media’s ongoing criminal complicity.”
I would not describe it as criminal…”
It may not be criminal, but it is scandalous that it is only the blogosphere which features direct links between some of the major architects of AGW, ie, Maurice Strong and Al Gore, and that this link has not been examined as I far as I know, in the MSM.
Trillions of dollars are being spoken about here, enough to lift millions of people out of poverty, and to all intents and purposes this money is going towards an unholy cartel of politicians and climate scientists.
If this is true then it is a scandal like none before.
Maybe it’s time, once more for some Days of Rage.
#16 Gabriel, as with the last time we went through this, there’s a very good reason I won’t add your a-e: I don’t believe they are true. (a) for example, is either false, or Phil Jones’ recent confession of not keeping good records and of losing data is false. Since the confession is a :statement against interest”, it seems more likely, but in any case I’d leave it to you to decide for yourself in which case the falsehood lies.
Similarly, as another example, (e) is false: as raw data has become available, skeptical investigators have reconstructed the process leading to the “accepted” data and shown that the processes are questionable, and that slightly different, and perfectly reasonable, assumptions lead to wildly different results.
I can assure you that I’ve read a good bit of the “mainstream” literature, including all zillion pages of AR4.
But look: they’re letting me have a little more editorial input on this story. You can contact me at chasrmartin AT gmail. If you’d like to propose a pro-AGW-model article to cover this stuff, I’d urge the editors to publish it.
#17 Don, as I was saying to Tom above, I think it would be pretty tough to make a case that there had been conscious fraud. There is a lot more chance, I think, of scientific misconduct allegations being pressed through the Office of Scientific Integrity, or whatever the hell they call it now. People have been reprimanded for falsifying records and poor record handling in the past.
21. Charlie Martin:
abiet that proving a case for conscious fraud would be difficult.
HOW do you explain so called scientists claiming (and attacking those who question) that the science was settled is anything but conscious fraud.
it was not settled by any stretch and the scientists knew it ..that is why they were hiding the decline. that is why they attacked people for not letting the science be settled.
a modern day inquisition.
Gabriel Hanna is either simply ignorant, or is spreading misinformation. What isn’t at all available is the raw temperature data. Only the “adjusted”, or “value added” (as the warming fabulists put it) temperature data is available, if even that. In most cases, access to even the “value added” data has been refused to researchers. Moreover, no “process” by which the raw temperature data is “adjusted” is recorded.
Making it up as they go along as the warming fabulists have been doing is not science, bur rather scientific fraud, and as all has been done with public funds, serious legal prosecution would be in order.
“I think it would be pretty tough to make a case that there had been conscious fraud.”
Very few of these people consciously engaged in fraudulent behavior. No, they just lied to themselves. They wanted to believe! These scientists and journalists reside in a culture that amply rewards them for jumping on the global warming bandwagon. One does not need to be another John Calvin to realize the inherent sinfulness of human nature. That is why our Founding Fathers argued for checks and balances. Progressivism simply fails to understand the at least metaphorical reality of Original Sin.
Poor Citizen again displays his complete lack of knowledge of the subject under discussion and his left wing liberal BIAS. Listen ‘POOR’ nobody here is claiming the the Climate does not CHANGE, it gets warmer it gets cooler it is a NATURAL process which has existed since the dawn of time and over which MAN has absolutely no control or INFLUENCE at all. So while we can adapt to the fluctuations of the Climate we cannot CONTROL it.
Unfortunately for people like you and for left wing moonbats in general CONTROL over the populace in general was the ONLY aim you had and now a huge hole has been blown in the SCAMS and LIES that were being used to get such control.
#16 Gabriel. Your assertions are either factually incorrect, or misleading. For example, station meta-data is often not available (look at the current problem with Jones and the Chinese stations). The raw data is sometimes only available to other government organizations, or for a high price. The methods described in the literature have been shown, in some cases, to not be as expected – because of software errors.
Beyond that, the use of surface temperature stations as a proxy for the change in heat content of the earth’s surface region (including oceans) is fraught with errors, including but not limited to: very poor spatial sampling; discontinuous time series; urban heat island effect; misplacement of stations (such as next to heat sources); undocumented changes in station data; micro/miso meteorological effects.
While researchers have attempted to correct for these, ultimately it is probably not possible to measure temperature changes of fractions of a degree in data this bad. It is for this reason that the ARGO buoys were deployed – upper ocean heat content is a much, much better diagnostic measurement. The ARGO system only has a few years of data (showing, for that short time, flat heat content), but in a few decades that data will provide us with far better information than we will ever get from fiddling with thermometric data, or trying to sort out the principal components of tree ring variance.
Yes – let’s talk about the money. Let’s not bother with millions, though – or even mere billions. Let’s go straight to the motherlode:
“The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) is an organisation based in the United Kingdom which works with shareholders and corporations to disclose the greenhouse gas emissions of major corporations.
The CDP represents 475 institutional investors, with a combined $55 trillion under management.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Disclosure_Project
Now that’s real money. $55,000,000,000,000. With those kind of sums you don’t just get to influence things – you could, for instance, actually make the rules. You might be tempted to lean on anyone who doesn’t want to play by your rules. They confess their carbon sins – or face ‘excommunication’.
Then again, the CDP could just be nice guys who only want the best for the planet and its people. Your call.
But remember: fifty. five. trillion. dollars.
#22 SAC:HOW do you explain so called scientists claiming (and attacking those who question) that the science was settled is anything but conscious fraud.
Easy. They believe it to be true. It’s not like it’s never happened in science before, viz, the nutrition information cascade that Gary Taubes wrote about in Good Calories Bad Caloris, or Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift.
But Charlie … it may be difficult to PROVE conscious fraud, but the mere act of being put through the legal system with “discovery” and questioning by the plaintiffs attorneys and the Court will bring more of the “facts” to the surface and you can guarantee that the substance of the fraud will be uncovered.
One of the fraudsters is guaranteed to turn on the others in order to be dismissed out of the lawsuit and the scheme will be exposed.
Criminals always behave that way.
Following up on Charlie’s comment… Richard Feynman wrote the following (from Wikipedia):
Science as a process ultimately removes the effects of self delusion and other human failures. It doesn’t prevent them from happening along the way.
Charlie:
Good paper! I’ve been following all of this since Climategate release on Nov 19th (I think it was). The leaker or whistleblower should rightfully be awarded a very special medal of honor, it was a very patriotic task! And my sincere thanks to PJM for following this as detailed as you have!
And YES, we need to follow the MONEY! I want to see an explicitly detailed list of names, amounts, reasons/justification. Let the people form their own opinion of its validity.
LameStreamMedia (LSM) needs to be blasted severely for improper coverage of this, but I wouldn’t even know who to contact any more, haven’t wathed any LSM in years – with the 300+ cable channels I have, I don’t need any damn LSM! I haven’t blocked their channels in my cable box, though close, and occasionally I’ll pop in to listen to an Olbermann wild RANT that I’d heard about. But that is maybe a monthly occurrence at best…
For Phil Jones, the suicide he considered a little bit back might have been an easier way out. He still OWES US a much more thorough explanation of what was done. And I’m perturbed with his claim of ‘shabby record keeping’… That claim is worthy of some serious punk-slapping at minimum! (yeah, I’m a conservative redneck)
BUT, along with my other requests here, I want our politicians who followed suit on this AGW theme to be blasphemed! They need to be UN-elected! I already know there’s a good chance of Ms Boxer getting dumped by Chuck DeVore. I’m not sure about Feinstein’s re-election cycle, but she needs to get dumped for many reasons! Her email to me in response to my Climategate events early this month was the most intelligence-insulting piece of trash I’ve ever read!
Also, for CA governor, there seems to be a good amount of suspicion of Meg Whitman being RINO is dress (http://www.flashreport.org/featured-columns-library0b.php?faID=2010021207335259). CA doesn’t need another RINO, we’ve tolerated Arnie much longer than he deserves! Hint hint – perhaps this might be a good article suggestion for someone with PJM…
On scientists involved in this AGW RUSE, they won’t ever be charged, yet less anything proven. The best we can achieve is their name is dirtied enough they’ll NEVER get a similar job. Names/action/links and need to be exposed!
We’re going to be digging at this, exposing this, for a very long time! I was amazed when we got into January and there was still coverage, and even at Drudge… We’ve got a long ways to go with this, it’s very deep! It’s got about 30+ years of intent wrapped into it! (as a former off-road racer, I’ve been following environmental extremism since late ’70s – there is much history to it all – but this one is about MONEY, they just acquired tactics from Earth First? and GreenPeas).
I wish you all the best with further investigation and discovery this issue! The remaining parties involved will be more reluctant than PJ to discuss much of anything.
Now the question is, how do we get our money back?
A repeat from this corner!
Those who need to barbequed are Google, Apple and Kleiner Perkins. Then plug-in Geo. Soros and you have a foursome. Big buck and a funnel that remains full until their bluff is called. Add Bill Gates if you want , but he’s personally clueless. They funneled billions to Gore and the believers to create and extend the hoax. Until those with deep pockets can have their credit cards stopped, it will go on and on like an endless loop as these guys are that committed to the fraud with no reprieve. Start by stopping the purchase of their products and go to the KPCB web site and learn all of their investments and start to put pressure on them. Ask the hard questions about how their going to contribute to global warming is a start. It could be fun.
There is bound to be an A list of perps on this topic.
Publish it here.
We need to the Attorney’s General of each state that invested in this to file a waste, fraud and abuse charge against the universities involved, get them disbarred from every doing government/state work again, RICO the individuals where we can and other wise run the rest out of them out of the university system or we will have another topic picked and they will be off and running again. Before global warming there was ‘nano’ that turned out to be a bust. We need to stop this waste, fraud and abuse of the tax payer money. I want my money back.. Do the states not get this?
Perhaps ending Tenure would stop this run away non ethical behavior… We must get the university system back under control and get them out of the business model and put them back in the education model. Each university that is involved in this has a business unity whose sole purpose is to get patents and capture intellectual property for the university. What happened to education. It lost out to making money. The university system is the root cause of the mess. Get them back focused on education.
Thanks Charlie, great article; but left me hollow. Why? Because this whole scam is so absolutely massive and seemingly ‘un-bustable’, that it’s overwhelming.
The place to begin; the centre of the web is: George Soros – known Esperantist with a goal of “one world government” and a finger in many many many BIG money pies, as you know.
Then there’s the founder of the COR (Club of Rome), David Rockafeller (spelling) and all the minions with the same goal and ideology, including Gore and Strong.
The U.N. and the OIC are at least joined at the hip in attempting to bring down the USA. A primary objective for the implementation of a “one world government’ goal.
Everything else is simply peripheral – AGW is a vehicle, Carbon is the currency and this thing is a monster; a monster that is already scared. So let’s corner the rat and see how much fight it has left, (no pun intended).
Charlie/David Thompson et al
I’m not so sanguine about there being no fraud or criminal enterprise behind the “true believers” here.
It is one thing to be a “scientist” who believes in a hypothesis and doggedly pursues it through trial and error.
It is quite another thing to come across hurdles and obstacles…and deliberately hide them from public view, change the data to make your hypothesis appear to be something it is not, invade the province of peer review by blockading information and legitimate inquiry (often by slandering and smearing those making inquiry) and then declaring that the matter is “settled”…and anyone who doesn’t genuflect at your altar is a member of the flat earth society or equivalent to those who deny evolution.
(the latter, a coded leftist slam against faith-based folks…who are portrayed repeatedly as mouth breathing morons, incapable of grasping even basic information…which, apparently…is why that very information needs to be fraudulent, “for their own good”)
The criminal enterprise is the stifling of the debate through means that are often vicious and slanderous. Moreover, the total control of the principled debate that should have taken place on this subject, prior to the creation of schemes so vast and involving taxpayer expenditures in the trillions of dollars…is a part of a grander scheme related to a variety of subjects.
The “wealth redistribution” via environmental “cover” is but one tentacle in the creeping soft socialism that invades Western pocketbooks and purses.
Stealth legislation is not always the brutish taking of money from the “rich”…which is always paraded as only impacting “1%” of the population. When you boil down all the ways that “wealth redistribution” is being attempted to get into Western pockets, really dig into it and unravel the plans, intentions, and costs to taxpayers…this is nothing less than a RICO scheme.
Our lovely entrenched media are silent co-conspirators. They bury stories and cover the tracks of those who mean to install soft socialism and wealth redistribution.
The scientists who push this agenda are no less conspiratorial. It is beneath contempt for them to only provide information to “friendly” entrenched media types…knowing full well that legitimate inquiry could not be possible in such a redacted form.
Worse, smearing and slandering anyone who persists in obtaining access to legitimate inquiry is an affirmative act of deceit.
When we are deprived of facts, when the information we receive is utterly devoid of serious inquiry and inspection…when virtually every issue is clouded with the heavily shaded soft socialism taint of “false but accurate”, “truthiness” and “hidden items not included”…we are being ripped off in a way so nefarious and so septic…that we are wholly incapable of self-governing this land of ours.
Our information stream is so full of lies, distortions and hidden key elements we are being deprived of the very oxygen of democracy.
And, if that isn’t a crime…then we should throw out the criminal justice system and start over. We deserve better. Democracy deserves better. And, we aren’t ever going to get it, unless we understand this fraud…and demand that it cease immediately.
Thank you for this illuminating, well researched, article. Sunlight is an effective disinfectant.
28. Charlie Martin:
#22 SAC:HOW do you explain so called scientists claiming (and attacking those who question) that the science was settled is anything but conscious fraud.
Easy. They believe it to be true. It’s not like it’s never happened in science before, viz, the nutrition information cascade that Gary Taubes wrote about in Good Calories Bad Caloris, or Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift.
I agree it would be hard. But why the fraud if they are right then the science should prove that they are correct. They are scientists not just the general public and claim this to be their field of knowledge. (as they so often ridiculed us for not being scientists)
if it was one isolated data set I could ignore it.
I think that no one will be punished criminally but I also think they should be. To me it isn’t a whole lot different then Enron.
Fraud !
sin embargo …great work Charlie
#34 gibtx: Oh, there is, and the list starts with Blood and Gore. (Oh, this is going to be a great source of humor.) Rajendra Pachauri is another name to watch for. But do remember that this isn’t every scientist. I mentioned nutrition and continental drift; Glenn Reynolds recently mentioned Michael Bellesisles’ gun “research”.
This is the sort of thing that’s unusual enough it leads to books being written.
See also John Moore’s Feynmann quote.
Charlie,
‘If you’d like to propose a pro-AGW-model article to cover this stuff, I’d urge the editors to publish it.’
I don’t think that’s going to happen at this point. Not in a way that would allow for open examination of the methodology. As long as so many reputations depend on preventing that level of scrutiny, that door will stay locked tight. It will remain so until it is pried open in the legal rather than scientific arena.
If it does happen, I think that the contortions required to establish the provenance and integrity of the data sets used as input and defending the desired result driven modifications of the algorithms used in the modeling would be worth the read. I think it more likely you’d get regurgitation of old defenses of the original bad science married with ‘stupid right wingers and/or stupid creationist level skeptics should shut up and let the smart set tell them what’s what’ that you get from the BC and Gabriel Hanna types.
#40 JPT: The thing is that Gabriel keeps coming along and expressing his outrage that I’m not writing these articles to say what he thinks should be said. As I said above, I wouldn’t do that because I don’t think the points he lists are, in general, correct. But if he or someone wants to make that case, I’d be interested in seeing it.
“Charlie/David Thompson et al
I’m not so sanguine about there being no fraud or criminal enterprise behind the “true believers” here.”
There is little doubt, but that there were instances of individuals engaging in some postmodernist thinking. This would allow them to fib regarding a few facts as long as they were supposedly “loyal to the larger narrative.” Nonetheless, the outright lying was probably the exception. Most of these people just lied to themselves. Human beings are innately selfish and often argue backwards. They tend to embrace doctrines that fatten their bank accounts and raise their social status. Keynesian economics is another example of this phenomenon. I consider it to be utterly ridiculous. Nonetheless, it benefits the “elites” graduating from our allegedly best schools. On a gut level, they are worrying about themselves, first, last, and foremost.
@Charlie Martin: Gabriel, as with the last time we went through this, there’s a very good reason I won’t add your a-e: I don’t believe they are true. (a) for example, is either false, or Phil Jones’ recent confession of not keeping good records and of losing data is false.
Are you being deliberately disingenuous? “Raw data from weather stations”, not “data sent to Phil Jones twenty years ago”. The raw data is publicly available, as even John Moore admits, though he brings up fees as a red herring (a new book is “publicly available” even though I or a library has to pay for me to read it).
See, when I point you to where the data is, and you refuse to look, saying it’s not there, you cross over from “skeptic” to “denier”. Let’s quote from that paper I linked to that you won’t look at (section 2, “Station Temperature Records”):
The principal data sources for surface air temperature are… the World Weather Records published by the Smithsonian Institution and their continuation, Monthly Climactic Data of the World, published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
You can find them here http://www.amazon.com/World-Weather-Records-1921-1930-Clayton/dp/1406777218 and here http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/IPS/mcdw/mcdw.html . You might have to pay for the most recent ones, but most likely your nearest big university has already paid the fee. Nonetheless, it is a lie to say that the raw data is not “publicly available”, and an intellectually honest person should acknowledge this. I don’t know how near you are to UC Boulder, but according to their library catalog they have them:
http://encore.colorado.edu/iii/encore/search?searchtype=Keyword-Beta&target=world+weather+records&searchscope=3&formids=target&lang=eng&submitmode=&submitname=&SORT=D&Search.x=0&Search.y=0&Search=Search
http://encore.colorado.edu/iii/encore/search/C|Smonthly+climatic+data+for+world|Orightresult?lang=eng&suite=pearl
Why did you repeat a lie when I gave you all you needed to check for yourself?
Furthermore, the same paper explains at length how the temperature records are calculated from the raw data. But it’s too long to quote here. If I don’t quote some of it, you will refuse to look and say it doesn’t exist, but it’s section 3 of that paper I quoted. He deals at length with the urban heat island effect and all the other things John Moore says scientists don’t know how to deal with–but in 1987, twenty years before any of the commenters here ever heard of such a thing. John Moore of course does not advocate a better or even an alternate way of dealing with these things, just claims it’s impossible. In front of people who don’t read papers, you can get away with that, just like creationists can get away with their shenanigans in fron of non-biologists.
Look how much work it took for me to debunk ONE false statement. And of course you can just spread ten more in that time.
#43:
You seem married to the idea that CO2 AGW skeptics must take 30 years of climate research data, come up with independent climate model, feed in the data, and use this exercise to either come up with a competing hypothesis or simply test the reproducibility of the current one. Unless and until they do not, in your mind they should be dismissed along with Flat Earthers.
That’s not the way it works. You don’t defend a hypothesis by requiring that the skeptic come up with a competing one. You defend it on it’s own merits. It is up to the CO2 AGW proponents to answer the skeptics by submitting to peer review where approach, procedures, methodology and so on can be examined by reviewers who are not cherry picked for a lack of skepticism. That’s one step. The second step is that in order for CO2 AGW to be accepted as a valid hypothesis that both illuminates and explains observable, measurable climate changes, the results must be reproducible. No attempt can even be made at doing so unless the data sets used to drive the current modeling and the model code is released.
More specifically:
‘The raw data is publicly available’
But not the dataset that Phil Jones used. Which means the results based on that data cannot be tested for reproducibility. Which calls into question the hypothesis of CO2 driven AGW, or any other hypotesis, that is based on irreproducible results. Which is the issue.
Finally:
‘John Moore of course does not advocate a better or even an alternate way of dealing with these things’
He most certainly did in a clear and unambiguous way in comment #26. You may not like the implications, but that’s not the same as saying he didn’t.
Gabriel, I tell you what: you don’t call me a denier and I won’t call you a climate scientologist. Alternatively, if you assume I’m not being deliberately disingenuous I won’t assume you’re being deliberately obtuse.
In the case of Jones’ data, the whole point here is that the GISS, HadCRU and NCDC data sets as published are pre-homogenized and subsetted, with peculiarly opaque methods used for some of the selection and manipulation; one of the issues in the data handling is various observations that suggest the homogenization process has introduced a warming bias. Without Jones’ original data, that can’t be tested nor his work replicated. In this particular case, you insist that the “raw data” is available for all these things; when Jones says they lost the raw data, you change tracks to say the HadCRU data — which is not raw — is available so it doesn’t matter that Jones lost the raw data.
As to the rest, well, you keep insisting on calling me a liar, and that I modify what I write to your satisfaction. I don’t agree with what you’re asking for, but I’ve offered you the opportunity to rebut at length. While I’m not an editor, I do have quite a bit of input on the climate stories; I think I can pretty well guarantee that a decently written informative rebuttal would be publishable here.
I think that would be both more informative and more productive than popping into the comments, calling people names and misreading arguments.
So pick an argument and stick to it, but try to pick one that’s consistent with what Jones’ himself has said in BBC and Nature.
@Just Passing Through:
You seem married to the idea that CO2 AGW skeptics must take 30 years of climate research data, come up with independent climate model, feed in the data, and use this exercise to either come up with a competing hypothesis or simply test the reproducibility of the current one.
I ask only that they engage it, not pretend, as Charlie Martin does and you do, that it doesn’t exist.
No attempt can even be made at doing so unless the data sets used to drive the current modeling and the model code is released.
How many times do I have to link to it?
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/
“The frozen version used for upcoming IPCC simulations (see below) and the controls for upcoming model description papers is denoted as ModelE1 (internal version number 3.0, dated Feb. 1, 2004). This code can be freely downloaded (as a 1.2 MB gzip-ed tar file) from modelE1.tar.gz.
Boundary and initial conditions for all of the template rundecks can be downloaded from fixed.tar.gz (191 MB). This is a large amount of data due to things like transient 3-D aerosol concentrations etc. If a smaller selection of data is preferred, please contact us. There are many variants of this data available internally, so if you do not find the configuration you’d like, let us know and we may be able to help you.”
Why don’t you download it and tell us what’s wrong with it?
The raw data is publicly available’ But not the dataset that Phil Jones used…
Another lie. According to his Nature article of 1986 (Nature, v 322 p 430) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v322/n6078/abs/322430a0.html he used the references shown on that link. They’re really hard to find too, you actually might have to GO TO A LIBRARY. Among them are COADS and NOAA data, again and always publicly available. Did you bother to look? No, you just repeated lies spread by others.
Even if your lie were true, there are other groups besides his, and they get the same results, even if he can’t find the original spreadsheet or whatever.
All the data used by all the climate groups COMES FROM THE SAME PUBLICLY AVAILABLE SOURCES.
More publicly available sources of raw climate data:
http://dss.ucar.edu/datasets/ds570.0/
http://eca.knmi.nl/
http://icoads.noaa.gov/
http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
But you all go on telling everyone that it doesn’t exist. Readers on the fence can click the links and decide for themselves.
@Charlie Martin:
when Jones says they lost the raw data, you change tracks to say the HadCRU data — which is not raw — is available so it doesn’t matter that Jones lost the raw data.
That is not what I am saying at all, or ever was saying. I am saying that the actual raw data, unadjusted and unhomogenized, not produced by GISS or NOAA or HadleyCRU but the actual raw data that all of them use, is and always has been publicly available. You said this statement
the raw data used to generate global temperature records are, and always have been, publicly available from weather stations, university libraries, and in the scientific literature
is false, but I’ve posted many links to showing the contrary. Will you retract?
It is impossible for Phil Jones to have lost raw data that is currently sitting in library stacks all over the world and in repositories available online. What he lost was not “raw data”. Raw data is stuff measured by satellites and weather stations. What he lost was HIS INITIAL VERSION of it, which may well be sitting in an 8″ hard drive somewhere. Every climate group has their own copies with which they’ve done whatever, but the actual RAW DATA that EVERYONE uses is PUBLICLY AVAILBLE and ALWAYS HAS BEEN.
As to the rest, well, you keep insisting on calling me a liar,
I’ve accused you of repeating lies originated by others; it wouldn’t happen if you would read the scientific literature. I’ve said that you accuse people of fraud–look at your current headline. I’ve accused you of not reading the papers I link to. But if you acknowledge the five points of I stated in the beginning, it would be very difficult to justify your use of the word “fraud”.
I don’t agree with what you’re asking for, but I’ve offered you the opportunity to rebut at length.
For which I thank you and I appreciate it. You and I don’t disagree on as much as you might think, but for me it’s the use of “fraud” (even modified to unconscious fraud, whatever that means) and statements like LarryOldtimers #23, which are completely bogus; I have little tolerance for such and you have a lot more.
While I’m not an editor, I do have quite a bit of input on the climate stories; I think I can pretty well guarantee that a decently written informative rebuttal would be publishable here.
Now that’s very fair, but I’m not an expert. Why don’t you invite Gavin Schmidt to sum up the case as best he can? But you already know what will happen even if he agrees, he’ll be subjected to a lot of
calling people names and misreading arguments.
and I think it’s quite funny that you can read what people here have said about ME, but I’m the one who gets the scolding.
Incidentally, I do not agree with your characterization of what Jones said in BBC and Nature. In neither article ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090812/full/460787a.html ) does he say he “lost raw data”. In fact, he says this:
“There is more than one “official” surface temperature record, based on actual land station records. There is the one we have developed in CRU, but there are also the series developed at NCDC and GISS. Although we all use very similar station datasets, we each employ different ways of assessing the quality of the individual series and different ways of developing gridded products. The GISS data and their program are freely available for people to experiment with. The agreement between the three series is very good.
Given the web-based availability of the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), which is used by both NCDC and GISS, anyone else can develop their own global temperature record from land stations.”
I think this agrees rather better with my characterization than with yours.
So why isn’t anyone talking serious jail time for them?
Or for guys like Al Gore who fomented worldwide catastrophic economic collapse, which in turn caused untold deaths, the death penalty?
An honest, hardworking citizen gets harassed or punished every day by the IRS, the traffic cops, planning boards, school boards, etc., etc., but horrendous consequences from these guys leave them with lifetime tenures and pensions. Time for serious pitchforks and torches.
“I ask only that they engage it, not pretend, as Charlie Martin does and you do, that it doesn’t exist.”
Nonsense.
“How many times do I have to link to it?”
As many times as you wish. It’s irrelevant. It does not represent the datasets used in the modeling.
“‘The raw data is publicly available’ But not the dataset that Phil Jones used…’
Another lie.”
There is a liar here, but it is not me, nor Charlie Martin, nor finally after being under great pressure to come clean, (to some extent not yet quantified), Phil Jones.
Here’s a blatant lie, or perhaps an indication of adherence to a position so blind as to be unable to comprehend simple text
‘But you all go on telling everyone that it doesn’t exist.’
No one is saying that the raw data you are so fond of linking to doesn’t exist. You own that wildly inaccurate misrepresentation lock stock and barrel. There are a multitude of issues with the CO2 based AGW hypothesis. Two main ones being discussed here are the reliability of the raw data, and the integrity of the data sets used by Phil Jones et al. Those are the issues you seem unable to address.
Mr Martin suspects you are being purposefully obtuse. He shows far more patience with your nonsense than I own. I suspect that some time past you crossed the line into treating CO2 based AGW as a religion, based on faith and unassailable by heretical skeptics, rather than a scientific hypothesis, open and welcoming independent peer review and examination.
