Science/Environment Climate Scientists Email Theft - Part I

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Blight von Torp

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

Look at what he's posted, it is solely references to ACTUAL authorities that support Gores claims, I'm not quoting Gore as an authority. And if you actually go back and look at the threads his quoted I'm always responding to people who have brought up Gore as a way to discredit global warming. Hawky has learned a thing or two from the deniers he worships so much, he knows how to cherry pick quotes and take them out of context because he knows ther will always be gullible people like you who who will be fooled by the trick.

You are drawing a very fine distinction there - "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

For your information, I have no firm beliefs on AGW and have not looked into it in great detail. However, I suspect that the more alarmist claims are rubbish, and I have to laugh at people holding out long term predictions based on computer modelling of a chaotic system. I believe that political forces within the AGW clique, and also funding imperatives have skewed the science, as clearly illustrated by the Hadley CRU debacle.
 

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

^^ Yeah but you believe all sort of whacky things. I don't think anyone who's seen the 9/11 thread takes your opinions very seriously.

LOL bit_pattern... I can only see one denier on this page.

Whatever dude. I've never quoted Gore as source and it was you guys obsessing over him then just like it's you guys obsessing over him now. You don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to the science so you have to attack the personalities instead.
 

medusala

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

So you're a fan of frivolous lawsuits now are you, Ripper?

Amusing that you say that BP. The line the usual suspects like the Guardian and the BBC are running is that this is stolen information of a private mail so it should not be taken seriously.

This would seem rather strange to me as this is precisely what happened with respect to the leaked MP's expenses scandal in the UK.

Why would anyone argue against transparency with respect to data etc?

You constantly talk of peer review. Well how do (non clique) peers review something if they can't get access to the original data?

We just need to have faith?
 

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

The lawsuit has nothing to do with deleted emails, it is about Gavin Schmidt's moderation policies on RC.
 

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

Update: Pulling out some of the common points being raised in the comments.

  • HARRY_read_me.txt. This is a 4 year-long work log of Ian (Harry) Harris who was working to upgrade the documentation, metadata and databases associated with the legacy CRU TS 2.1 product, which is not the same as the HadCRUT data (see Mitchell and Jones, 2003 for details). The CSU TS 3.0 is available now (via ClimateExplorer for instance), and so presumably the database problems got fixed. Anyone who has ever worked on constructing a database from dozens of individual, sometimes contradictory and inconsistently formatted datasets will share his evident frustration with how tedious that can be.
  • “Redefine the peer-reviewed literature!” . Nobody actually gets to do that, and both papers discussed in that comment – McKitrick and Michaels (2004) and Kalnay and Cai (2003) were both cited and discussed in Chapter 2 of the IPCC AR4 report. As an aside, neither has stood the test of time.
  • “Declines” in the MXD record. This decline was hidden written up in Nature in 1998 where the authors suggested not using the post 1960 data. Their actual programs (in IDL script), unsurprisingly warn against using post 1960 data.
  • CRU data accessibility. From the date of the first FOI request to CRU (in 2007), it has been made abundantly clear that the main impediment to releasing the whole CRU archive is the small % of it that was given to CRU on the understanding it wouldn’t be passed on to third parties. Those restrictions are in place because of the originating organisations (the various National Met. Services) around the world and are not CRU’s to break. As of Nov 13, the response to the umpteenth FOI request for the same data met with exactly the same response. This is an unfortunate situation, and pressure should be brought to bear on the National Met Services to release CRU from that obligation. It is not however the fault of CRU. The vast majority of the data in the HadCRU records is publicly available from GHCN (v2.mean.Z).
  • Suggestions that FOI-related material be deleted … are ill-advised even if not carried out. What is and is not responsive and deliverable to an FOI request is however a subject that it is very appropriate to discuss.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/
 
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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

Climate gate appears to have infect Australia as well

New

maxT.004020.annual.15977.png



Old

004020_0_13_52446.png
 

bit_pattern

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

I have no idea what conspiracies you think you are seeing in those charts Ripper.

Anyway, back in the real world, the observational evidence is building and building, with everything running right on schedule if not even faster than anyone predicted just a few years ago. This is the science that the wags who hacked the CRU were trying to distract you from:

Global ice-sheets are melting at an increased rate; Arctic sea-ice is disappearing much faster than recently projected, and future sea-level rise is now expected to be much higher than previously forecast, according to a new global scientific synthesis prepared by some of the world’s top climate scientists.

In a special report called ‘The Copenhagen Diagnosis’, the 26 researchers, most of whom are authors of published IPCC reports, conclude that several important aspects of climate change are occurring at the high end or even beyond the expectations of only a few years ago.

The report also notes that global warming continues to track early IPCC projections based on greenhouse gas increases. Without significant mitigation, the report says global mean warming could reach as high as 7 degrees Celsius by 2100.

The Copenhagen Diagnosis, which was a year in the making, documents the key findings in climate change science since the publication of the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.

The new evidence to have emerged includes:

  • Satellite and direct measurements now demonstrate that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are losing mass and contributing to sea level rise at an increasing rate.
  • Arctic sea-ice has melted far beyond the expectations of climate models. For example, the area of summer sea-ice melt during 2007-2009 was about 40% greater than the average projection from the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
  • Sea level has risen more than 5 centimeters over the past 15 years, about 80% higher than IPCC projections from 2001. Accounting for ice-sheets and glaciers, global sea-level rise may exceed 1 meter by 2100, with a rise of up to 2 meters considered an upper limit by this time. This is much higher than previously projected by the IPCC. Furthermore, beyond 2100, sea level rise of several meters must be expected over the next few centuries.
  • In 2008 carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels were ~40% higher than those in 1990. Even if emissions do not grow beyond today’s levels, within just 20 years the world will have used up the allowable emissions to have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.
The report concludes that global emissions must peak then decline rapidly within the next five to ten years for the world to have a reasonable chance of avoiding the very worst impacts of climate change.

To stabilize climate, global emissions of carbon dioxide and other long-lived greenhouse gases need to reach near-zero well within this century, the report states.

The full report is available at download.copenhagendiagnosis.org
 

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

I have no idea what conspiracies you think you are seeing in those charts Ripper.

Anyway, back in the real world, the observational evidence is building and building, with everything running right on schedule if not even faster than anyone predicted just a few years ago. This is the science that the wags who hacked the CRU were trying to distract you from:

The new one suddenly doesn't go over 36 degrees until 1943

That means Marble bar has at least 8 years prior to 1943 cooled by global warming.

Southern Cross has been cooled substantially in the teens , 20's, 30', 40's as well.

Winston from the ministry of information has been on the job.
 

bit_pattern

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

So I'll deal with the interesting bit, which is obviously me. I appear in 5 emails; one only incidentally, the rest about an interesting search for the origins of the first IPCC report fig 7.1.c. This is a fun topic; there is even a wiki page about it [[MWP and LIA in IPCC reports]] (yes, of course, I wrote most of it). If you're not familiar with that issue, go off and read the wiki page. So: at the time of the first report, there wasn't a good reconstruction of the last 1kyr, and they wanted one, so they found one from somewhere. Unlike just about everything else in that report, the figure is unsourced. If, nowadays, IPCC were to try to include a completely unsourced 1kyr reconstruction they'd get ripped to shreds. However, since that old graph shows a warm MWP plenty of septics nowadays are very keen to throw away all the peer-reviewed stuff we have and go back to this sourceless pic (e.g. [1]). It would be funny if it wasn't so stupid. Oddly enough, although the text of that email is really jolly exciting - we still don't have an adequat explanation as to how Jack "cooked up" that figure - I do not believe it was purely out of thin air - no-one seems interested in putting it about. As for Ah, you mean A9(d) (I thought you meant A9(a) for a bit). Yes, that looks pretty similar to IPCC 1990. Though not identical - the scaling is different, but the timing is similar. - well, it is strong stuff.
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/11/those_cru_emails_in_full.php
 

medusala

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

Anyway, back in the real world, the observational evidence is building and building, with everything running right on schedule if not even faster than anyone predicted just a few years ago. This is the science that the wags who hacked the CRU were trying to distract you from:

Quoting from the HS crew and their mates again.

Amusing if nothing else.

Artic ice melt has reduced in the last two years

It is highly questionable to say Antarctica is losing ice mass.

Re CO2 emissions, good of them to use 2008. Conveniently ignoring that they will be quite a bit lower in the next few years than previously thought due to the GFC.

If only temperatures would do what they are meant to.

Never mind, a minor inconvenience.
This stuff is so easy to tear apart, I really dont know why you post it.
 

medusala

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

However, since that old graph shows a warm MWP plenty of septics nowadays are very keen to throw away all the peer-reviewed stuff we have and go back to this sourceless pic (e.g. [1]). It would be funny if it wasn't so stupid

Another quality blog link.

Monbiot again

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov/25/monbiot-climate-leak-crisis-response

I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial.
.....
In this case you could argue that technically he has done nothing wrong. But a fat lot of good that will do. Think of the MPs' expenses scandal: complaints about stolen data, denials and huffy responses achieved nothing at all.
.....
When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity
 

HarryTiger

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

One station two data sources.

East Sale Aerodrome.

GISS
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/g...py?id=501949070000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

BOM
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/clima...ation=085072&dtype=raw&period=annual&ave_yr=0

2q0rnkh.jpg

jj39sx.jpg


The BOM version shows a lot more relative warming in the 2000s, so for that one you get large positive anomolies at the right side.

i.e. this (if that comes up)
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/clima...tion=085072&dtype=anom&period=annual&ave_yr=0

The GISS file won't give you that at all, on the contrary it actually shows the 2000s being slightly cooler than the previous.

Notice BOM has a 16.1 average where GISS isn't even close.

Warming or no warming? Take your pick.
 

medusala

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

I don't think it's really the same as, say, selling crack to 12 year olds is it?

Who is implying it is?

Numerous people have commented on the illegality of hacking emails. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
 
Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

Who is implying it is?

Numerous people have commented on the illegality of hacking emails. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Sooo.... rules of evidence anyone?
 

medusala

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

Sooo.... rules of evidence anyone?

The words are those of a committed believer (Monbiot's) not mine.

Issues regarding FOI requests in the UK on this subject are well documented.
 

Hawkamania!

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

You don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to the science so you have to attack the personalities instead.

Another quick search...

When was the last time McIntyre submitted a paper for review, rather than posting hopelessly erroneous blog postings that demonstrate quite clearly that the man doesn't have a grasp on the research he is attacking?

Briffa has taken the time to offer a brief statement on the technical matters of McIntyre's, despite being quite sick atm, and politely overlooks the slanderous implications of McIntyre's blog post.

Young McIntyre: “Mr. Scientist, I want to drive your car. