Climategate: The Official Whitewash Continues
The University of East Anglia’s carefully selected “International Panel” released their report on the ClimateGate scientific fraud scandal today. At eight pages, it’s not even a thorough whitewash. They don’t even make a minimal effort to rebut the obvious appearance of widespread data manipulation, suppression of dissenting research through improper means, and intentional avoidance of complying with Freedom of Information requests.
It appears that they concluded that the only way they could produce a whitewash and protect the interests of the establishment was by making only the most superficial investigation. Perhaps they realized that doing more than taking the representations of Phil Jones and the others on trust would involve them in the moral difficulty of having to choose between being honest and maintaining their exoneration.
The seven panel members only looked at eleven published articles from CRU selected on the advice of the Royal Society. And all eight panel members didn’t read all eleven papers. Instead, “Every paper was read by a minimum of three Panel members at least one of whom was familiar with the general area to which the paper related. At least one of the other two was a generalist with no special climate science expertise but with experience of some of the general techniques and methods employed in the work.”
Perhaps the third reader was a chimpanzee. Yes, they have done a thorough and professional whitewash.
However, the report makes one concession, which is quite damning: “We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.” In fact, the handling of the historical temperature data and production of the Hadley/CRU temperature record by Jones et al. and the handling of the paleoclimatological data and fabrication of the hockey stick by Michael Mann et al. was only possible because they hid their data and methods from professional statisticians.
When professional statisticians were able to look at Mann’s methods and data, the result was the Wegman report, which was devastating.
The whitewash committee also concluded that hiding your data from anyone with an interest in disproving your thesis was OK, because it was standard practice in the climate research community.
That statement alone revealed how corrupt the “climate research” community has become.
Let’s not forget that many the members of the panel have financial interests in companies that have been making money off of the global warming scam.
Slightly OT
A citizen’s group has done an independant audit of the IPCC report. They give the report an F.
http://www.noconsensus.org/ipcc-audit/findings-main-page.php
Despite the claim of organizers that 100% of the studies used in the report were peer reviewed, the auditors found that over 30% of the cited works weren’t peer reviewed. In fact many of these cited works, weren’t even studies. They were newspaper articles, student thesis, brocures put out by advocacy groups, and worse.
“The (Climate Research)Unit is a very small academic entity within the School of Environmental Sciences. It has three full time and one part time academic staff members and about a dozen research associates, PhD students and support staff.”
So here we have it . . . a unit with a full time staff of three (3) was in the process of directly causing all the major climate legislation on the ENTIRE EARTH to be rewriten!
And to do so they some how directly prevented or inhibted the criticism of the rest of the world?
And now you expect me to believe that this is a “scientific community problem”?
In that case I think I need to hurry home and read the tea leaves in the bottom of the cup I used this morning.
The world has gone insane!!!!
Do you honestly believe that the CRU is the only group within the “climate research” community that has this problem?
Secondly, nobody ever claimed that the entire scientific community has this problem, so quit trying to make strawmen.
Hey Mark;
I agree with your Mark . . . No it is not a solitary problem . . . but all the harping on the CRU . . . might make just a few people think it is a “single point” problem.
Strawmen no intentions to do so . . . I agree again and again exactly my point . . .
Hard to get how horrified I am about this into words I guess.
Sorry, guess I’m just having a bad day.
No problem for me and I do sincerely understand. We have all been having a bad day for a really long time now and it seems that us with the rational perspective, of knowing from experience the difference between the “scientific method” and tea leaves or tree rings, well it has been tough on us. Now we just have to hang in there, maybe, just maybe, we are finally being heard. Hang tough! I am with ya!
You may want to familiarize yourself with Climategate before commenting on it.
Sorry tallgrass, I also misread your comment. Too bad I didn’t hit “refresh” before posting. I could have saved myself some embarrassment.
Sorry tallgrass, I also misread your comment. If only I had hit “refresh” before commenting, I could have saved myself some embarrassment.