Whatever drives you to consistently avoid engaging continually restated positions but instead pose irrelevant strawmen that you can then tear down makes no difference. As far as I’m concerned, you yourself come off as the Flat Earther that you claim the CO2 based AGW skeptics are.
Into the bozo bin you go.
@JustPassingThrough:
It’s irrelevant. It does not represent the datasets used in the modeling.
“The frozen version used for upcoming IPCC simulations (see below) and the controls for upcoming model description papers is denoted as ModelE1 (internal version number 3.0, dated Feb. 1, 2004).”
So the IPCC is going to use it, but it’s not the REAL one? Not that you offer any proof whatever in support of your claim; just wave your hand and say “This isn’t the data you’re looking for”.
No one is saying that the raw data you are so fond of linking to doesn’t exist.
Ahem.
#23 Larry Oldtimer: Gabriel Hanna is either simply ignorant, or is spreading misinformation. What isn’t at all available is the raw temperature data. Only the “adjusted”, or “value added” (as the warming fabulists put it) temperature data is available, if even that. In most cases, access to even the “value added” data has been refused to researchers. Moreover, no “process” by which the raw temperature data is “adjusted” is recorded.
#95 Charlie Martin: On the second, I think you missed one of my complaints about the GISS data: that the data is only available in a homogenized, post-processed form, and the homogenization process isn’t replicable either.
National Review “The Dog That Ate Global Warming”:
Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.
Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer.
In no case do these gentlemen make it clear that they are not talking about RAW DATA. They are talking about GLOBAL TEMPERATURES DERIVED FROM RAW DATA. No RAW DATA has been hidden or lost by Phil Jones or anyone else. But they benefit from this confusion.
Their criticism amounts to: we didn’t see every step in the calculation, so we don’t believe in any of it. But they don’t SAY that. They say, “the data is unavailable”. By being vague, they can create the impression that the DATA doesn’t exist. This is why they make such a big deal of Phil Jones. His DATA came from the same publicly available sources that everyone else’s has. His COPY of that raw data from twenty years ago is what’s missing. If the skeptics made it THAT clear, no one would care.
Excellent summary; the coming collapse of ‘Carbon Markets’ is reminiscent of Dutch ‘Tulip-Mania’ of a few centuries ago………Ha!
51. Fine, we didn’t see every step in the calculations, so we don’t trust his conclusion. When you write a formal report, you detail every step. Skipping steps in your report make all subsequent steps worthless. As far as a reader is concerned, you just made those functions or transforms up out of whole cloth, with no reason to do so.
Charlie is right on the money (pun intended). But seriously, keep in mind that elections matter. The way to tame the beast that has become the Democrat party is to support in word and deed (i.e., contributions) members of the party that will not a part of this monstrous fraud known as cap ‘n trade. Moreover, something has got to be done to tame the EPA. I wouldn’t seeing it eliminated. It is trying to legislate by regulation. For that alone it should be eliminated. In the interim, institutions that will bring the EPA to court should be supported in word and deed. While this POTUS is in office, we face a grim reality.
Ref: The latest issue of National Geographic; “WATER SHORTAGE!!!”
The AGW crowd already has their new cause, and the solution is the same as the old cause: “The industrialized world must be compelled to provide trillions of dollars to avert a natural catastrophe in the third world or we’re all gonna’ DIE!!!”
The difference is that they don’t have to fudge the numbers; there really is a water shortage. There really is a looming catastrophe in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, mostly due to unchecked birthrates combined with improving health care. There really are a huge number of people without access to decent sanitation and clean potable water where outbreaks of preventable diseases kill many every year.
They tried to paint it as a global emergency, which is isn’t. With the shrinking birth rates in the industrialized world, it is unlikely to become a global issue. Not to be discouraged though, with the increasing influence on international affairs wielded by nations from those regions, and the charlatan class fishing around for their next Luddite cause, it won’t be long before the clammor for western funding to “Save the water” starts to gain traction.
I think this one is going to be a lot harder to defeat.