Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean?
- The emails suggest that the authors manipulated and “massaged” the data to strengthen the case in favor of unprecedented CO2-forced AGW, and to suppress their own data if it called AGW into question.
- The emails suggest that the authors co-operated (perhaps the word is “conspired”) to prevent data from being made available to other researchers through either data archiving requests or through the Freedom of Information Acts of both the U.S. and the UK.
See for example emails 1106338806, 1228330629, 1212063122, 1210367056, and 1107454306 (again!).
Email 1107454306 is particularly interesting. In it, Dr Jones writes:
The two MMs [McKittrick and McIntyre] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.
What makes this interesting is that the CRU, in later years, announced that they had “inadvertently deleted” their raw data when they responded to an FOIA request from … McIntyre.
Now, I’ve purposefully not included much of the text from these emails, both for reasons of space and because I want people to read them for themselves. But, at least on this first look, it appears that the three scandals are:
- First, a real attempt by a small group of scientists to subvert the peer-review process and suppress dissenting voices. (For another look at this, by a respected climate scientist who was one of the targets, see these posts on Roger Pielke Sr.‘s blog.) This is at best massively unethical.
- Second, a willingness to manipulate the data to make a political case. This is certainly misconduct and possibly scientific fraud. This, if it proves true, should make these scientists subject to strong disciplinary action, even termination of their tenured positions.
- Third, what gives every appearance of an actual conspiracy to prevent data from being released as required by the Freedom of Information Acts in the US and UK. If this is proven true, that is a federal crime.
These emails and the data associated, taken together, raise really important questions about the whole scientific structure of AGW. Is the data really valid? Has the data been effectively peer reviewed and have attempts to falsify been fairly treated? Is CO2-forced AGW really the best hypothesis?
Until these questions are answered, the various attempts to “deal with the climate change crisis” have no acceptable scientific basis.
It is going to take some time and a lot more coverage on this issue for people to begin to understand that the so called environmental movement is nothing more than a front for the leftist, socialist agenda. This has never been about science. If it had, there would have been serious questions such as how so many of these global warmist were also the next ice age advocates of only a few decades ago. And of course the oncoming ice age was the product of man made pollution. The global climate warming (change) has always been about politics. It has always been about destroying Western economies all in the name of saving us from ourselves. It has always been about redistribution of wealth as Copenhagen so clearly demonstrates. And it has always been about asserting more govenmental controls over every part of our lives as people are now understanding in Europe and soon the US.
It will be a terrible awakening to discover that all of these punitative measures were being imposed on us by a fraudulent movement with the full cooperation of our elected hacks. Unfortunately we may ultimately end up punishing only those who got caught – the crimial participants of the global warming “science”. But we need to recognize that this fraud would not have proceeded if not for the willingness of the leftist in our government to fund these studies that allowed them to continually oppress their citizens not for the good of all but for the continuation of their power and control over the people. That is the lesson that we must learn from this. Our governments have turned against us. We must be willing (as the brave citizens of Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union were willing to do) not only throw these political oppressors out but repeal all of the legislations and bureaucracies that they created to control our lives and suppress our liberties. We cannot expect someone to save us from this. We must be willing to fight our own fight to regain our liberty.
It still seems to be too good to be true. Maybe I am being naive, but a hoax on this scale would require the collusion of a whole lot of people… unless other scientists accepted CRU data at face value, uncritically. That would point to an even deeper issue, which would be the apparent forgoing of the scientific method by a large percentage of the scientific community. No one ever requested the CRU data before M&M? Really? Wow. Just, wow.
Not in the traditional sense of “collusion,” CG. Scientists, just like the rest of humanity, respond to incentives and penalties. The warmistas in the scientific community were drawn there by a variety of incentives.
Some were undoubtedly sincere, certain that with enough evidence they could validate the greenhouse-gas thesis and willing to explain away “inconvenient data” with the usual dismissals of the true believer.
Some were loyal Hessians, willing to go wherever their idols and masters might point them.
Some were “following the money,” as ever greater amounts of money poured from government coffers and the treasuries of left-leaning foundations to support the promulgation of the anthropogenic-global-warming thesis.
Some were merely publicity hounds, who would ride any wagon that appeared to have the media’s attention.
Some were flogged into sullen support of AGW, fearful that refraining would cause them to be stripped of their funding and relegated to the outer darkness.
No doubt there are other reasons…none of them at all connected to the core doctrines of science.
What matters in practical terms is the fraud itself. If the documents stand up to sustained scrutiny, they will doom AGW and its political implications forever.
Pray for it. I do.
It is nice to dream that this will have some impact but I suspect it will be minimal in the end. The AGW friendly media control the news and this will never get much if any play there. Same for the US Congress.
news broke on PJM and elsewhere that a large amount of data had been “stolen” from one of the major climate research institutions.
To Charlie Martin
Please change the word stolen here… I know many ppl on here or other sites don’t know much about the freedom of information act, whistle blower or other laws along those lines… and thus we don’t know if this information is in fact stolen. Every E-mail and doc that has been posted online appears to be public information that could be requested through the FOIA… thus none of this data is “stolen”.
Until at least 2 things happen NO ONE should be saying this is illegal or that the data was “stolen”.
1. Its confirmed that this data is real.
2. Its confirmed that the data was not part of the public works available under the FOIA.
Until such a time as at least both of these are confirmed ppl need to not jump to a unfounded conclusion that someone did something illegally here.
Yes, there is a leftist agenda (nobody’s giving China credit for 1 child and reforestation, let alone woks; cap and trade and sequestration is drowning out more sensible, cheaper measures like topsoil regeneration)–particular groups get MONEY from it, duh.
So, we expect Joe Scientist to say, “Gee, I spent all my grant money and 5 yrs of work to get a data set; why don’t I give it away for free to people who are going to use it badly and make stupid arguments against me instead of getting my own publications.”
or “I think the climate skeptic scientists are making a bit loose claims…why don’t I help them out instead of talking to just those who agree with me.”
(wow, the irony meter on that last one is going to quickly snap off when the echo chamber in this blog starts going….)
But geez, this is a small number of the total scientists, a very selected small number of their e-mails, and global warming is directly in front of our eyes. When you get quotes in PJM like ‘it’s not the global warming its the warming around the cities’ or ‘CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, there are other stronger ones’. It is obvious which side is basically correct.
Are they the Pentagon Papers of Piltdown Warming?
CableGuy, I think it’s a mistake to think of this as a hoax. This isn’t Climate SPECTRE colluding on their evil designs; it’s a bunch of regular guys who, at each step, thought they were doing the right thing.
From the Volokh Conspiracy:
GaryC says:
lucklucky: Yes it appears an inside job, the initial nick of the person that released them was FOIA and reasons stated is that this shouldn’t be hidden from public.
The last date on an email message is November 12, 2009.
On November 13, 2009, Steve McIntyre was informed that his FOI request for data, much of which is in this data package, had been rejected.
That doesn’t “prove” anything, but it certainly suggests that an insider who was aware of the contents of the data package, because he (or she) had been involved in assembling it to respond to the FOI request, decided to act as a whistleblower. The probability that it was an outside hacker seems very low, at least to me.
http://volokh.com/2009/11/21/nyt-on-hacked-climate-e-mails/comment-page-2/#comment-692175
So maybe we should not use the term “hacker”, it may very well be a disgruntled employee.
Mr. Martin, thank-you for a very important post — clear, direct, right to the point.
The data has always been flawed by including the urban sites in the calculations. It is similar to measuring the temperature in the forest next to your campfire. You need to look at the temperatures of the rural sites. We have done a comparison of matched urban and rural sites (each within 100 km of each other) across the US that have continuous data for 111 years. The rural sites do not show any overall warming. The urban sites are getting warmer. More air conditioners, street lights etc. are probably the reason. Any good scientist knows this. Check out the data yourself at the GISS site (if they haven’t messed up the data yet).
Go to YouTube and look up Global Warming Urban Heat Effect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcsvaCPYgcI
Even a 6th grader can understand it!
I think, CableBy, that one of the things that you will find when you read some of those emails is that the authors of the scientific products used to establish the existence of global warming and then to link it to human activity made it incredibly difficult to actually check their work. If this is the case, then no large conspiracy is necessary, just a few folks with a mission and a large number who didn’t care enough to do their jobs.
Those who agreed with the alarmist’s premises and conclusions were not inclined to check the work of their colleagues. In fact, when others asked for the data upon which much of the work was based, you will see that they commiserate about the fuss without really inquiring about the data themselves. On the other hand, those who disagreed were shut out at many levels: data sets were not made available so the results could be tested for repeatability, publishing venues were closed, and now it appears that FOI/FOIA requests were stonewalled or even falsified.
There’s one particular email conversation that made me laugh out loud and it’s on Powerline. In it, a plant scientist writes Biffa and a posts the following questions:
“As an environmental plant physiologist, I have followed the long debate starting with Mann et al (1998) and through to Kaufman et al (2009). As time has progressed I have found myself more concerned with the whole scientific basis of dendroclimatology. In particular;
1) The appropriateness of the statistical analyses employed
2) The reliance on the same small datasets in these multiple studies
3) The concept of “teleconnection” by which certain trees respond to the “Global Temperature Field”, rather than local climate
4) The assumption that tree ring width and density are related to temperature in a linear manner.”
As the PlantGuy goes on to write, #3 and #4 are not really supportable conclusions. I, myself, am no expert in the field, but #3 is laughably risible. Anyway, this exchange took place in the last three months. Biffa has not responded to the questions and his colleagues have urged him not to.
Very well written. This is the best summary of the issues here I’ve seen. And in exactly the right order of significance: 1) manipulation of the the peer review process, 2) manipulation of the data (which would be caught in a working peer review system), and 3) attempted cover-up of the first two by destroying, or threatening to destroy, evidence. The last may seem the most significant, and certainly comes with the most punishment, if true, but the jerks would never have found themselves in that position without going through the first two stages first.
Thanks.
“Consensus among ‘scientists’” was always about left-wing politics and the Left’s politics has always been about lying, cheating, conning, pamphleteering, polemic-ism and Goebbelsesqe propaganda-driven mass-hysteria.
But, just as the lying Left, these “scientists” included, can blank-faced call every North-American-Continent-wide ice-storm evidence of “global warming,” NBC can call a dynamite explosion it sets off evidence of a fuel-tank’s vulnerability to spontaneous combustion and CBS can call fraudulent documentation evidence of the dishonesty of the victim of the CBS fraud?
So can and will these lying politicians-posing-as “scientists,” and their cult followers say their scientifically-systemic lies but demonstrate the urgency of the need to blow Trillions on “doing something” about a non-existent “problem.”
“It is going to take some time and a lot more coverage on this issue for people to begin to understand that the so called environmental movement is nothing more than a front for the leftist, socialist agenda.”
I’d say that’s more than a trifle overbroad. For a counterexample I’d suggest you take a trip to Butte, Montana. As recently as the 1990s the tap water was unsafe to drink due to chemicals used in the mining. Superfund’s activities (in this and in other cases) are far from perfect, but are clearly necessary and certainly one part of the “so called environmental movement.” My own experience in watching the decline of air pollution in the LA Basin, in spite of population growth and an increase in the number of cars, informs me that not all the environmental stuff is a scam. I can believe that we might look at alternative means to get to the results desired, and as a conservative/libertarian I’d suggest we look to markets and not government.
The question is “How to separate the wheat from the chaff?” I can at least offer up a few basic principles. 1) Malthus was wrong. He was wrong in the 19th century and he remains wrong now. Any solution proposed for a problem that relies on his assumptions is wrong too. 2) Human nature is what we have to deal with. Humans will externalize costs to others for their own benefit. If a good is “free” as in clean air, for example, economic actors will consume it in massive quantities. 3) We are right to be wary of the rule of experts. We didn’t dump hereditary monarchy and theocracy only to bring them back in disguise. Sumptuary laws, which are in effect, what Algore and his ilk are proposing, have their history, and we should reject them as theocracy. 4) Economic growth is, for the most part, “green.” Capitalism generates the most economic growth, and socialism has a bad history of killing people in large numbers, whether it is the international kind or the national kind of socialism.
Call you Congressman and Senator and ask if they are aware of this information. If they aren’t, make sure they become aware.
I agree with TheCableGuy that a hoax on this scale normally would require collusion of a large number of people. However, as the links to Roger Pielke’s website illustrate, some of those involved are with the National Climatic Data Center – the world’s largest collection of climate data. The NCDC collection is the Holy Grail of climate data.
According to the local newspaper, the Asheville Citizen-Times, NCDC has 161 Federal employees and 90 contract workers. A handful of key people could easily control what was released, when older paper records were digitized, and, God forbid, even alter the data. If you control the data source, you can control the research since this is data-based scientific research.
The vast majority of folks out here in fly-over country are simply saying “…tell us something we didn’t know.” We know snake oil salesman when we see them and most of us would lock up our daughters if Algore and his cabal came to town.
Global hysterical, energy witch hunt, propaganda or pyramid scheme, call it what you will but if it looks, quacks, walks and smells like a duck (and does this scam smell) it’s more than likely a duck.
This is really not that surprising. Big Science has always been a fractured, competitive group of people. They defend their own little theories and fiefdoms for reasons of receiving grant money, fame and power. When the Oligarchs decided to use climate as a weapon to bludgeon the ignorant and stupid into giving them unlimited political, and legislative power. This translates into total control over every aspect of peoples lives. The “global warming”, scientific prostitutes, most famous among them James Hanson, couldn’t resist the money and power offered by Gore, Immelt, Soros et al. They simply manipulated raw data to their liking to support their stance, and in some cases I believe manufactured it out of whole cloth. When scientific theories are proven incorrect, it always takes a long while for people to get it, and the ones whose careers are at stake usually fight it out to the bitter end. This is no simple “Piltdown Man” farce by one person as a joke and embarrassement, it is a systematic, sinister and deadly perversion of science to institute socialistic, Oligarchical control of the worlds population. These conspirators must be imprisoned for a long time.
It takes an idiot not to understand that POLLUTING the planet is detrimental to, guess what, the planet!
What’s wrong with pure air, pure water, clean energy?
Do any of these institutions receive federal money? (Surely they do.) If so, some citizen could make a tidy sum pursuing a False Claims Act suit. Not to mention the treasure trove of discovery waiting to be had.
Any takers?
“It still seems to be too good to be true. Maybe I am being naive, but a hoax on this scale would require the collusion of a whole lot of people… ”
You aren’t being naive CableGuy, you’re just being complicit. So this is houw you guys are going to do damage control? With ad hominen attacks.
The RICO Act. At some point in the not to distant future Mr. Gore will become an expert on it as well. AGW was not a hoax, it was fraud.
TheCableGuy: ‘Getting ahead by going along’ is a terribly powerful ‘ethic’.
I’m still not convinced that this is the work of a “hacker.” Rather it seems that these e-mails and documents came from an insider with unfettered access to the data. The timing of the release before Copenhagen, the fact that it was posted to an obscure Russian FTP so it would be more difficult to trace, and the response of the university in not informing the police for 4 days suggest an “inside job” to me.
Thank you for a sober look at this subject. I only read about 40 or so of the emails, but the data sets were interesting too.
It will take a while for this to get traction.
Thank you for your efforts.
I am no scientist, and I have no idea whether AGW exists or not. But I am suspicious of anyone who argues that because of the emergency of (AGW/overpopulation/ecological collapse/poverty/the threat of nuclear war/economic depression/the oppression of the proletariat) they should be granted unlimited powers over society and the economy, and that debate over the issue is not merely superfluous, it is out of the question and not respectable.
This isn’t helping.
It doesn’t require collusion on a huge scale. This has happened over a long period of time. Scientists created an industry to satisfy politicians. They insulated themselves in a bubble of false intellectual superiority, lauding themselves with honors, prizes, and especially research grants. They ridiculed every sceptic as “flat earthers” claiming sole ownership of science itself. This progrom will not be stopped easily or swiftly. The climate itself puts the lie to AGW, yet still they will boldly restate it in Copenhagen. We have to hold onto the truth at all costs.
Excellent piece and here’s The Telegraph maing fun of the major media’s coverage of this story.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017451/climategate-how-the-msm-reported-the-greatest-scandal-in-modern-science/
The author notes that most of the media’s main sources on the topic are the scientists involved in this scandal we can expect the ridiculous way they are treating this story—-so far.
Bernie Madoff got convicted and years of jail time, so how many years does Albert Gore get for his scam?
CableGuy,
CRU, Briffa, Mann, etc. consistently refuse to release their data or methodology. On the very few occasions when this information has been pried away from them, they have been shown to be creating science in order to support political ends.
The proponents of AGW have attempted a crime against humanity of unprecedented proportions. They attempted to use fraud to persuade us to make government force the abandonment of resources which are vital to the lives of 6,000,000,000 people, relatively impoverishing those who lived despite their conspiracy and necessarily leading to the early deaths of hundreds of millions.
They were willing to cause hundreds of millions of deaths.
I hope that is uppermost in mind when thinking of them.
Mr Martin, I think you are being overly cautious at this point. A handful of emails could be a hoax, but a data dump of this magnitude is beyond contrivance. It’s time to plan a strategy.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - –
A republic will survive only as long as the populace stays informed and engaged. Now that the scandal is public knowledge, the MSM can either deny or ignore it. A “journalist” who reverts to Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” defense will put his career at risk. The alternative media needs to press the attack.
The scandal is also an opportunity for conservative politicians to take off the gloves. They need to take the revelations of fraud directly to the people. BHO and Holder might have the Department of Justice in their pocket, but that doesn’t mean Congress cannot call for investigations, or that local AG’s are without power to do the same. Don’t waste the opportunity.
It seems to me that the socialist agenda stands on three pillars: national bankruptcy, socialized medicine, and global warming legislation. The third pillar is suddenly showing major fissures. It’s time to bring in a wrecking ball and finish it off. There is still time (barely) to stop the socialist totalitarians. We can turn the tide in 2010, and hopefully roll it back by 2012. If we fail, the consequences after 2012 will be too horrible to contemplate.
i agree with political observer, the bottom line is a ruling class over the massess, one world government. these are scary times for every human on this earth. a handful of people, in positions of power, determining our very existence. very scary.
We want Gore! We want Gore! We want Gore! Tar and feathers, just like the good ole days.
The “hacker” who discovered and distributed this information may turn out to be the world’s greatest hero for the next century.
Having lived through the “global cooling” scare of the ’70s, this latest fear-mongering was always a little hard for me to believe.
Great news and bye bye Al — “the science is settled” — Gore.
Leaked is the word, not hacked. Unlikely the information comes from hacking. Very probably someone inside who is sick of the lies. See time line here: http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/test/
(this is a mirror site for clmiate audit site, which is having trouble)
Do we see a pattern here?
Various Leftist groups—often supposedly scientists with a veneer of expertise, or “caring” groups with what seem to be various legitimate grave “concerns” about our survival, and often the issue of “fairness” in the distribution of wealth, and disparities in global economic development, funded by all sorts of money from Soros and various left wing foundations, proclaim a grave “Crisis”; that, for instance, we are going to be destroyed by the massive payback from Mother Nature for our destruction of the Environment—earlier it was the new Ice Ace, then the Hole in the Ozone layer, now AGW, the accelerating, man caused extinction of species, glaciers melting and seas rising, massive famine, you name it.
And they all propose various cures for these existential crises that—in what is just a coincidence I am sure—require massive increases in government power and control, a resulting drastic change and constriction of our lives and our freedom, and also usually necessitate massive transfers of money/power from citizens to the government, and from the developed to the underdeveloped world—as Obama’s Science Czar Dr. John Holdren said,
“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States.”
A massive effort that, of necessity, must be orchestrated and controlled by those “experts,” those “people of concern” who first diagnosed the problem, and these “educated,” elite Leftist “experts,” and groups, would need some variant of what, again, of necessity, would have to be a world-spanning and controlling government—say, the UN, or the EU–to save us from world-wide disaster.
In the United States, Obama & Co. have diagnosed our economic “Crisis” as being the result of crises in our Economy, in Education, in Energy production and use, and in Health Care—requiring a massive, extraordinarily government “intervention” in each one of our lives to fix these crises, again—in what I am sure is just another coincidence—requiring that the government devour our wealth, our rights and our freedoms–and democracy along the way—to save us from disaster.
The MSM will never cover this to such an extent since they have invested so much money & time to prove Global Warming exists, although the evidence contradicts such cases. It will take time to simmer, build, & ultimately cascade in the alternative media until the MSM must report the facts. The e-mails just show how corrupt the fraud of Global Warming is. This has been building for over 30 years since the MSM were touting an apocalypse for the Earth with Global Cooling…
CO2 is not the reason for the warming of the earth. It is a natural phenomenon that happens every 26000 year or so.
I am from Holland and if I have to believe Gore I will have wet feet in about 50 years. I think it will happen a lot sooner but we are pretty smart when it comes to water
Excellent summary. The emails look real and they provide enough data to verify if the authors haven’t deleted them and won’t disown them. Several points however, although I do believe at this time that the emails are real I think this situation may lead to a dangerous trend by the general public of assigning truth to “stolen” data. Keep making it clear that this data is not the gospel. Every blog I’ve read is making this clear and I hope they continue to do so. I hope the licensed press does as well but I have my doubts. Next, after reading about the data massaging in some of the emails I wonder if part of the problem is that the AGW proponents simply do not have enough accurate data to make their extraordinary claims about why the climate is changing. Some of the emails are damning in my opinion so I think in order to use this excuse the authors should have to prove their methods are valid (or honest if you prefer). Finally, I fear for the peer review system. This small cabal of scientists appear to have had a disproportionate influence in both the scientific community and the general public (the public via the press). I think this exposes one of the weaknesses in a heavily networked community. This issue has already been politicized (thank you Al Gore, et al). Politicians, if embarrassed, may seek a “solution” to the weaknesses exposed here in the peer review process. I’m not sure that will be good for anyone in the long term. Keep up the good work all of you pajama people!
Why should the mindset we see in these e-mails exist only in the field of climatology? Anyone with a political agenda is tempted to shut down and delegitimize the opposition. This release of internal data supports the contention that any area of science that becomes politicized becomes corrupted. What would we find if we could get similar info on the campaign for embryonic stem cells or anything else related to abortion?
Well here’s a really tin-foil-hatted thought.
Look at it this way. The real and final answer to this development lies in the data, not the emails. If an analysis of the data shows fraud, the emails won’t matter. If the data is clean and good the emails won’t matter.
Suppose the ‘leak’ was a deliberate, carefully engineered ploy:
1. The emails would naturally be the first thing focused on since they are ‘in the clear’, -in plain English requiring no real analysis. (The data will require some time to assess.) So the incriminating emails are left unaltered as ‘bait’, in the hope that everyone will jump on said emails and stake out a position.
2. However, all the original data files have been ‘cleaned up’ to fully support the AGW proponents contention. –all incriminating data points removed or altered to leave no trace of data manipulation.
3. When the data is finally analyzed, it demonstrates the Warmists contention to be proved. All the nay-sayers are left with indelible egg on their faces, their claims never again to be taken seriously.
Even more hype, manipulated and faked statistics, “evidence,” and hyperventilation here in the U.S. over our various Obama & Co. diagnosed “Crises” in Education, Energy, Health and our Economy that will prove–if given the close inspection our MSM, the Left’s “Ministry of Truth,” dares not give them–just as fraudulent a “Crisis” as AGW.
@vivo
“What’s wrong with pure air, pure water, clean energy?”
When how you want to get it will cause the early deaths of hundreds of millions and the relative impoverishment of the some 6 billion (and dropping) who are left–and the reasons given for it are fraudulent–even you should be able to figure out what’s wrong with it.
Now just for fun and a little nostalgia please watch Spock tell us about the coming Ice age in the
“In Search Of” program “The coming ice age” Remember being young and impressionable,scared to death of “Big Foot” and The Lochness Monster segments, the scary music and all. Enjoy fellow PJM ers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ndHwW8psR8&feature=PlayList&p=569D328F0DD9944B&index=0&playnext=1
It just means that most of you guys still aren’t close to getting it. As I posted elsewhere, climate researchers have been drawn into this idiotic “debate” about global warming when as far they are concerned, there is no debate, at least about the big picture aspects of it. They just want to concentrate on the science but have had to deal with massive amounts of confused and deliberate disinformation spewed out by petroleum interests, especially Exxon, and right wing pundits and politicians. With mainstream corporate media doing its useless “leave it there” shtick, and everyone and his Coors downing uncle pretending to be climate scientists and jumping on and spinning any “news” that downplays global warming, the scientists evidently have been taking a more stern approach to not letting slack-jawed numbnuts have anything to toss feces with. While there *is* a genuine consensus about active climate researchers about mankind’s role in the current round of global warming, it’s still a very complex field of study with lots and *LOTS* of question marks in the details. But *only* in the details.
Might I suggest that you guys do an teeny, itsy bitsy bit of actual research before regurgitating stuff that would make a B-average high school student roll his/her eyes? This isn’t a bad start.
We all know that are lakes, river and oceans have become sewers with either no fish or fish you dont want to eat left behind. And we all know that the air is chocked up with man made caustic gasses. And we know that we will run out of massed produced oil/coal someday. And we all know that our forests are being chopped and burned away at an olympic rate. So now that we know that is there anyone that cares enough to do say something or do something about it. Why is the far right now unable to admit there is pollution? Years ago they did. What has happened? We need solutions, not arguments. Dont you agree?
Most of us genuinely care about the environment, but are not interested in anti-corporate politics. The anti-corporate movement hijacked the environmental movement many years ago, and created a religion. This religion says that the Earth is warming, the humans are at fault, and progress must be stopped and reversed to compensate. The faithful in this religion obviously include the prominent scientists who sent these emails. This religion teaches that when the Earth appears to be cooling, the proper approach is to fudge the results to hide the decline. The faith is so strong that the leading experts in this field, when faced with their own measurements of a cooling Earth, believe that the Earth is still warming, and their tests are flawed! The evidence is in these emails. It’s all a sham, and it’s finally coming to light. Maybe now we can all get back to being responsible about the environment, instead of lying about it.
As I understand the process, modern researchers do not “re-invent” the wheel every few years. The used accepted data to start their own research.
Notice that it is suggested that some of the data may have been “messaged”, abiet very slightly.
Thus, even a modern researcher, using some of that data to further his own research, has automatically, and unknowingly introduced a compounding error into his own research.
For instance, consider a current climate modeler, that “runs his model backwards” to check it’s validity. He is now faced with the possibility that if his model matches the here-to-fore accepted data, then it’s confidence level goes down, not up. A truely ironic situation. The better the match, the lower the confidence.
And Edward Lorentz is smiling.
http://www.schuelers.com/ChaosPsyche/part_1_3.htm
And the public is faced with the in-escapeable conclusion, that either there was a tight conspircy several years ago, to supress condictory data, or there is a tight conspircy today, to destroy the confidence in that data.
I am wondering what this will do to Owlgore’s carbon offsets franchise? I am hoping that this will take Gore down alongside the so-called scientists that have foisted this scam onto the world. The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, ELF, ALF and others are going to feel the backlash too. Personally, I hope they all get prosecuted as the terrorists that they really are. Will have to wait and see what becomes of this blatant attempt to shut down the world wide industrial base for personal gain.
To 46. skatzbert
While their is some logic to that thought… its well beyond what cultist in global warming normally do. Mainly for 2 reasons the e-mails are more important then any data.
1. The e-mails clearly show a directed effort to censor, adjust, create and view point based on the data.
This by itself is very very troubling from a science perspective. This alone should be enough to have these people disgraced and removed from there positions.
2. The data… or more the complete lack of data.
The whole reason why global warming has been a very successful hoax is because no one without 10s-100s of millions of dollars can create the data in question… and since all that data is under lock and key by the global warming cultists no one can challenge they’re flat earther views since no one can see the raw data… or even really the “adjusted” data… they only get to read the end result…
The hacking of CRU was bad and illegal, but if this is a whistle blower, trully uncovering institutionalized fraud and willful collusion in the arena of public science and policy, then we should give that person a Congressional Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Prize. We then ask Al Gore for his award back, along with the prize money. Keep up the fight, it’s not over untill the Sun goes super nova.
Re: “the apparent forgoing of the scientific method by a large percentage of the scientific community”. Keep in mind that only a very tiny fraction of the scientific community actually works on this sort of stuff. Scientists can’t spend their time cross-checking results from out of their area — their funding is to support their own research. Papers are peer-reviewed, but it’s pro bono — most scientists can’t afford to spend the months or years that it would take to reproduce the results from the raw data. So there is a danger that a particular subcommunity can subvert the peer review process. The quality of the journals they publish in helps distinguish good science from bad science. But sometimes it takes a generation to weed out bad ideas or to let good ones in (e.g., continental drift).
skatzbert:
The problem is that it is a “noisy” dataset and that simple analysis will not yield anything substantive. The original authors need to SHOW THEIR WORK, so someone can reproduce their result from their data. Shouldn’t be too hard to do.
HOWEVER, one can argue the methods and logic used to come to the conclusion. You cannot trust the published papers, because the “peers” reviewing them wanted to promote the same agenda, and did not subject the CRU results to strong scrutiny.
A sad day for real scientists who will be smeared by the fraud these people perpetuated.
What the emails in total show is a systemic effort to exaggerate findings and promote those findings.