“fabrication of the hockey stick by Michael Mann et al.”
Mann recently got a $560,000 grant paid out of Stimulus. You couldn’t make that up.
So let me get this straight: Stephen McIntyre is a useless moron not worth listening to because he isn’t actually a “climate scientist”. But here’s UEA declaring that it specifically included “generalist[s] with no special climate science expertise” in the review boards.
W. T. F?
Ok… for the record. This is NOT about Science. This is about politics, controlling the herd, and most importantly opening new lines of revenue to the beast welfare queen states of the Western world.
Do you think for one minute that China, India, or Russia are going to give a hoot in hell about all of this? The only thing that they are going to do is enable the old economies to cripple themselves, not to the point of failing to provide a customer for their cheap products, but just enough to keep the old economies from competing.
This is about taxation. It’s about Fascist welfare states controlling and limiting the growth of their nations. It’s all about maintaining power over the subsistence bound masses of serfs.
Hayek meets Malthus in a dark alley and loses. The Leviathan lurches on.
r/The Mighty Fahvaag
They could just as well have relied on 100% peer-reviewed work. They made sure that the work of dissenting scientists could not get peer-reviewed.
“By Alex Morales
April 14 (Bloomberg) — An investigation by a panel of scientists into the so-called climategate leaked e-mail flap found no evidence of scientific malpractice at the University of East Anglia, the U.K. school at the center of the probe.
The inquiry, the second of three into research at the school in eastern England, said methods used by the university to compile historical records of global temperatures were “fair and satisfactory.” It also said allegations of deliberate misrepresentation of data derived from tree rings weren’t valid.”
See? As long as science is “fair and satisfactory,’ it’s, well, science! When did doing “so called” science become an exercise in equity? I always thought science was about testable propositions subject to empirical verification. How silly of me.
Let me give a short summary of NPR’s coverage of this report as heard this afternoon by me: “No fraud here folks, move along.”
Jones, Mann, et al (that’s the rest of the “climatologist” schemers, fabricators and manipulators) had an agenda, as did the UN and environmental groups and liberal politicians. They have not changed, nor has their agenda. An official whitewash was absolutely inevitable, because most officialdom is squarely in the climate hysteria camp, hands out, squealing for money to “fix” the planet. Fools all, and hellbent on their own more immediate version of destruction.
Spot on VegasGuy. This entire climate change blah, blah, is socially/politically charged. You have a team of non experts in the IPCC looking at botched statistics. They admit they didn’t do the research and only checked out peer reviewed, articles, including material from newspapers, special interest groups such as Greenpeace and WWF and Friends of the Earth. Have you checked out the Wegman report, that also peer reviewed the CRU and Michael Mann. It was done years ago. It’s 91 pages long,however, it stated that Paleo-climates were kept out of the equation, and shouldn’t have been ignored. And any review of climate has to be longer than 160 years.
That the Medieval Warm Period 800 – 1300s and then the Mini Ice Age 1300s to 1850 had been left out. Of course the planet is warming and I hope it continues to. CO2 has nothing to do with it anyway. We don’t want another ice age looming as predicted in the 1970s by no other than Stephen Schneider. (Mate of James Hansen another fraud in my opinion and chief adviser to Al Gorian). However, this is a strong rumor that the UN will still proceed as will the EU in enforcing their ideology of a non elected eco panel, to work out what developed countries have to pay. This will cause trouble, especially as Pachauri is also a trustee of TERI Europe and India, and the Carbon trading shares and Uranium shares are not doing too well.
Trillions have been invested in this world wide. Now if this recent Iceland
volcano does drop temps for a while it might make people wake up to the fact
Mother Nature won’t be dictated too of how she runs this planet, and will continue too.
So, is anyone surprised by this? They waited just long enough to release their report that the furour had died down and hope we are not paying attention. For most ill-informed people this will suffice. For those that want to believe in Man Made Global Warming they will tout this as proof of much ado about nothing.