That doesn’t undermine / eliminate the case for AGW. It (hopefully) will get people back to looking at the actual physics and uncertainties and realize a few things -
1) that you can’t squeeze precision out of sparse data sets. Uncertainty is part of statistics and can’t be whittled away except with data and no one has a time machine to go back and get more data. Meanwhile, Mann’s paleoclimactic proxies (which have never had high statistical certainty with or without “tricks”) will suffer a blow and need to be scrutinized.
2) uncertainty can’t be covered over with a dogmatic PR campaign that substitutes moral certitude for scientific certitude while engaging in fraudulent activities to hide the uncertainty endemic to the science.
3) concluding from all of this that “AGW is not real” or “is not supported” is simply wrong. The physics haven’t changed. What has come to light are cases of misconduct that meant to “tweak” conclusions that are intrinsically uncertain so they’d seem more certain. All the same, if you pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in sufficient quantity you will get warming. How much gas gets how much warming? Uncertain, but it is a good idea to find out. Perhaps if personalities (and attendant personality cults) like those of Mann and Jones take a back seat we might just be able to calmly and patiently find out.
My hope out of this is that the catastrophists who shut down all conversations by declaring anyone discussing uncertainty as amoral imbeciles will be chastened and adopt some humility. Hopefully they will see this episode as humiliating because it is. But we are dealing with monumental egos operating in an echo chamber, so uncertainty about that outcome rears its head.
I’ve read some of the e-mails and the most damning are the ones where the writers want to hide data. If the proponents of AGW are so sure of their hypotheses and the data supporting them, why would they not share the data? Sort of like Einstein proclaiming his theory of relativity and not sharing his findings with anyone. Would anyone have believed him back at the beginning of the 20th century had he not shared findings?
If any of this can be shown to be a smoking gun, the fallout for science in general and not just climatology will be devastating. Why would any non-scientist believe anything a scientist says anymore?
In any event, we are fortunate that the weather has not been cooperating with the AGW hypothesis. At worst it has not warmed in the last ten years despite every increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, and at best it has actually cooled. Indeed, Lord Christopher Monckton has published several papers where he showed that the IPCC models in 1998 forecasted a steady increase in temperature. The trajectory, however, has been one of declining temperatures.
Finally, contra Vivo @ #21, whatever we do in countering “pollution” must be subject to a cost-benefit analysis. What are the costs and what are the benefits to human society. During the entire 20th century, and its purported warming, we have seen humankind improve its lot enormously. Today, in the US, even the lowest levels of the income distribution have riches that not even the richest individuals in previous centuries could have imagined. If allowed to develop unfettered by government rules and regulations, who knows how humankind will develop during the 21st century? So before anyone gets worked up our “polluting” the planet or “warming” it with CO2, examine the past and the benefits of our “polluting” and the costs of undoing such “pollution.”
AGW is like Marxism: a fraud that is heavily promoted by the powerful in order to deepen and broaden their power. The plain, powerful evidence of Marxism’s fraudulent character has not lessened its appeal to the ruling class; so likewise, plain evidence that AGW is a fraud will not affect them either. This will be brushed aside and ignored; in a few days, we will find that not only are we at war with Eastasia – we have *always* been at war with Eastasia.
You can search the emails online at this site: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/
(got the link from the wattsupwiththat.com blog)
Its amazing isn’t it? I was expecting AGW/Climate Change to be nearly forgotten before the fraud became exposed.
As others point out, AGW need not be a “hoax” in the strict sense, requiring a grand (implausible) conspiracy, but rather something more insidious– what Richard Feynman called cargo cult science. In other words, collusion by members of a politico-scientific community who’ve fooled themselves, first of all, as much as they’ve fooled others. The politico-scientific symbiosis and the tactics of ‘excommunication’ also make AGW something like a milder version (say, the phenomenon as manifested in a roughly speaking ‘democratic’ society) of Lysenkoism (the phenomenon as manifested in a totalitarian society).
A long excerpt from Feynman (only because it’s so a propos):
[...] But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school–we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
[...]
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of–this history–because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong–and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves–of having utter scientific integrity–is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.” He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing–and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.
I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.
As they say, read the whole thing.
What Everyone seems to be missing is that AGW ISN’T science, it’s religion. So the E-mails won’t affect the ‘swampies’. No more then having the 13th chapter of the Koran show up, chiseled into the wall of the “remote mosque”. Muslims will still believe Ol’ Mo, the goat roper ascended to heaven a remote Mosque in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was captured about 11 years AFTER Ol’Mo kicked the bucket and the Mosque itself was built about 4 centuries later. That isn’t going to change the mind of any Muslims. Nor will ANYTHING change the mind of a Swampie.
PS, the horse Ol’ Mo rode to heaven was named Baruk.
Co-ink-see-dink? I’m sure.
The Fortran code that shipped with the emails is used to process and plot the data provided with the code. It is not an exhaustive climate model. Finding flaws in it will not disprove AGW. Flaws will show that the claims that the past has almost always been cooler than now WILL go out the window if the code/data are shown to exaggerate the case.
If you are a critic of AGW alarmism the way to box the alarmists in is to insist they account for statistical uncertainty. It is inescapable (except by using an ongoing dogmatic PR / career assassination campaign which has now come to an end).
Frankly this is all good for science.
48. Tom Perkins:
vivo is changing the subject. His question is irrelevant; no one disputes the value of clean air and water. Fake science is the issue here.
Dr. Matt wrote: “So, we expect Joe Scientist to say, ‘Gee, I spent all my grant money and 5 yrs of work to get a data set; why don’t I give it away for free to people who are going to use it badly and make stupid arguments against me instead of getting my own publications.’”
Joe Scientist may say or think whatever he wishes, but if his research is funded in part or entirely with federal or state dollars, the data is public. Period. That’s why it’s subject to FOI requests. That doesn’t begin to touch on the ethics of denying data for the purpose of peer review.
Dr. Matt wrote: “But geez, this is a small number of the total scientists, a very selected small number of their e-mails, and global warming is directly in front of our eyes.”
Yes, a very small number of very influential scientists (see the IPCC report) who have been engaged in very public denunciations of those who have questioned their work. The issue is less about GW, though that may now be questioned if the worst of this pans out, but (A)GW: In other words, given mean temperature increases, what is the principal driver?
The problem has been that some scientists have prostituted science to a political agenda. Politicians will survive the worst of this (think Al Gore), they nearly always do, but climate science and the scientists involved with it will suffer as always happens when science and politics mix.
#21 vivo: “What’s wrong with pure air, pure water, clean energy?”
Straw Man Argument of the Year.
Hey, I’m not willing to agree the dishonesty was done by well meaning guys who believed in what they were doing. There are BIG bucks involved here. Gore, alone, has made/will make a fortune.
The politicians LOVE this kind of stuff; there are bribes, payoffs and kickbacks that justify the risks of passing really silly laws.
The trick is to become the expert with “proof” that the sky IS falling, especially if your predicting the big boom won’t happen for years. Methodically faking data to “prove” your expertise is a modest price for years of wealth, status, academic assistants and, yeah, more wealth.
These scum can rationalize that they haven’t hurt anyone and therefore, it is no big deal. Think of the academics today who present “proof” that lead in paint really doesn’t do harm. If you accepted that thesis and put lead in paint, children would die. Not so with fake weather data; only money changes hands and the wealthy are blamed/punished/taxed.
Wait for the counter attack. If the Goristas go after the skeptics like the captive media goes after Sarah Palin, then we’ll have a sense of the money that was about to be acquired or stolen.
The problem with clean air, pure water and clean energy is related to the definitions of each. Natural is not clean or pure. It all depends on the definition of(is is)clean and pure.
I’m shocked! The NYT doesn’t think this is terribly newsworthy…just more “fodder” for the skeptics.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html?ref=science
51. Poor Citizen: “Why is the far right now unable to admit there is pollution?”
Just another troll. Probably believes in evolution, too.
“Dr.” Matt wrote:
But geez, this is a small number of the total scientists, a very selected small number of their e-mails
And that “small number” of scientists happen to be ones who have been hugely influential in driving this debate. That “very selected small number of their emails” happen to be ones in which they speak freely about how to jigger the data so it comes out in their favor and how to silence the nay-sayers. If you’re arrested for murder and cops find that you confessed to the crime in an email you wrote, that’s the one they are going to zero in on, not the thousands of perfectly innocent ones you sent. Face it, if authentic, these emails are utterly damning.
When you get quotes in PJM like ‘it’s not the global warming its the warming around the cities’ or ‘CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, there are other stronger ones’. It is obvious which side is basically correct.
So, a few blog comments written by laypersons discredit the other side? Gee, “Dr.”, what about Al Gore’s apparent belief that the core of the earth is millions of degrees, or the latest green propaganda commercial warning us that dead polar bears are going to drop from the sky if we don’t take AGW seriously?
AGW isn’t “settled science.” (The very idea that science can be “settled” is profoundly unscientific.) It’s both a scam – one that has made the Right Rev. Al Gore very, very rich – and a religion, and your reaction to seeing your faith being discredited is to lash out at the sceptics.
I also fear that the facts don’t matter in this situation. The facts that AGW is a fraud is irrelevant, for the real agenda has nothing to do with the environment but with a political agenda of taking the wealth of industrially developed countries and handing it over to the undeveloped…and not necessarily for their own development. We know what happens to monies in corrupt undeveloped countries.
The empirical facts will be ignored; they were irrelevant right from the beginning. The focus will turn to the major tactic used within the AGW agenda, which was to make the industrial peoples feel emotionally sinful, guilty for their industrial wealth.
Science has always had the problem of protecting ones own ox from being gored. People like Immanual Velikovsky, among others, have always had a problem with the scientific community in getting a fair review of their theories.
I am grateful for the internet’s ablilty to overcome the establishment’s control of information.
Late to the dance with this but I must say:
Velikovsky.
Perfect.
Pseudoscience at its finest, no theory is too foolish to find a base of support on the intertubes.
The physics haven’t changed. What has come to light are cases of misconduct that meant to “tweak” conclusions that are intrinsically uncertain so they’d seem more certain.
What has come to light, to the sentient at least, is that climate has clearly cooled over the last 3 years while CO2 has increased. The improbable theory of AGW (that temperature is controlled by a trace molecule comprising a mere .04% of the earth’s atmosphere, of which mankind contributes 3%) has been disproved. This improbable theory can’t explain the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm period so they had to fudge the data.
Scientists go wherever their observations take them and welcome peer review. Mann, Hansen are not true scientists but propagandists (and likely profiteers). Funding for these charlatans should be cut off immediately.
The details are surely damning but the big picture is Hellish. These so-called climate scientists gave up science more than ten years ago. Notice that they have nothing to say about revisions in theories or models, improvements in theories or models, or results of robust debates about theories or models. For ten years or more, all they have done is massage data to fit preconceived notions of AGW, hide data from critics and potential critics, and attempt to punish their critics. In the hearts of these men, the light of science was entinguished more than ten years ago. They are now political hacks who hawk fossilized science.
“21. vivo:
What’s wrong with pure air, pure water, clean energy?”
Same thing that’s not wrong with unicorns and rainbows.
It isn’t that there is anything wrong with the things you cite, the objection is over the manner in which the left wishes to achieve them.
Poor Citizen:
“We know that are (sic) lakes, rivers and oceans have become sewers with either no fish or fish you don’t want to eat.” I live in a part of the country where for most of history the staple diet was corn, beans, and squash. Today I can eat fish every day of the week should I choose to do so, in the middle of a desert, no less.
“And we all know that the air is choked up by man made caustic gasses.” The industrial revolution turned Britain’s cities and towns literally black with soot. Clean energy is the result of new technologies. Nuclear, for one.
“And we know that we will run out of massed produced oil/coal someday.” Yes, “someday.” See also point two above.
“And we all know that our forests are being chopped and burned away at an Olympic rate. The opposite is true. We have more forested areas in the US today than we did 200 years ago. More wild game, too. It’s called “resource management.”
“Why is the far right now unable to admit there is pollution?” Why is the left unable to admit we have the means to clean it up, and that environmental quality has improved since the 1960′s?
Dude, I can see that you are earnest and well-meaning, but the way is forward, not backwards. You have to be a Luddite to believe otherwise. Even if AGW were a confirmed fact, we would develop the technologies to fix it. Technology is the solution, not the problem.
We all know that are lakes, river and oceans have become sewers with either no fish or fish you dont want to eat left behind. [No, they are not. Current environmental regulations are making our waters cleaner, not dirtier] And we all know that the air is chocked up with man made caustic gasses. [If it was you would be dead for breathing it. As I noted above, LA smog is declining, in spite of increases in population in the area.] And we know that we will run out of massed produced oil/coal someday. [Best guess is 400+ years here in the US. Which buys us a lot of time to figure out something better.] And we all know that our forests are being chopped and burned away at an olympic rate. [Can't speak worldwide and I know that there are issues in South America, but here in the US we have more forest acreage than we did when Columbus landed.] So now that we know that is there anyone that cares enough to do say something or do something about it. [If they have to lie to achieve their ends, is that justified? I'd say not.] Why is the far right now unable to admit there is pollution? Years ago they did. [And they still do, we on the far right disagree immensely with the left on how to fix the problem. We're not ready to impoverish and kill billions to get results.] What has happened? We need solutions, not arguments. [Not really. Not when the cost of a solution is greater than the benefit it delivers - better to deal with the consequences. For more details read Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist.] Dont you agree? [Since I've proven your premises incorrect, NO I DON"T. Nor do many other Americans who value our lives and those of our fellow citizens. We completely unwilling to be ruled by so-called experts, who are in fact, theocrats. We take conservation seriously, but have no time for frauds. And Algore is a fraud. If actually believed the stuff he was pedaling would he fly around the world in his private jet, with a huge carbon-footprint? No. He'd be living as a subsistence farmer in a shack in the Tennessee mountains.]
#59, Adam, I think you’re right, with one exception, which may just be phrasing. I don’t think there’s any question that greenhouse gases are a “warming forcing”, that is, they contribute to the things that would lead to global average temperature going up. Whether they contribute anything measurable to the overall temperature change seems to me an open problem.
Hansen, Mann, Jones, et al have hypothesized that they do, and this has become popularly accepted. I think, with these data, that has to be considered more questionable.
Wait until Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck get hold of this information. They will do more to ‘enlighten’ the politicians than anyone.
It will take time, but this global warming fraud will be exposed and hopefully it’s perps will be put on trial for what they cost in enormous tax dollars and the pain and suffering of children.
This was a most grotesque effort by these pseudo scientists to help evil politicians and some evil businessmen such as George Soros the Rothschilds and even Fat Albert Gore himself from forming a global feudal state. People control and not climate control was the ultimate goal and most of us on the skeptic side of the fence have always known that.
Be warned these are very evil people and they will not stop here. Watch for the next catastrophic theory that comes down the pike and you will see many of the same people and groups of people behind it. Even though many of them should and may go to jail, many will hide in the political shrubbery and wait it out.
We must be ever vigilant if we wish to remain free.
“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” – John 8:32. (NOT Al Gore)
Any emails to or from Al Gore?
The apologists who insist that this scandal doesn’t weaken the case for AGW are missing the point. Whether there is any warming is a scientific question. What to do about it (taxes, cap and trade, carbon reductions, etc) are political questions. These so called scientists were not answering scientific questions, they were pushing a political agenda.
Scientists, who in many cases already rely on taxpayer money to fund their work, have been found to have massaged and tweaked (falsified) data, blacklisted scientists that tried to review their work, and deleted data that might have proven them wrong. Now these same scientists are asking world governments and citizens to fork over an extremely large amount of money to fix a problem which has been shown to be, at least in part, fraudulent.
I think before any government agrees to spend a single dime on any proposed solution, every taxpayer funded scientist should be forced to make public their data and emails, just as CRU has had theirs exposed. There should be regulations to this effect.
Science is a search for truth, not a political game. If scientists are subverting the scientific method in exchange for money and power, that is a BIG problem. The only solution is transparency. Lets throw some light on the problem, and take a fresh look. It would be extremely foolish for any agreement to come out of Copenhagen in light of this recent scandal.
I read the e-mails posted and, while I cannot come with a qualified opinion regarding the content, I was stricken by the e-mails’ tenor – reminding a besieged, secretive sect’s members, who defend a majestic truth from some nefarious figures trying to dismantle that.
Paranoia, suspicions of betrayal, moles, inside jobs, leaks – I remember once I read a Scientology thread during one of their crisis – the substance of the crime was completely incomprehensible for me, but the exchange had exactly the same paranoid tone, weird accusations flying around –
Heh-heh-heh – and liberals claim that conspiracy theories are an exclusively conservative-controlled domain -
Really funny -
RE #21/vivo:
[...] It takes an idiot not to understand that POLLUTING the planet is detrimental to, guess what, the planet!What’s wrong with pure air, pure water, clean energy? [...]
May Kumbaya music enlighten you all day long, Vivo, son of the Berkeley-In-The-Sixties!
But the problem here is the Malenkovich Cycles (maybe you never heard about that), not the water imported for you from Fidji in whales-hurting tankers -
Dr Matt:
So, we expect Joe Scientist to say, “Gee, I spent all my grant money and 5 yrs of work to get a data set; why don’t I give it away for free to people who are going to use it badly and make stupid arguments against me instead of getting my own publications.”
Yeah, pretty much. That’s why reputable journals require authors to archive their data and make it available. Replication, along with peer-review is a keystone of science.
“21. vivo:
What’s wrong with pure air, pure water, clean energy?”
Vivo my friend – here is the problem: the modern leftist environmental movement is an “all or nothing” philosophy. If you question the science of CO2 – based, man cause global warming, you are (in the left’s mind) obviously in favor of dumping raw nuclear waste in the public water supply. The left permits no discussion of specifics. You are part of the orthodoxy or you are not.
Nothing is wrong with pure air, pure water and clean energy. We all want pure air, pure water and clean energy. We do NOT all blindly subscribe to all of the economy killing methodologies the left would impose on us and future generations.
Several popular blogs that have adamantly defended global climate change/ice age/warming are now defending these AGW scientific e-mail frauds.
Tricks really means technology?
Blogger’s comments are being deleted or dinged down by those that worship and donate
to protect the true scientists of AGW’s global world religion.
I mentioned that it was ‘sad’ these great men of science got caught stifling opposition and fudging the debate.
Being ostracized for detesting fraud is like telling the kid with his hand already caught in the cookie jar to go steal the cookies off the store shelf instead.
To: 55. robotech master:
I agree with what you say. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire and a brief perusal of the emails suggests a great deal of smoke indeed, especially when taken in their entirety. But as others have pointed out, some of the statements in the emails can be construed in different ways depending on whether you wish to take a worst-case or a best-case interpretation. For example, the term “trick” has been focused upon to mean that the researcher was engaging in an act of deception, but that term can often be used to mean, “a clever and innovative way to solve a problem.”, I use it that way all the time.
Perhaps I should have ended my previous comment with a question which was implied, but not stated:
>>How difficult would it be to go back through many years of data sets and ‘sweep out’ the incriminating data or ‘correct’ it to conform with the contentions the Warmists are making?<<
If that’s so difficult a task as to be well-neigh impossible, then my original suggestion is not worth much, however, I don’t have experience in that line of activity so I have no way of assessing the probability of it being done.
I’d appreciate if someone here could take a shot at that question.
The other main point I wanted to make was that I believe it’s safer, -more prudent- to wait for the data analysis than to rely on the emails. Let the hard facts speak for themselves. (If they haven’t been altered)
To: 58. Dr. K:
Yes. This is a real mess for science as an endeavor and scientists as individuals. As I said in another place, if this scandal proves out, honest scientists everywhere should be dragging the guilty before their respective Academic Standards Committee(s) and demanding heads.
I find it very telling that environmental groups and the MSM always celebrate the success of the DDT ban, epitomized by increasing Bald Eagle populations, but–somehow–never dwell on the other effects of the world-wide DDT ban on human beings, like the hundreds of thousands of people–mostly people with weaker immune systems, children and the elderly–who sicken and die each year in Africa from the Malaria that DDT formerly controlled, or the recent outbreaks of formerly DDT controlled head lice in our schools, and the most recent epidemic of bedbugs in our hotels and homes.
You can be sure that for every so called “fix” of our supposed grave “crises” there will be many nasty side effect–anticipated or unanticipated–many broken eggs that proponents of these fixes will consider just the cost of making an omelet, and make sure we never hear of, or get sufficient information about to get alarmed.
Again, grave “souffle” crises, full mostly of the hot air that temporarily inflates them, but a great way to frighten us and make us willing to give up our money and our freedom to a Nanny state–or more properly a Fascist/Totalitarian state–which will “save” us from these inflated, illusory, “Crises.”
/bump from top
“That is the lesson that we must learn from this. [b]Our governments have turned against us.[/b]“
The injection of political leanings by commenters here serves little purpose and comes off as tinfoil hat silliness.
The overall problem isn’t left wing conspiracy but that climate change has been politicised via the UN and made into a bureaucracy. Jones and Mann et al were merely doing what human nature dictates and Jerry Pournelle sums up as the “Iron Law of Bureaucracy”; that is, they were assuming to own some turf and their actions over time became less about the science and more about protecting their position.
This of course is bad enough. The best example is the stuff re Steve McIntyre e.g. suggestions that they’ll delete the data before turning it over to him. That’s not science, which is supposed to be open. Moreover, McIntyre is merely an auditor. Claiming that he needs to create his own peer reviewed paper is akin to claiming that the corporate auditor ought to recreate a year of sales data because he finds discrepancies in what was reported. That’s a stupid argument.
Ultimately what this leak proves is that the Team became more interested in turf than science. This has been ‘known’ for quite some time by of us who have been following the McIntyre site: refusal to show data isn’t science, which requires repeatability and scrutiny to even BE science. It’s not a special club. This is especially true when it is we in the public who pay for it all. Public data is public data.
Charlie: As to debating the authenticity of the emails I would re-work the idea that “none of them have been refuted” to note that in various published remarks (an article in the WaPo, e.g.) reflect the fact that some purported authors have actually defended the content of some emails. That presents a fairly strong admisssion of authenticity.
Re #87/misanthropicus: surely you understand that the lefties, lacking facts and logical argument, construct straw men to make their opponents look like uncaring monsters. You don’t support SCHIP? You hate children. You don’t support hate crimes legislation? You’re homophobic. You don’t support destroying the world’s economy based on higly questionable — nay, totally fraudulent — data and analysis, and fairy-tale computer models? You want smoggy air, burning rivers and dead oceans. Simple, no?
Global warming is just another name and another cover for governmental power, the true religion of the 20th & 21st century. Though it is interesting that the flacks for this titanic lie have switched to Climate Change, a less descriptive phrase.
Regardless of what it’s called the little people of the left will go along with it, note this site as an example. Some folks just yearn for the boot on their face, if it’s government it has to be good. They can’t begin to realize that what it’s really about is the infliction of misery, perhaps someday Obama will inform them of this.
But not anytime soon.
These emails expose a cult. Not a group of serious scientists.
Also, the feeble strawman arguments already being made that anyone who questions the cultist’s “science” must be water polluting, animal hating, air clogging monsters is infuriating (but will likely be the approach we can expect to be used in an attempt to distract from the many large issues these emails raise.)
If there is any doubt about the authenticity of the emails, someone can easily do a FOIA request of the US agencies, such as NOAA and NASA, that were on many or most of the distribution lists. Agencies are required by law to keep emails and must respond to FOIA requests. Maybe the Powerline guys or someone else with the legal know-how can do this.
#3 Francis Porretto
Excellent list. I would add another: Some theoretical scientists have trouble finding funding for and justifying their work (to Deans, Regents, the public). Being able to pitch their research as a potential solution to AGW “problems” provides them with a new purpose and cachet.
#50 BC — They just want to concentrate on the science but have had to deal with massive amounts of confused and deliberate disinformation spewed out by petroleum interests, especially Exxon, and right wing pundits and politicians.
I do so love the Big Oil argument. So, if I get it right, Big Oil has billion$ to spend on the best and brightest minds on the planet. Meanwhile, oil is running out, and the best the brightest business minds on the planet can manage is a plot to piss off the populace and get nationalised by incensed governments and put themselves out of profitable business by using up the limited resources as fast as possible.
It never occurs to you anti-corporate types that it’s actually in Exxon’s long term interest to LIMIT oil. Based on the magic of supply and demand, they would make more profit on less product and less outlay. Centuries of profit.
The self-conflicting, tortured, twisted crap you Big Oil arguers have to believe would embarrass any self-respecting fundamentalist preacher in a revival tent.
Dr. Matt wrote: “But geez, this is a small number of the total scientists, a very selected small number of their e-mails, and global warming is directly in front of our eyes.”
Dr. Matt’s wearing a blindfold and not using all of his senses if he thinks the world hasn’t cooled, and noticeably, in the last 3 years. The reason these conspirators changed the language from global warming to climate change is that it’s been obvious to the sentient that it’s been getting colder, not warmer.
re: 81
Charlie,
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but water vapor is much more dominant in its impact. Also don’t forget the oceans are the largest reserve of gaseous CO2, and that explains why CO2 is actually a LAGGING indicator of temperature increase. It takes a while to heat the vast thermal mass of the oceans to cause them to give up their CO2. The warmists have always skated around this point though it’s been raised repeated (starting early in the debate) by the skeptics. The “ocean effect” has always been the simplest explanation for the correlation of CO2 concentration with global temperature — and the fact that it’s a lagging indicator supports it as the primary cause.
For the doomsday models to work, they have to include a “trigger point” at which the effect of CO2 is suddenly magnified by some type of positive feedback loop. Several mechanism have be proposed, but none have been proven to exist. Based on the available evidence and data, one would suspect that the “ocean effect” is probably the primary driver of the correlation.
In the meantime, temperatures have either been stagnant, or dropping slightly for the past ten years in spite of continuing CO2 increases. That fact, in and of itself, raises serious questions about CO2 as the PRIMARY driver of global warming. The computer models have been the primary support for AGW theories, but they have not been able to predict the changes in the earth’s climate since they were first promulgated.
The key players in AGW promotion have been restricting access to their data from the very beginning, Hansen was one of the first to resist releasing the data, and he is an employee of NASA, the data is not “his,” it belongs to the citizens of the United States. That was another of the early red flags of what game was being played. A true, and honest, scientist would have welcomed an open review of his data and his statistical approach.
Similarly if you read the original IPCC report, you’ll find that the conclusions in the Executive Summary (which was written by political hacks) are, indeed, not supported by the papers in the scientific “core” of the report. This fact was pointed out by several participants in the first conference, but was largely ignored by the conventional “press.”
The evidence of a politically driven agenda has been available in the public domain from the very beginning.
The current “hack” (or, more probably “inside job,” as you suggest) is merely a much more dramatic release of a much larger body of evidence that is consistent with the past data about the behavior of these organizations. Your point about the evidence that they may have intentionally destroyed the data that was reported “inadvertently destroyed” in response to FOIA requests is particularly significant, I think. Many of us had real problems with the “dog ate my data” answer that they had provided, and now you’ve picked up a strong indication of felonious contact.
Thanks for the excellent article.
“Global warming” has always been about the same issues as “Snowball Earth” (global freeze blamed on atmospheric pollution) which was the media darling of the 60s and 70s. These are:
a) blame the capitalists (a handy substitute for parents)
b) feel self righteous, and
c) tell other people what to do.
When “climate change” is discredited, another thing will pop up that will serve the exact same purpose and it will attract the same believers. If it justifies higher taxes, it will also get the same gushing government support.
“Late on the night of of November 19, news broke on PJM and elsewhere…”
That was a helluva stretch, wasn’t it. Didn’t it ‘break’ at Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit, first? …seeing that HE orginally ‘broke’ the story?
Wasn’t it at least several hours later, if not a day or so, before consevative blogs picked up on the story and ran with it?
Credit where credit is due, kids, or give up your credibility, forever and ever, amen.
“But geez, this is a small number of the total scientists, a very selected small number of their e-mails, and global warming is directly in front of our eyes.”
Perhaps its in front of your eyes Dr. Matt, but apparently it is not in front of the eyes of this small number of “scientists” who feel compelled to falsify data, cover up results, and delete data to support their claim of global warming.
Waterloo for the Environmentalist Wacko Movement!
HOAX deceive by way of a joke; humorous or mischievous deception.
FRAUD criminal deception; dishonest artifice or trick; impostor; person or thing not fulfilling claim or expectation.
CONSPIRE combine secretly for unlawful or harmful purpose; (of events) seem to be working together.
CONSPIRACY act of conspiring; unlawful combination or plot.
AGW WAS NOT A HOAX IT WAS FRAUD AND CONSPIRACY
Rachel @ 66:
Thanks for the Feynman link. It is excellent.
I expect the “mainstream” media will give this scandal the same thorough coverage it gave to the revelation that Van Jones is an avowed communist and 9/11 Truther.
To paraphrase, “This was the moment when the AGW bullshit began to slow and the earth began to heal…”
Make that Rachel @ 60. Sorry.
“inadvertently deleted” their raw data.
What kind of amateurs do not back up their data?
By hiding the raw data, we have no way to know what they have done to it, to make it support AGW.
Environmentalism amounts to state sponsored religion. It is based on nothing that is factually concrete and is purely conjecture extrapolated from correlations. It is a product of the computer age, just like all the rumors we find on the internet. It takes faith to believe in the canards of this religion and if the government were not passing out research grants with our tax dollars, there wouldn’t be many believers and this group of “experts” would not have ever been exposed. Follow the money, folks.
And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!
/scoobydoo
I’ve suspected for a long time that they were BSing us. This just confirms it.
What’s wrong with pure air and pure water? Answer: It doesn’t exist, anywhere, and it never did, nor will it ever without divine intervention. Good luck getting the uranium and radium out of the water supply- those radioactive elements occur naturally and get dissolved in water. You can filter out a good percentage of them, but it is thermodynamically impossible to remove all the contaminants from water.
The top elite on the left knew this, or something like this, was bound eventually to happen. That is why several months ago they changed their agenda to ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’. Well, guess what kiddies, we have and always will be experiencing climate change until the end of the world, and it has nothing to do with human interaction, and for the last seven years the Earth has and is getting cooler. If the Environmentalists had been around during the ICE AGE, they would have blamed the cave people’s fires as the cause; Is not our life percarious enough already,without this Leftist hysteria every new decade. Most environmentalists, have the credibility like Al Gore: Of a pay toilet in Tijuana ! Leave us normal people alone!
G. L. Alston writes:
“The overall problem isn’t left wing conspiracy but that climate change has been politicised via the UN and made into a bureaucracy. Jones and Mann et al were merely doing what human nature dictates and Jerry Pournelle sums up as the “Iron Law of Bureaucracy”; that is, they were assuming to own some turf and their actions over time became less about the science and more about protecting their position.”
You are missing the big picture. What these emails prove conclusively is that these fossilized old men who call themselves scientists have done nothing for ten years except 1) massage date to fit fossilized, preconceived notions about AGW, 2)illegally hide data or destroy it to thwart legitimate FOIA requests, and 3) harass their critics. Their critics should be filing lawsuits against them as I write. And most important of all, ten years of emails shows not one advance in science, not one theory revised, not one new theory proposed. They have become nothing but political hacks hawking a fossilized product, milking it for everything it is worth.
There must be a class action lawsuit against Al Gore and his cadre of corrupt scientists. If this does not get into the court system, it will be ignored and swept away… too much big money is at stake.
Environmentalists use the courts to control the agenda. Learn from them. Use the legal system that is set up for just this situation.
This issue MUST enter into the court system for it to have any impact at all. Am I the only lawyer who posts?
daniel ellsburg + cardiff giant…
I hope this is true and not a set up. Expect the usual suspects to ignore this as long as they can.
Andrew Myers writes:
“Papers are peer-reviewed, but it’s pro bono — most scientists can’t afford to spend the months or years that it would take to reproduce the results from the raw data.”
To call something that a tenured professor does “pro bono” can only bring howls of laughter from the knowledgeable. A tenured professor’s duties amount to about 20 hours a week while the university is in session. In addition, reviewing papers is how you curry favor with editors. It is an investment and, in any case, you do it while you are holding office hours. Poooor wittle scientists.
I’ve been arguing for years against AGW hysteria somewhere along the same lines as Freeman Dyson. In a recent discussion with a local economics professor, his argument consisted of “All your sources are biased, mine are purely scientific and unassailable”. Needless to say, the Left has pinned many of their dreams of reversion to ennobled paleolithic living on the evidence of AGW and they’re not going to let good science stand in their way.
“Why is the far right now unable to admit there is pollution? Years ago they did. What has happened? We need solutions, not arguments. Dont you agree?”
Poor (anonymous, of course) Citizen, there is no one here who supports pollution. You don’t know how to read. What concerns people is the misuse of science. If you don’t understand that, your remaining anonymous is probably a good idea. I would too.
Here is how CRU conveniently ignores long term thermometer records to scare us out of our wits:
http://i45.tinypic.com/iwq8a1.jpg
This is an epic tail of human behavior when confronted with money, prestige and power. Federal and foundation grant money turned scientists into whores. A whore has to give the John his due so his studies say global warming is a threat to planet. Once the whore-scientist has made his reputation he doubles down to prevent the underpinnings of his prestige from collapsing around him so he fakes the data. Finally those who seek power based on global warming smear their opponents and suppress data unfavorable to their cause. The Greeks knew all about this.
Regardless of your stance on environmental issues in general. The problem with AGW is that it is forcing the use of limit available resources (read cash) on something that is not a problem. I doubt the most vehement anti-environmentalist thinks that pollution is a good thing. The issue is what are the real problems presented by the pollution and what are the most effective ways of eliminating these problems within economic realities. Focusing on and using resources on a non-problem take away from the ability to solve or reduce the effects of other environmental issues. It also makes it more difficult to address these issues. As the public and the politicians do not know what are real problems and what is made up by those that wish to manipulate the system.
Google news. keyword: ‘climate audit,’ ‘Steve Mcintyre.’
The MSM is starting to cover the story. Over a thousand hits. A few of them are offering more or less balanced povs.
#101 Warren, that’s probably fair; I was thinking in terms of “on general news sites”. I was also gently tweaking my editors, because we probably had it before any other general news site, except they dawdled publishing it.
#91 GLA, I agree, but then what web site doesn’t have the shiny-skullcap brigade?
#94 and others, I think it’s worth being vewy vewy careful on the authenticity question, ’cause we ain’t huntin’ wabbits. But I agree that between outsiders corroborating some of the emails, and the lack of any complaints about fake emails, the case for their authenticity is getting stronger. I also think the case for their being an inside job is getting stronger.
#118 Theo, having thought for a while about doing the tenure track, and having seen a lot of my friends go through it, I’ve got to say your notion of what it’s like is a little unrealistic. But in any case, “pro bono” basically means “for nothing”. It contributes very little directly to your success as an academic and can be a real pain in the ass. Andrew has it right — you can’t expect a reviewer to get the data and attempt to replicate something during a review.
Usually, replication is done by a grad assistant as a way of learning the techniques in the field, and it sometimes reveals problems too. In this case, I can’t but think they were worried, maybe subconsciously, that their results really weren’t replicable.
This AWG email thing is a perfect example of why we need smaller government. We have today large groups of people (entire nations and states too) trying to defraud governments of taxpayer money and in our case today, money we don’t have. The greedy appetite is way out of control. Name one government program that does not have significant fraud and waste. Global warming/climate change is just one example of the wicked amount of greed we are facing. The tragedy is that it is elected politicians who are facilitating most of the financial destruction.
Put the choices back in the hands of private citizens and lets see how easy it is to steal their money and resources.
Right now our resources are being taken away at the point of a gun under the guise of “law”.
The global warming tards are in it for the money and since the private citizen won’t buy their snake oil they are hoping to get themselves legitimized under “the law”. Yes we can say they are communists, eco terrorists, Marxists and statists but the truth is they are thieves and murderers being driven by greed and hatred like the evil master they serve.
It is their ability to deceive that has given them traction. Because they are blinded by their greed, they don’t see that God in heaven is working to defeat them. Every little lie of theirs is being exposed but they can no longer hide or crawl under a rock, they are out of hiding forever. This is it for them. They must conquer the world or die. No matter the result, they are destined for destruction. The Earth will be returned to those who uphold truth and righteousness.
There would have to be an official with the institution who would bring fraud charges against these politically correct activists. What are the chances of that happening in any major US or UK P.C. fraud University? These frauds will fly even higher. Now they are “victims” of a hacker.
‘..pretending to be climate scientists and jumping on and spinning any “news”..’
Yeah, BC – if the shoe fits..
Your opinionated blathering can be used for the pro-agw crowd’s scientists and their political leanings/ stances. i.e. Big Government ‘knows best’.
I chuckled when Charlie Martin mentioned ‘realclimate.org’ as a ‘valid’ site for ‘lucid discussion of a climatological nature’.
I can’t recall the posters name, but ~ month ago someone used this site as furthering their viewpoint. I hope that poster looks outside their self-empathy state and look outside the box and acknowledge other data. i.e. fact.
The majority of realclimate’s contributor’s credentials are far left (NCAR, WMO, NOAA etc.,), crushing any chance at true debate, conversation on the matter. If attempting to do so, the post will not be acknowleged, responded or in some instances – removed.
As others have said, we’ll see how this plays out.
Lots of things were systematically hidden from the public. The scientists behind IPCC knew about these problems, but avoided publishing any information about them and even tried to suppress such publications. Does anybody know that at present it is impossible to calculate CO2 contribution to greenhouse effect in real atmosphere, to measure it or to infer it from statistics? This is the crucial problem for confirmation or refutation of AGW hypothesis, but scientific community keeps silence about it for two decades.
Charlie Martin writes:
“#118 Theo, having thought for a while about doing the tenure track, and having seen a lot of my friends go through it, I’ve got to say your notion of what it’s like is a little unrealistic. But in any case, “pro bono” basically means “for nothing”. It contributes very little directly to your success as an academic and can be a real pain in the ass. Andrew has it right — you can’t expect a reviewer to get the data and attempt to replicate something during a review.”
“Usually, replication is done by a grad assistant as a way of learning the techniques in the field, and it sometimes reveals problems too. In this case, I can’t but think they were worried, maybe subconsciously, that their results really weren’t replicable.”
That is not how I work and it is not how I advise others to work. Getting tenure is a challenge. I am talking about folks who have tenure. “Pro bono” means “for nothing.” Reviewers work for nothing, except for the good opinion of the journal editor. You seem not to appreciate the importance of having the good opinion of the journal editor.
8. Charlie Martin:
CableGuy, I think it’s a mistake to think of this as a hoax. This isn’t Climate SPECTRE colluding on their evil designs; it’s a bunch of regular guys who, at each step, thought they were doing the right thing.
lol …RIGHT ..doing the right thing by falsifying data. you have the intelligence that matches your morals. ZERO
Let us all be reminded that the concept of ‘global warming’ was first promoted in Britain by none other than Margaret Thatcher, who, when finding her country in the powerful grip of coal mining unions, needed to sell the country on the benefits of nuclear power. How to do that? Well, Ther team came up with the concept of ‘global warming’ caused by humans, and especially coal burning plants. Clever stuff. Then, the scam has been promoted and nurtured by wealthy Canadian socialist/armageddonist Maurice Strong. So yeah, politics has always been the reason behind this, but it is almost humorous to observe that leftists have taken up a cause begun by one of last century’s prime conservative idols. There is plenty of interesting material on a facebook protest page, and I would cordially invite interested parties to peruse the material, and to join!
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=167981036862
#125 Charlie Martin — #91 GLA, I agree, but then what web site doesn’t have the shiny-skullcap brigade?
I’d be a great deal more sympathetic to your reply if on this site tinfoil was the exception.
#130 Theo, um, did you actually read the part of what I wrote that you quoted?
Corruption in the UN, corruption at every level of government, corruption within our military, financial, educational, science, social and religious institutions…with the inevitable results staring us in the face and affecting our lives at the most intimate and minute levels imaginable.
So…
When do the good guys get a chance to run things? …or are we gonna keep playing the games by the rules that the corruptocrats make up for their own benefit as they go along?
Playing the game according to ‘house rules’ is one thing. Playing the part of the chump is quite another.
When are we going to stop being chumps and start being free and sovereign people?
The Andrew Bolt blog in Australia remains hot on the topic of “AGW fraud,” or, as I like to call it, the “burned out, fossilized old men selling the good name of science fraud.”
Great article! Great comments!
Someone up thread stated what I believe to be the real deal – that is – it does appear more and more likely that this was an inside job – Medal of Freedom, Nobel Peace Prize and much more should be awarded to this very brave soul.
Being a member of the Sierra Club IS like being a member of a cult. Back in 2000 I managed a campaign for them and worked with several of their long-term members. They were great people but some of them were nuttier than a fruit cake.
If you want to point fingers at someone point them at Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club and Board Member of George Soros’ Open Society Institute run by Podesta. All of these men are far, far, far left liberals which many now call fascists or marxists. And remember Carl and the headquarters for Sierra Club are located in the heart of San Francisco, CA. Back in 2000 they were just starting their Environmental Justice program and their political work using 527s and their c4 status to fire Republican’s and hire Democrat’s. They are THE MOST PARTISAN environmental group in the country.
From the looks of the list below it appears that members of the board of OSI are responsible to fulfill specific goals, ones they were intentionally recruited to implement based on their area of expertise. To fulfill the goals they need money which comes directly from Soros, Tides, Heinz and other foundations, likely the very same ones that fund ACORN and SEIU. Here’s the list –
In 1979 Soros established the Open Society Institute (OSI), which serves as the flagship of a network of Soros foundations that donate tens of millions of dollars each year to a wide array of individuals and organizations that share the founder’s agendas. Those agendas can be summarized as follows:
- promoting the view that America is institutionally an oppressive nation
-promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States
- opposing virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by U.S. government, particularly the Patriot Act
- depicting American military actions as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral
- promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws
- promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes
- promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
- defending the civil rights and liberties of suspected anti-American terrorists and their abetters
- financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left
- advocating America’s unilateral disarmament and/or a steep reduction in its military spending
- opposing the death penalty in all circumstances
- promoting socialized medicine in the United States
- promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is “not clean air and clean water, [but] rather … the demolition of technological/industrial civilization”
- bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations
- promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike
- promoting taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand
- advocating stricter gun-control measures
To learn more click here http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=977
How many of these goals appear to being realized? hhhmmm. Folks, Soros is the bad guy. Soros is the one behind all of this. Soros funded ACORN, SEIU and is now propping up the DNC. He is the one that needs to be behind bars. This is an extraordinarily dangerous man IMHO and he will stop at nothing to achieve his goals. Obama’s his puppet. Pelosi is his stage manager. His board are the Directors. Soros is the Producer. And the movie drama we are watching unfold with these faux scientists at AGW is part and parcel of OSI. Talk about waking up!!!
This is simply the latest in a century-plus worth demonstration that the left will co-opt anything to obtain absolute power over everything. Remember feminism? Gone. Remember ecology? Gone. Remember education? Gone. Intelligently regulated free markets? Gone. Federalism? Gone. Cross anything with the left, anything at all, and what we wind up with in the end is the left standing alone. They abandoned reason and good faith generations ago, and will not stop until they are stopped.
Consider the potential application of 18 U.S.C 1001 to grant applications, reports prepared with grant funds, Congressional testimony including written, etc.:
18 U.S.C. 1001:
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully -
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years.
(b) Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party’s counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding.
(c) With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to -
(1) administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or
(2) any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate.
Charlie Martin writes:
“#130 Theo, um, did you actually read the part of what I wrote that you quoted?”
Do you mean the following:
“It contributes very little directly to your success as an academic and can be a real pain in the ass. Andrew has it right — you can’t expect a reviewer to get the data and attempt to replicate something during a review.”
I believe the claim is false. Doing the work of a reviewer is real science. You should do the real work. If you do not want to, you should not be a reviewer. I cannot imagine what someone would write to an editor if they did not offer the results of their real work. As regards the quoted claim above, I do not associate with people who hold that view and they know it.