The fix is still in folks. Do not let the Thought Police catch you disagreeing with official policy.
I read this article long before the scandal broke, and even though he calls it a layman’s guide, it’s pretty scientific. I’m intelligent enough in my own area, but I did end up skimming some of Hill’s explanations that were too scientific for me to understand. Still, the parts I did understand were enough for me to know… the panel is being intentionally blind.
Another part of the whitewash, the panel only interviewed members of the CRU staff. Nobody else was interviewed for the report.
Every time these people open their mouths I think about the way Nazi science (?) dealt with the issue of eugenics. Simply put, we will make science support anything we wish if it supports our agenda. Truth is secondary.
If they aren’t careful, these climate scam artists will undermine the credibility of science as a whole.
Whitewash! I have absolutely no evidence of fraud, but I am hoping to get on Fox News.
Perhaps the report was so short is because there is no “there” there to write about.
But seriously, science is too serious a subject to be handled by scientists. We all know that they have banded together across all geographical, ideological and cultural boundaries to create a new world order in which they will get our hard-earned money to use for American left-wing radical projects like renewable energy and clean air. It is not too late to stop the green horde — all we have to do is disband all universities and stop teaching science in high schools. I can’t sleep at night worrying that my son may be exposed to science at his high school — and the administrators do nothing to stop it. Rise up people before it is too late.
What you should be worried about regarding your son’s exposure to science at his high school is the new tendency to redefine “scientist” to mean “one who believes that Global Warming/Climate Change is real, is caused by Man, and can be cured by man, given sufficient and unlimited resources.” Anyone else is a phony scientist, a denier, and should be–and is–banished from the scientific community. Or even, as some Believers have suggested, arrested and prosecuted, and if possible, put to death.
You should also worry about the re-definition of “peer reviewed,” to mean “a review by peers after shredding and/or burning any scientific report that does not support the theory of anthropogenic global warming, any such report being unworthy of the time of serious peers.”
One might wonder if such reaction to Climate Change analysis might have a chilling effect on non-believing serious scientists. Which is, in reality, an attack on honest science.
Thank you for not paying attention.
This guy actually believes that to be a scientist you have to believe in the AGW scam.
Guys, guys.
The goal of the investigation wasn’t scientific. They were unqualified to judge. What they looked at was whether or not CRU was outrageously flouting the law, whether or not behaviours were disparaging to science. What they said was that while CRU was *barely* within the law, the law sucks; they think CRU needs to be open and above board.
In essence this was as much of a bitchslap of CRU as could be allowed within the limitation of their endeavour.
Those of you calling this a whitewash seemingly have no idea what the ROE was here.
Which law would that be? There is no law covering peer review and scientific conduct.
If you are refering to the FOIA requests, that was not covered by this commission but rather by a previous commission. That commission ruled that the CRU had violated the FOIA requirements but couldn’t be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had run out. The law (deliberately?) set up a nice catch 22. If an FOIA request is denied, it can’t be appealed until after the academic review is completed. Under the FOIA there was a 6 month time limit after refusal in order to appeal. Unfortunately it took more than 6 months for the academic review to finish.
You’ve confused your commissions.
I didn’t come late to the climate debate. I’m a technical writer by trade and have been reading journals like SCIENCE and Nature for the last thirty years or so. The notion that dissenting scientists weren’t allowed to publish is hogwash. They published plenty. After a protracted and acrimonious argument, a consensus did eventually emerge on several important issues, however; and the scientists largely moved on. The noise and nonsense we hear now is a political conflict kept alive artificially by ideological obsession and huge infusions of money from commercial interests. The situation is not so different on this front from what happened when well-bankrolled PR techniques kept the tobacco and cancer argument going a decade beyond its expiration date. I guess we should be grateful you guys haven’t decided (yet) that the Pythagorean theorem is a communist plot.
There never was anything very remarkable in the leaked memos. I read them all when they were first published and hardly had to wait for any sort of committee to tell me that they wasn’t anything very interesting in them. In the absence of paranoia, general scientific literacy and the ability to read English sufficed.
While dissenting scientists may have been permitted to publish 20 and 30 years ago. This stopped being the case after that point.
As to the claim that a consensus was reached, that is also a complete lie. There has never been a consensus regarding AGW.
As to your claim that there was nothing in the leaked memos. I guess admitting to forcing science publications to not let skeptics get published is no big deal. Declaring that you will do whatever it takes, including re-defining peer review, to keep skeptical papers out of the IPCC is no big deal.
I guess discussions regarding ways to hide data that doesn’t fit your conclusion is no big deal.
Regardless, the biggest scandals were in the released code. Utterly arbitrary fudge factors added wherever necessary in order to ensure that the output matched what the authors wanted to see.
If you think dissent was shut off 20 or 30 years ago in the scientific literature, you obviously haven’t been reading the scientific literature. Skeptical articles get published to this day, though the journals quite properly defend themselves from obvious cranks through peer review.
What happened in the development of a consensus about the most general facts about global warming was no different than what occurred in other scientific debates such as Big Bang vs Steady State and the advent of global tectonics except that ideological and business interests resurrected far fewer zombie denialists in those cases.
You seem to think that peer review is worth the time it takes. As has been shown by the climategate scandal, it has been corrupted to protect the politically dominant position of the day.
As for your claim that sceptical papers get published, I have talked to reputable scientists who have had their papers rejected for scurillous reasons and who were never even given the chance to respond to the attackers.
“the most general facts about global warming was no different than what occurred in other scientific debates such as Big Bang vs Steady State”
Ah! The political activist who does not understand the scientific method gets caught out by his own ignorance of science. Mr. Harrison’s statement is accidentally true, but not in the sense he meant it.
One of the continuing difficulties in cosmology after the apparent initial victory of the Big Bang theory has been explaining the apparent expansion rate of the universe. It does not match the predictions of Big Bang theory. This has resulted more recently in the postulate of Dark Energy, which gets created as the universe expands. Shades of the Steady State theory! The science is not settled (but then, real science never is). The continuing progress of science suggests that both the Big Bang and Steady State theories were incomplete. Reality may contain elements from both, and from other theories not yet even devised.
The claim that Anthropogenic Global Warming — alone in the entire field of science — is the only place where the Science has been Settled once and for all is patently obviously nonsense. Only the kind of idiot who invented the internet would even entertain such a silly claim.
There is not, and never was a shred of scientific evidence backing the AGW theory. It’s all based on models. Given the fact that we are probably more than 100 years away from adequately understanding how the climatic system responds to changes, the idea that we could adequately model it is the height of idiocy. Beyond that, the models fail miserably when fed past data and are asked to model past climates, despite the fact that most of the models have 10′s to 100′s of variables that can be tuned to try and acheive the desired results.
There are some that cliam that climatology is easier than weather predicting because we don’t need to know the exact initial conditions. Anyone who says that either is lying, or has demonstrated that he doesn’t know enough to have an opinion yet.
There are 5 main “spheres”.
Atmosphere
Hydrosphere (water)
Cryosphere (ice)
Biosphere
Lithosphere (land)
To try and understand the hideous levels of complexity here. Changes in the atmosphere not only will change how the atmosphere itself behaves, it will change how all the other spheres behave. In turn, the changes in the other spheres interact with each other and back with the atmosphere, which in turn causes new changes in all of the other spheres, and so on, to infinity.
None of these interactions between spheres is well understood at present, and won’t be at any time in the foreseeable future.
Anyone who tells you that a small change in a minor gas will definitely cause X, Y, or Z, is either a liar, or a charlatan. There is no other option.