It would be interesting if someone has backtracked to see where
and why the database was hacked. Was this initially an inside job,
leaked to encourage someone/s to hack the information?
Who planted this seed?
No. 120 R.L. Simon,
I was responding to some in the thread, rather than the article. However, I failed to make myself clear. Thanks for pointing that out.
As for my being anonymous. I am and I feel that is the right thing for me at this time. I really dont think that most of us will be sharing any warm showers in the morning anyway so there is no point in revealing any more than necessary. I am an american. And I left America and live in Europe. Again, thanks, and I shall be more specific in future.
What’s a little manipulation of data when your goal is Paradise On Earth (as already tried by Comrade Stalin) ???
The UNBELIEVERS, the infidels, will be taken care of…. by death panels, by public education, or by the comrades of al qaeda.
Thank you for the opportunity to earn re-education camp points.
The lawyers must be salivating.
I’m knowledgeable, and I’m not laughing. It’s time taken up from doing my own research. The only saving grace is that I save time by not having to read the same paper when it is finally published.
Wow! I want to work at your university! (Unless you’re talking only contact hours.) You must be in the humanities. Most of a science faculty member’s time is spent on his research, and 20 hours would be a two or three days’ worth.
You must do a lousy job of reviewing (or of teaching, so that no one bothers to come to your office hours). Try teaching a freshman science course to 300 students; I guarantee that students will turn up for your office hours, every week, in sufficient attention-destroying profusion that reviewing a technical manuscript in the same time is out of the question.
Reviewing papers does curry favor with editors, but only in the sense that it helps you to eventually be offered an editorial position; it doesn’t help much to get your own papers published. The only exception to that generalization is that a favorably inclined editor might break ties (one reviewer for acceptance, one for rejection) in your favor. A better strategy is to garner a reputation for doing work renowned for its quality.
The main goals of peer review are:
Establish that the article is worthy of publication and consistent with the scope of the publication in question. They are looking to see if the results are non-trivial, if they are new (ie not duplicative of findings already well-understood), and in some way important. If you think of peer-reviewers as an ad hoc editorial board for the publication, you get closest to intent
Reviewers will check, to the extent they can, to see if the methodology and its presentation is logical and clear — not necessarily right, but logical and clear. Their most frequent comments are for clarification of certain areas of the work or questions that they don’t think the authors answered. They do not check all the sources, but if they are familiar with one of the sources references, may point out that this source is not referenced correctly, or that some other source with which they are familiar might be referenced as well. History has proven time and again that gross and seemingly obvious math and statistical errors can easily clear peer review.
Peer review is not in any way shape or form a proof that a study is correct, or even likely to be correct. Enormous numbers of incorrect conclusions have been published in peer-reviewed journals over time. This is demonstrably true. For example, at any one time in medicine, for every peer-reviewed study I can usually find another peer-reviewed study with opposite or wildly different findings. The fraud in the “peer reviewed” Lancet on MMR vaccines and autism by Andrew Wakefield is a good example.
Studies are only accepted as likely correct a over time after the community has tried as hard as it can to poke holes in the findings. Future studies will try to replicate the findings, or disprove them. As a result of criticism of the methodology, groups will test the findings in new ways that respond to methodological criticisms. It is the accretion of this work over time that solidifies confidence (Ironically, this is exactly the process that climate alarmists want to short-circuit, and even more ironically, they call climate skeptics “anti-scientific” for wanting to follow this typical scientific dispute and replication process).
This was not necessarily a “hack”. Hell, it could have been done with a USB stick by and insider.
It is interesting that the last dated e-mail is 12Nov09 and the FOIA request was denied 13Nov09. Points to an inside job, at least.
Download the data to the stick (all, what, 172 MB? Tthat is close to nothing when you consider most e-mail text is < 10 KB.), and upload it off site.
That would be my bet, as there would be virtually no trail.
But what do I know?
To 140. Theo Goodwin
I think one of the biggest problems in science today is the complete lack of people who really do science or do real work to check other peoples science…
This is one of the reasons why we have global warming today… because you have a group of hacks who are “above” everyone unless they have a 4-7 year degree…(and even above them when they feel like it) not only are they above even talking about the issues but they are “above” even letting these “lowering” look at they’re data.
To many scientists/college Profs these days believe because someone doesn’t have a college degree they’re opinion and knowledge is meaningless… I learned this first hand when I went to college and corrected many of the blatant lies that were told and refused to believe things just because they said them or they “appeared” in they’re selected books…
Sociology just to name one field is awash with studies that have been peer reviewed claiming everything under the sun… and yet when you can get your hands on the complete study, the study is a complete joke and doesn’t even remotely give any results that are claimed in the published version and then a text book will cherry pick a handful of line out of it and push it in further into the insane rating.
I think people who really review work and even attempt to recreate or even check the raw data are very very rare nowadays in the world of science.
Nice generalization Vivo. The problem is that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a vital compound required for photosynthesis. No carbon dioxide, no oxygen production. So I must assume you slept through several lectures in school relating to the carbon cycle. All state science and national science standards include it.
I don’t feel that the group of scientists at the center of the controversy are consciously engaging in wholesale fraud. They are true believers. The zealously protective and provincial mindset they display in some of the uncovered emails are pretty much what you’ll find in any large advocacy organizations dedicated to a single issue; much like all the corporate lobbyist and NGO orgs that put up shop in downtown D.C.
The eco-disaster theme as an engine of public hysteria and political demagoguery has been with us for decades and feeds into certain ideologies and personality types. Chiefly among such sympathizers you will find a tightly connected set of shared beliefs:
- Modern humans are mostly greedy, selfish and destructive and their base impulses must be tempered by some call to a higher authority (instead of God, it’s Gaia or mother earth)
- Most humans are unrepentantly stupid and require control lest they wreck everything for the smart few.
- Primitive mankind (those who live in the undeveloped world -meaning no jobs, no industry, no electricity, but close to man’s ‘natural’ state) is morally superior to us modern, bloated, corrupt and selfish citizens of the “first world.”
Hi Charlie~
I’m a like-minded neighbor in Colorado, seeking social contact with you. How about Objectivism over lunch, as one topic? in addition to this one and many others…!
Drop me a line, please.
-Orson (Denver, formerly Boulder)
ullr20021@yahoo.com
You seem to be suggesting that members of a surreptitiously organized around a shared philosophical POV were supported by key administration operatives in cherry picking evidence and manipulating public opinion for political purposes. Could that be possible? What are the chances of that happening in today’s world? My but you’re cynical. Why so negative and suspicious?
#38,Wolla Dalbo, “Do we see a pattern here?’
Your contribution to this discussion is very helpful and I believe you “get it”.
For anyone interested in connecting some more dots>>>Obama sat on the board of
Joyce Foundation, which contributed in excess of $1,000,000 towards the establishment
of the Exchange in Chicago that is the only Exchange that trades in Carbon Credits in
the US, and is privately owned. Goldman Sacks is one big owner, and is represented
on the board. Soros has some involvement here also, and of course Al Gore is also
heavily involved. One other person on that board is Maurice Strong. He is the mistery man behind the scenes in this whole global warming phenomena.(Google him and
you will find he organized the whole Kyoto Conference and has worked toward global
governance ever since.) Goldman, GE, and a host of other large corporations and politicians have a very large stake in the outcome of establishing tradable carbon credits. I also believe that there is a small group of very wealthy influencial people that are moving this forward, and not just in the US.
You seem to be suggesting that members of a surreptitiously organized around a shared philosophical POV were supported by key administration operatives in cherry picking evidence and manipulating public opinion for political purposes.
No one has suggested they were surreptitiously organized.
If by key administration operatives you mean Congress and foundations (and I’m assuming) members of the public, well yes that’s where they get their funding.
Cherry picking
Why yes.
Political purposes
And greenbacks.
Could that be possible?
Well yes, since it has happened, it must be possible.
What are the chances of that happening in today’s world?
100%, evidently.
My but you’re cynical.
Well if we weren’t before, we are now.
Why so negative and suspicious?
Read the emails and enlighten yourself.
The foundation of a Republic depends on voluntary compliance with Laws that are judged by Citizens to be both fair and equitable. The People elect representatives to that end, but never rulers. When representatives presume to rule, the compact with the Body Politic is broken, torn asunder, and the contract becomes immediately null and void. No man is bound by God or any other power to obey unjust laws. Indeed, injustice is anathema in the eyes of the Lord.
What has this to do with Science? Everything. The Lord gave unto his People the ability to discern, to discriminate, and to discover the Laws by which He governs the natural world. It’s a gift, but it comes with conditions. Knowledge is given to those who will speak the Truth. Those who prostitute themselves for personal gain are anathema in the eyes of the Lord.
I hear your laughter, but it deters me not a bit. Save it for someone who cares. If you have ears to hear or eyes to see, you will know by my reasoning, and by the quality of my prose whether or not I speak the truth. I stand on firm ground. May my brothers and sisters remain as resolute as I am in this time of gathering crisis. Gird up your loins; the time is nigh.
Mister H, – Primitive mankind (those who live in the undeveloped world -meaning no jobs, no industry, no electricity, but close to man’s ‘natural’ state) is morally superior to us modern, bloated, corrupt and selfish citizens of the “first world.”
If a time machine is ever invented, I’m going back and mudering Rousseau with as much glee as one man can possibly muster.
#140 Theo: I believe the claim is false. Doing the work of a reviewer is real science.
Which claim is false? That it’s a pain in the ass? That it doesn’t contribute a lot directly to the rewards ofan academic?
I agree that it’s important and essential, and to me at least I think the violations of the ethics of peer review may anger me the most. So I suspect you’re violently agreeing.
#133 GLA: I’d be a great deal more sympathetic to your reply if on this site tinfoil was the exception.
And I’d be significantly more sympathetic to yours if we didn’t have the moderation policy we do (see above.) But see the email that discusses what they do at RealClimate: we may have more tinfoil-hat guys, but at least we don’t delete comments y people who disagree.
#159 MisterH: I agree with you. This is more like the old joke: first you do it for love, then you do it for friendship, then you do it for a nice dinner, then you do it for cash money.
Well, the trolls are back, having gotten their marching orders.
“Okay, guys. Let’s try changing the conversation to POLLUTION. Create a strawman argument while you’re at it. See pollution’s bad. Who can be for it? If we can paint these guys as striving against pollution, then people will overlook a bit of data-fudging. Oh, and guys, it’s just a select few guys acting on their own. Going Rogue, you might say. Ha!”
I think it was an inside job. Someone did not want to go to jail for violating the FOIA.
Eventually, it will come out whodunnit. Someone will get immunity. Wouldn’t it be great if the Queen spoke out and demanded an investigation. Just move in and shut them down, before they can delete any more data. I mean, it is so clear that the data they lost is data they promised, internally, to destroy.
If the press were honest, they’d be on this like stink on a monkey. This is the JUICIEST story! Exposure of a conspiracy like this? HUGE! But, the press is NOT honest.
#152 HankBosma – do you have any links? I’d love to learn more about this Exchange. Thanks in advance.
Very well put, “political observer”. In this and the current health care “debate” you would have to be delusional to think our government represents us anymore. They are by and large a criminal enterprise, the enemy within. The problem is how many Americans are smart enough to see this?
I’m glad so many people responded to me, but most seemed to miss the point…
Science builds on other science AND observation. The reason this had to involve a great deal of collusion is because the data provided would not square with observations IF IT WAS FALSE! Yet we have literally hundreds (thousands?) of articles in many journals purporting to OBSERVE and, indeed, back up the conclusions of the false data. False data (or even rigged data) can’t stand up to repeated observations.
Of course, it becomes painfully obvious when talking about the medieval warming period or the current leveling of temperatures.
The fact that so many scientists had to have observed conditions that clearly refuted the false data and still reported it as supporting the data is a systemic failure of major proportions. And, is money really the only reason? A researcher at the University of Texas recently got millions to set up a “sex lab.” Money is never in short supply, but further on that point I can’t believe that many intelligent people would consign their children to a fate of a dark, energy-poor world for the sake of a grant and a few more graduate assistants (just as I can’t believe that oil companies would willingly poison the atmosphere for a quick buck– they have to breathe, too!)
There’s something missing to all of this, and I wish I could put my finger on what it was.
CableGuy, science is good at disproving but not at proving. The fact that many published studies support AGW may mean that the data were over-interpreted. A failure of the process was a willingness to allow the extrapolations.
I found an excellent interview with Dr. Tim Ball on YouTube discussing the implications of the leak. Search for the “Corbett Report”. He says that it confirms his suspicions and he talks about the peer review process amongst other things. I found it really enlightening.
#161 CableGuy
“I wish I could put my finger on what it was.”
No, you don’t want to wish for that.
The hole goes really deep.
Money is CERTAINLY not the cause.
Some key words are:
Ideology, power,neomarxists, hate, nihilism, “brothers”, funding by enemies of the West.
This single theme we are discussing here is not different from everything else we are facing today: a chimera, a monster produced by history because of the slumber of the Traditional Knowledge – i.e., of True Reason.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment.
I will bet that by tomorrow they will be making commercials supporting cap-and-tax with children who tell us they will die in the next day or two from the poisonous air we are providing for them. This crap will never end, no matter what happens. It is the religion of the collective.
Let us check the first example at the top of this page (2). Charlie Martin says: “See for example emails 1047388489“. According to Martin
The emails suggest the authors co-operated covertly to ensure that only papers favorable to CO2-forced AGW were published, and that editors and journals publishing contrary papers were punished. They also attempted to “discipline” scientists and journalists who published skeptical information….”
So does 1047388489. It relates to “The Soon & Baliunas paper” for which the email (and its predecessor in the thread) makes a forceful argument that it ” couldn’t have cleared a ‘legitimate’ peer review process”. The reasons given include “The phrasing of the questions at the start of the paper determine the answer they get. They have no idea what multiproxy averaging does. By their logic, I could argue 1998 wasn’t the warmest year globally, because it wasn’t the warmest everywhere.”
Now, you may disagree with the email authors, because after all “multiproxy” is an awfully big word,isn’t it? But their logic in re science is difficult to assail. The paper was garbage science and therefore quite properly excluded from a scientific discussion.
If you want to call it “conspiracy”, go ahead. But then, all science except that broadcast live on TV is, to you, conspiracy. You and I are reading this in private: CONSPIRACY!!!!
If you want to run a blog or a journal that gives equal time to flat-earthers as to round-earthers, that is certainly your right, but to argue that there is a conspiracy against flat-earthers is to say that science itself is anti-flat-earth.
As to Martin’s:
They also attempted to “discipline” scientists and journalists
I wonder how this discipline is arranged. Leather-clad martinets with riding crops perhaps?
Note this AP story TODAY – 11/22/09 at 2:54 pm:
“Warming’s impacts sped up,..worsened since Kyoto” by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer -
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/sci_climate_09_post_kyoto
Has he offline for three days?!
Anyone with at least 1/4 of a brain who lived thru the brief “global freezing” scare of the early ’70s which quietly flubbed as all its predictions were far more than just wrong, knows that the current global warming scare — originally justified by models created BY THE SAME GLOBAL FREEZING CHARLATANS — is just as much hooey as the first attempt of these 4th rate scientists to achieve name recognition and income from engagements to speak to crowds of ignoramuses and retards. All the data shows — repeat ALL the available historic data, bar none — that although CO2 and atmospheric temperature are correlated, it is WITHOUT EXCEPTION the case that atmospheric temperature changes first, THEN much later the co2 level rises. It rises because of evaporation of co2 dissolved in the sea, more of which enters the atmosphere when surface sea temperatures are warmed. This is true for the data Gore shows in his famous “documendacity,” which he intentionally squeezes into a long time scale over a small chart so that the detail is obscured, since it shows the precise opposite cause & effect that he knows is the correct one in reality. The atmosphere has been far warmer in the past than now, and it has had at times at least 20 times the co2 concentration as at present. And… those times were wonderful times when plant and animal “biodiversity” flourished, as any botanist would tell you is the natural consequence of a little warming. That’s why life is easier in the warmer latitudes and terribly harsh in the northerly ones. We should PRAY (if religious) for global warming because it would go a long way toward ending world hunger, expanding the rain forests, increasing biodiversity and making this planet more of a heaven on earth than it already has the capacity to be. But the advocates of the global warming hoax are just SO incredibly uninformed (or such liars) that they are either unaware of (or hiding) their hypocrisy in advocating a war on non-existent man-caused warming that would, even if correct, accomplish all the other goals they claim to worship. It would be a colossal joke if these neanderthal numbskulls weren’t so populous and endowed with the voting power to destroy the lives of their betters along with their own suicides.
Solar activity, as mentioned in other posts, is also highly correlated with atmospheric temperature, something that ought to appear very common-sensical to anyone with 1/10th of a brain, and something which has been demonstrated to be EXTREMELY reliably correlated for much of earth’s history. So we have 3 correlated variables of concern(there are of course many others too, but they are not of concern here because we are addressing only the claims of a mass of mindless idiots parroting the propaganda of a few shrewd charlatan, so we can limit ourselves to examining only their stupid, worthless, and totally groundless claims). These are solar activity, atmospheric warming and co2 concentration in the atmosphere. And indeed the order I’ve mentioned them is the order of their causality. Solar activity increases, THEN the atmosphere warms as a result, and FINALLY, the co2 content of the atmosphere rises. Anyone who understands the basic laws of equilibrium states from physical chemistry knows that man’s contributions of co2 into the atmosphere CANNOT have an effect on its concentration, any more than you can increase the salt content of a glass of water after it’s become fully saturated at the prevailing conditions of temperature and pressure. You just precipitate out all the salt you add and the water remains at its equilibrium salt concentration no matter how much more salt you add.
Two final points of the 500 I might make if space permitted:
1. Al Gore’s net worth was public knowledge during the political campaign of 2000 — it was approximately $2 million. He is no longer a public servant so his financial affairs are his own private business. However, from investments in public concerns, it is known that he has to have at a minimum a figure upwards of $100 million now. At least a 50-fold increase in 9 years. What has he been doing full time for the past 9 years? Pushing the scam of global warming that’s making him rich. If cap & trade is passed in the US, Gore stands to become a multi-billionaire. He is the indirectly paid propagandist for the eco groups and the corporations who will benefit from that particular means of thieving on the grand scale from the average citizen. Which, I might add, will undoubtedly cause the deaths of at least thousands of elderly from freezing for lack of heat in winter, and of the poor whose diets will be pushed over the line into malnutrition that lowers their immune systems and causes them to succumb to diseases they otherwise would have recovered from (as food prices soar and as disposable incomes of the poor are especially hard hit).
2. For all the untold $billions of taxpayer monies wasted on global warming research, and all the zillions of published papers on the topic, ask the next advocate of this pure junk science that you meet to refer you to a bona fide, peer-reviewed scientific paper in any reputable journal anywhere on earth which has provided evidence of a link between any of man’s activities and atmospheric temperature changes or climate change. That’s not asking for proof, just one tiny but definite piece of evidence. And that’s regarding ANY of man’s myriad activities being damned by the pea-brained warming advocates. And…the evidence can be linked to either climate change of any type or atmospheric temperature change in either direction. He will not be able to offer you even one such paper, because despite the many, many billions wasted on this hoax, NOT ONE paper in any peer-reviewed scientific journal in any nation on earth, NOT ONE, exists or ever has existed which shows even EVIDENCE of a link between ANY of man’s supposedly nefarious activities and climate change. NOT ONE. NOT ANYWHERE. If you don’t believe me, try and find one. You warmers out there reading this, ask the gurus whose received wisdom you place your mindless faith in to provide you with the name and title and publication of such a paper ANYWHERE ON EARTH, and then post it here. And the rest of you, watch this space, because hell will freeze over before you see it. There is no such paper in existence for one reason only: there exists no line (that means NONE) whatsoever between man’s activities and global warming.
The Algorites are the 21st century’s version of the old gloom and doom religious zealots who walked around with signs urging everyone to repent because the world was coming to an end tomorrow. IE, they are lunatics one and all, with mental deficiencies or, in the case of their leaders, character deficiencies (or more accurately, lack of character). This is not a controversial statement. It may be debated by the lunatics themselves, but they won’t do a very good job of it, since they are after all very unintelligent sub-normal humans by definition, being lunatic fringe fanatic religious believers in the global warming religion. Their parents were probably zealots for global freezing in the 1970s, and they have inherited the genes. It is an absolute, inescapable requirement that to believe in a human contribution to global warming in the absence of any shred of evidence for any aspect of it whatsoever other than the arbitrary claim of charlatans that “We have a HYPOTHESIS, and it is confirmed by the computerized models WE put the garbage into, models which you must believe are TRUTH AND WISDOM even though they disagree with each other and continue to produce forecasts that prove wrong, one after the other” — yes you have to be, if you actually choose to believe this, you MUST ABSOLUTELY AND LOGICALLY be either (a) unfortunately quite ignorant of the topic OR (b) an unusually stupid person OR (c) suffering from a severe mental/emotional/psychological problem. These 3 together make up the all-encompassing, exhaustive list of possibilities. There is no 4th option.
I have read many of the posts supporting global warming and if there were time I could demolish every argument in each one. With ease. And with irrefutable fact and/or logic. I have already abused the generosity of this site by writing more than most, however, and it would take 10 times what I’ve written to dispense with all the lame-brained rationalizations the Algorites keep coming up with as each previous one is refuted. I have heard them all and there is not one with an iota of validity. They are arguments designed to sound reasonable to the unintelligent, and conclusive to those ignorant of the topic.
Not one is correct, or even partially correct.
Man-caused global warming a hoax and a fraud and complete garbage. There is no scientific dispute about this, only a political one which has enlisted a few scientists and many pseudo-scientists to join with the politicians and share the same agenda. This is a fraud on a global scale, and those who swallow it will deserve the truly horrible consequences for humanity, dwarfing the largest wars in history, DWARFING THEM, in the horrors of its consequences. Should the lemmings succeed in implementing the politics of the global warmers, unfortunately many of their betters — ie, those with actual HUMAN brains — will also perish, and the culmination of thousands of years of advancing human civilization will be destroyed for absolutely no reason.
You who advocate global warming, do you have any idea what awful harm you will be doing to humanity and life on this planet? How dare you, ignorant as you are, spout off like a scientist when you can’t possibly have any idea of the topic, given the side you take. Look into yourselves. I think if you are capable of being honest with yourself you will find someone who needs something to crusade for so badly in order to shore up his self-esteem, or something to draw away the focus of the hate he has for himself, and for that reason has an EMOTIONAL NEED to believe in this hoax and to have someone to condemn as evil. If you are man enough to admit it, welcome to the club of human beings. If not, you consign yourself to membership amongst the worst enemies of humankind, human life, human civilization: you are a crusading ignoramus, about to add your own 2 cents to the savagery and barbarism recorded history’s litany of human disasters.
Finally some clear coherent light being shed on the biggest hoax perpetuated on mankind. I get so sick of my leftie friends telling me that not supporting this hoax is an endorsement against the environment. The environment is important to all of us and we should do all we can to keep it pristine. It is the only earth we have but this is not the way to go about it. It has as much to do with the environment as health care reform has to do with health. Power, control and stealing wealth is the name of the game. Notice how quick the left is to blame big pharmaceutical companies for covering up scientific data when a drug turns out to be dangerous. You hear about it far and wide on the lame stream media whether it is true or not . I have not heard a whisper about this from the sycophants who control the media
Good job, Charlie; thanks (and thanks to the whistle blowers if whistle blowers they be). This comes not a moment too soon. It will be interesting to see if this is addressed in Copenhagen and, if so, how.
In homage to Tim Blair’s former blog: Sod off, Swampy!
Congratulations; This thread is doing
way better than Sturgeon’s Law predicts.
On the larger question of Useful Fools
and Evil Geniuses: Complete the triad by
adding Lumpen Proletariat, but do not despair;
The Forces of Light, Leaders and Followers both,
can still save the day, using truth and technology to move Terra forward into the 21st century;
If you do not want to help, at least stay
out of the way.
rewinn:
Congratulations! You are the first person to come through with the Stalinist defense of scientific fraud. I am proud of you.
#166 rewinn: I wonder how this discipline is arranged. Leather-clad martinets with riding crops perhaps?
Are you kidding? That’d cost a fortune.
But then you’re not so much kidding as depending on other people not reading the other links, and so being taken in by your scorn. Those who follow the links will find journals being pressured to eject editors who were considered skeptics, Jones and others deciding that all work by Roger Pielke Sr must be excluded, and one case where they planned an attempt to have someone’s PhD work reviewed long after the degree was awarded in order to discredit a critic. Look a little further afield and you’ll find the use of “denier”, equating skeptics with Holocaust deniers. Look a little further afield yet, but still in the AGW camp, and you’ll find noted scientists threatening civil disobedience if their demands aren’t met, and even public calls for concentration camps, “war crimes” trials, and execution for not having the right opinions.
Good science doesn’t need war crimes trials to make its point.
To the Left, some pollution is acceptable if it furthers the agenda. For example, the great dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and the large decline in crab size and population in the Chesapeake caused by runoff from “biofuel” production. It takes a hell of a lot of corn to make ethanol (approx 400 pounds to fill up an E85 Escalade), and a huge amount of nitrogen fertilizer to grow that corn. That nitrogen ends up in the rivers that drain to the coast, and kills marine life. Of course, since killing off human beings by limiting food production appears to be the real goal of these envirofascists, no problemo! However the Delta smelt in CA MUST BE SAVED! and to hell with the farmers in the Central Vally and all the folks who depend on them for food.
When New York harbor freezes over in the coming years from Solar Minimum, we can burn Algore, Hansen and the rest of crew at the stake to stay warm.
Just as corporations will only fund scientific research that only benefits the corporation, government bureaucracies and their MSM/University colleagues will only fund scientific research that expands the power and stipends of the government. With the exception of ARPANET, name me one publicly funded science research that encouraged the shrinking of government?
It’s almost inconceivable that this is not the top story on CNN, ABC, CBS, NY Times etc etc…. This news affects everybody on the planet. If this isn’t news, what is?
Charlie, AFAIK Mann never published the code he used for his climate model. This should have been an immediate red flag to anyone in the sciences. It was ignored and accepted has fact and soon became the new left religion. While I have no doubt that many scientists were doing what they felt was right there is a core group that has engaged in nothing less than scientific fraud. How many of those “innocent” scientists were manipulating their data to fit a bad model? Making the data fit a model is fraud, period. There is no excuse.
Dear SvinMark,
It appears you have missed Now-and-Then’s Sarcasm.
You see, he was referring to “Bush Lied and People Died”
That’s right, BDS plain and simple. He has to deflect bad behavior by pointing to “fraudulantly created” other bad behavior.
jd
@ 20 Vivo
Define pure water, pure air and clean energy please.
H2O is pure water, and you will find it in 0 places on this earth from the time it formed until the present and into the future for billions of years. In order to get down to simply just one polluting molecule in a single drop of water would require billions of dollars in investments to make the clean labs required.
Pure air? What is pure air? O2? because if that is pure air, it is deadly to all plants and all mammals, as pure oxygen would be corrosive to the lungs. What is the right amount of CO2 in the air? Because the vast majority of plants, if looking at it from evolutionary principles would be that plants evolved at a time when CO2 in the atmosphere was 4,000-5,000 ppm. Plants use less water for growth the higher CO2 levels go, and we all know that life on earth is dependent on plant life. Today’s CO2 level in the atmosphere is the lowest it has been in the history of the earth, by a full magnitude.
What is clean energy? Solar? Wind? Where do we get the compounds that makes these great items? Do you know that the materials used to make these require massive amounts of rare toxic minerals? Massive amounts of energy to turn into useful items? Where do you think the massive amounts of energy will come from? Other solar cells or wind turbines? Seriously, it is going to come from increased use of fossil fuels. What about the massive swaths of pristine earth that will be covered over by these toxic eventual derelict constructs, does that make them clean?
Thanks for playing with the big boys.
Lord Monckton got it absolutely correct when he said ‘ There IS no man made Global warming, there NEVER has been any man made Global Warming, there never WILL be any man made Global Warming’
robotech master (148) says: “Sociology [...] is awash with studies that have been peer reviewed claiming everything under the sun… and yet when you can get your hands on the complete study, the study is a complete joke and doesn’t even remotely give any results that are claimed in the published version and then a text book will cherry pick a handful of line out of it and push it in further into the insane rating.”
What compounds the problem is that the APA method of citation (endorsed by Sociology, English and Education faculties, for instance) means that citations are almost impossible to check properly. If you paraphrase another work in your paper, under APA rules, you need not provide a page number. Accordingly, when you paraphrase multiple authors, and provide only the year of publication in your reference, I need to read many entire bloody books just to ascertain whether you gave the right gist of their claims. So, if I have a hold of the aforementioned sociology text, and I wish to prove that its claims are unsubstantiated, and selected out of context, and fundamentally meaningless in the first place, just locating the original claims will take weeks and weeks of hard reading. It is so much easier to say, “this work contains proper citations, it has been pee-reviewed, and it was published by a reputable publisher: it must be perfectly fine.”
A very interesting announcement from the UK Government today in The Times
Moreover, the scientific basis for global warming projections is now under scrutiny as never before. The principal source of these projections is produced by a small group of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), affiliated to the University of East Anglia.
Last week an apparent hacker obtained access to their computers and published in the blogosphere part of their internal e-mail traffic. And the CRU has conceded that the at least some of the published e-mails are genuine.
Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.
There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.
It is against all this background that I am announcing today the launch of a new high-powered all-party (and non-party) think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org), which I hope may mark a turning-point in the political and public debate on the important issue of global warming policy. At the very least, open and reasoned debate on this issue cannot be anything but healthy. The absence of debate between political parties at the present time makes our contribution all the more necessary.
Lord Lawson of Blaby was Chancellor of the Exchequer 1983-89. He will be speaking at an Institute of Economic Affairs debate on climate change at the Institute of Directors in London today
Here is a link to the whole article it say the Copenhagen accord is already dead in the water. Hope so.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6927598.ece
To 181. Deadman
I have had that same problem… in fact I think its so bad to me citing “references” in a debate is a sign of weakness… which is why I rarely debate with either global warming nutters or many other fields because they simply throw out memorized numbers and such and refuse to debate or explain the “raw data”. I also find it very very elitist and since I’m not paid to read science texts but only do it for fun its hard to memorize large numbers of “references” and be able to spit it back out on the fly.
I honestly think the reference system was borderline created to make it very very hate to refute “accepted” claims… to many papers nowadays have “summaries/conclusions” that include 40+ references for less then 2 pages of “summary/conclusion”… Thus making it near impossible to understand/track back the complete information set and compare them side by side.
One only has to take a good long look at the spokesman for this hoax to realize what it is. If the situation were really that important and critical do you really think the bloated and gaseous wind bag that is Al Gore would live his life the way he does? He uses more energy to fuel his extravagant life for one day than the African continent uses in a month. Typical liberal. The onerous rules only apply to you not me.
This is a bombshell but it will have no real impact on Mr. & Mrs. Mainstraem unless the big media outlets FULLY cover it.
I just picked up the WSJ this morning and read the first print article (Boston Sunday Globe didn’t have any mention in the A-section, or anywhere else, no surprise) to cover this that I’ve seen. It was pathetic!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125883405294859215.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_news
No mention of the consiracy to destroy info requested via FOIA, no mention of manipulation of data. It only went so far as to talk about the “Bitter Feud over Global Warming”.
The last line is the money-shot. Some ass-bag from Germany, Mojib Latif, saying “I simply can’t believe that there is a kind of mafia that is trying to inhibit critical papers from being published.”!!! Can someone send him the files?
This is something that needs to be pursued, and pursued relentlessly. I’m e-mailing the WSJ author Keith Johnson and the Editor. That will be my contribution for today, but I ain’t done yet! Everybody needs to apply some pressure, even if it’s only one call, e-mail or conversation a day. We need to contact any “reporter” who fails to convey the entire scope of the issue. We need to contact any “scientist” that is still intrasnigent in the face of this revelation, or the Overseeing Bodies of Institutions which are connected to and hold the power to discipline those involved. We need to relentlessly pester the politicians who will be likely to counter the funding and support that the “Friends of Al” will likely continue to bestow.
This is too huge. These FU@#% tried to destroy our kids future!
out
George Orwell is smiling.
Al Gore…Nobel Prize
Barry O…Nobel Prize
UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)…Nobel Prize
Do I detect a pattern?
57. Jack in Silver Spring:
45. Tom Perkins:
“Finally, contra Vivo @ #21, whatever we do in countering “pollution” must be subject to a cost-benefit analysis.”
Pollution controlled by bean counters?
Give me a break!
86. GDT:
“We do NOT all blindly subscribe to all of the economy killing methodologies the left would impose on us and future generations.”
And your solution isss . . . .
149. chemman:
“Nice generalization Vivo. The problem is that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.”
We are talking here about EXCESSIVE CO2 and pollutants. Guees you’ve never been to Mexico City, China, and other cities where you can hardly breath.
179. AStoner:
“Define pure water, pure air and clean energy please.”
You are a good example of an alarmist/extremist exaggerator. You perfectly know I mean drinkable water, breathable air and non-polluting energy. I’m not going to think as a lawyer every time I write. The word ‘pure’ is perfectly understandable in its context. But you had fun writing, didn’t you?
“Dr. Matt wrote: “So, we expect Joe Scientist to say, ‘Gee, I spent all my grant money and 5 yrs of work to get a data set; why don’t I give it away for free to people who are going to use it badly and make stupid arguments against me instead of getting my own publications.’””
Because that’s what scientists *do.* You are *supposed* to lay it on the line for others to attack: either your work holds up, or it doesn’t. “I’m right, you’re wrong, and no, you can’t see my data so shut up.” is NOT SCIENCE.
Sorry Dr Matt, but providing your data to other scientists is what real scientists do. It’s part of science’s self-correcting process. Being found wrong can be painful, but your data are not your children.
chemman: CO2 is not a oollutant–American cars’ anti pollution measures produce CO2 and water. CO2 is plant food. If you think CO2 is a dangerous pollutant, you should stop breathing.
190. You fail chemistry forever! Smog has nothing to do with CO2. Smog consists of ozone and oxides of nitrogen. CO2 levels have to rise to .8%, over 20 times current levels, before they pose a problem.
The big government liberals have come out and had this to say about the article…NOTHING. They do have a lot of obfuscation and straw men walking though.
Until AGW is truly reviewed, including data and models and until their models can accurately predict global weather when plugged into dates from the past, then I will pay attention to AGW.
Here are some useful comments about the authenticity of the data dump indicating that it originated as an insider’s personal email archive. This also makes it likely that there was no illegal “hack” from the outside, and that the insider simply downloaded his email archive onto a memory stick and uploaded that onto the original Russian server.
I recommmend you read the whole think at the link provided. What I quote is just an excerpt speculating about the authenticity of the data dump.
http://market-ticker.org/archives/1651-Global-Warming-SCAM-A-Further-Look.html
“… There are apparently 1073 emails, each with a sequence number but those numbers are not sequential. That is, there are a lot of sequence numbers missing. However, the dates in the files appear to be ordinal (that is, increasing from earliest to latest) with the last entry being November 12th of this year.
This strongly implies this is a partial data set intercept of email from some point. The same person does not appear as a “to” or “from” in each email (although there is a lot of commonality), which belies the general idea that this was someone’s “saved storage” – at least at first blush.
The intercept, wherever it happened, does not appear to have been done at the system or transport level. Specifically, the “Received:” and “Message-ID:” lines that are part of all internet-transported email are missing. This strongly implies that wherever these emails came from, they were saved/stored by one or more user(s) and were not an automated process that was maintaining archival (or forensic) logs.
The emails themselves, however, look authentic. That is, the formatting is consistent with character mode operation in many of the messages (Unix) and Windows or MAC format programs in others. The quoting is consistent – and correct for the time period in question. Attachments are missing, again implying that this is someone’s “saved copy” and NOT from a system-level stream. The early emails contain a fairly significant number of messages that are consistent with the user being on a character-mode terminal (e.g. ELM, MUTT or similar on a Unix system), including the quoting and line formatting. The message content shift toward “desktop email programs” – that is, appearing to be more and more programs such as Eudora, Thunderbird, Outlook and the like is also apparent as time goes on.
My conclusions on the email data set itself are that this is very likely to be either (1) someone’s “private email” storage of things they wanted to save, or (2) it was a working directory of someone who was in the process of putting forward a response to an FOI request or internal inquiry of some sort. The messages are not the entire email stream to or from any specific set of users, but rather are a set selected in some fashion – either by the person saving them as “important” or by someone collating messages for the purpose of responding to some sort of request. The majority of the messages themselves are what appear to be ordinary and reasonable discourse between scientists and researchers with an occasional “revealing glance” at the various defensive (and offensive!) approaches to those who question their premise and conclusions. Wikileaks concurs with the latter assessment.
In short, I see nothing in that data set that implies that the messages have been tampered with, but there is also no reasonable way to prove their provenance as the necessary information to do so (routing and message-id information) is missing. A well-place FOI request should resolve that problem, if anyone is particularly interested in doing so.
The data sets included in the archive are also interesting. Again, a reasonably-detailed look through them shows nothing implying that they have been tampered with, and they include data and computer code (source program code) from a wide variety of time periods. It appears authentic …”
#195 Tom: A well-place FOI request should resolve that problem, if anyone is particularly interested in doing so.
I’m aware of several people who have done just that. This is *not* finished yet.
I am a geologist who has studied the history of our planet and associated climate for the past 30 years. You don’t have to know anything about climatology or science for that matter to be skeptical of the “science of global warming”.The often repeated phrase “the science is settled” is enough to let you know that science has nothing to do with current theory of global warming. Science is never settled by true scientists only by politicians with an agenda.
What is also tantalizing about this scandal/hoax, is whether the SCOTUS case which approved CO2 as a global warming greenhouse gas that is subject to regulation should be reopened and reargued due to fraud and/or potential fraud by the climatologists at Hadley CRU and in the USA? If that is the case, the current EPA attempts to regulate CO2 and/or the CapnTax efforts should be stayed pending such fraud investigations and the reopening of the recent SCOTUS decision.
20. vivo:
It takes an idiot not to understand that POLLUTING the planet is detrimental to, guess what, the planet!
What’s wrong with pure air, pure water, clean energy?
Actually, nothing wrong with any of that, vivo, but AGW is not about any of that. As a matter of fact, AGW has pushed genuine environmental issues into the background while squandering resources. It is tragic that genuine environmental problems will now be lumped in with the AGW scam by an increasingly angry public.
“Dr. Matt wrote: “So, we expect Joe Scientist to say, ‘Gee, I spent all my grant money and 5 yrs of work to get a data set; why don’t I give it away for free to people who are going to use it badly and make stupid arguments against me instead of getting my own publications.’””
Hmmmmm. Well, it’s not like the grant money was Joe’s own private funds. It’s public money. Therefore the data and the results belong to the public. If Joe Scientist wishes to keep the results all-to-himself, then let him figure out how to fund it. When you use OUR $$$, the results are OURS.
As To: 195. Tom Holsinger:
The computers at the site need to be impounded and sealed NOW, as material evidence in an upcoming investigation.
Hey Al Gore, you’ve been found out!
While I agree wholehartedly with Lord Monkton and the increasing number of scientists who are trying to point out the many irregularities in the so called ‘scientifc’ analysis of supposed global warming, I am worried about some of the ongoing comments on this blog.
Those of you in the USA should know that comments which include Americanisms such as duh, jeez, wow, gee etc. tend to put the writers in a bad light in the rest of the English speaking world and thus greatly diminish the impact of the message you are trying to get through. Please desist. I am on your side!
193. myth buster:
“190. You fail chemistry forever! Smog has nothing to do with CO2. Smog consists of ozone and oxides of nitrogen. CO2 levels have to rise to .8%, over 20 times current levels, before they pose a problem.”
I guess you’re right. I meant to say ‘smog’.
Wikipedia articles that should record this event in a neutral and balanced manner, with journalist-written sources (best to discuss on the talk page, don’t just start editing directly):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Jones_(climatologist)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
Wikipedia articles that should record this event in a neutral and balanced manner, with journalist-written sources (best to discuss on the talk page, don’t just start editing directly):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Jones_(climatologist)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
I always knew that Global Warming was too good to be true.
Read through a handful of the emails, and I see nothing wrong. In fact, the first few I read are about how a Journal has been co-opted by skeptics. A very serious item, with very serious charges of publishing poor quality papers.
Charges that a blog edits it’s comments are troubling, but come on, it is a blog. wtf. No one should use a blog for scientific information.
One thing I must point out, is that the “data” being hidden or deleted is code for running a model. Scientists often guard their work jealously. It is there intellectual property, it is the result of their expertise, and it has significant economic value. Asking for their model code through FOI is equivalent to asking Coke for their recipe, or getting the manuscript of the new harry potter novel before it is published. It is theft.
Also, for actual data (i.e. measurements), these come at a cost, and often data is sold to recoup these costs. To get it for free, again, is theft.
Criminal Scientists and International Governments Conspired to mislead us.. THE SUN Controls the planet’s climate! Anyone with an iota of common sense knows that!.. Man is trying to play God (and raise taxes of course) We cannot control the Sun and our climate! It runs in 11 year cycles and depends on Sunspot Activity, NOT the Motorist??.. Yes, we can preserve the planet’s reducing recources, Has anybody considered that Trees breathe IN Co2?.. They are the Lungs of our planet!.. Yet deforestation continues at an ever faster rate.. IF Co2 Was (we now know that it is NOT) causing Global Warming Oops! Sorry it is Climate Change now! What effect would that have on Co2 Levels?.. Also is anyone aware that the heating system in Westminster is so ancient that the only way to control the temperature is to open or close the windows! Kettle calling the pot black comes to mind!
NOW! How do all you Climate Change believers explain this?
John c’,)
#207 Bob: good points. Entirely and uniformly incorrect, but good points.
Your point about the journal “co-opted by skeptics” would be a good one — except that scientists are supposed to be skeptics, and the people involved, like Hans von Storch and Roger Pielke Sr, are respected scientists themselves. Pielke in particular was excommunicated from the clique for the crime of believing, and publishing, analyses that show CO2 not having the dominant role it’s given in in-group publications.
That RealClimate edits its comments is not an issue. That RealClimate claims to be a scientific forum, but covertly offers its pages for advocacy, is.
Your point asserting that asking for data via FOI is equivalent to theft neglects two points (among many). First, the data is generated through government funding and is therefore not the property of the researchers, but public domain. This is part of standard grant agreements. it’s also supposed to be available to others for replication, as is expected from the standpoint of science and as is part of the “data archiving policy” of all journals of which I’m aware. And in any case, the Freedom of Information Act is the law; if Jones et al don’t like it, they’re welcome to try to change it, but they’re not free to violate it.
#208 John: You’re overstating most all of that. Everyone knows the Sun has a really major role on climate — take it away and things would get cold real fast. And dark. But or all of that, it’s not the only thing that has a role: the climate is a complex mechanism, near equilibrium and with a whole bunch of interactions that maintain that near-equilibrium. We know that the equilibrium has warmed a little in the last 400 years. The AGW folks hypothesize it’s because of changes caused by the CO2 level. Whether or not that’s true, it can’t simply be dismissed by an “everyone knows” — just as it’s not proven by a “consensus”.
#202 Patrick: while there are certainly comments here that I find discomfiting, I suspect fretting about vivid American idiom in what is, after all, an open and informal forum, just puts you in a bad light by making you look like a pedantic prat.
“Those of you in the USA should know that comments which include Americanisms such as duh, jeez, wow, gee etc. tend to put the writers in a bad light in the rest of the English speaking world…”
People who go around calling other people “lord” tend to put you in a bad light in the American-speaking world, but we tend to be tolerant of such behavior when it comes from our well-meaning, but provincial cousins in Europe.
Or to put it another way…chill out, dude.
Yes, vivo, you did mean to say smog, because smog makes it difficult to breathe, whereas CO2 does not.
Hello, just giving a shot out.
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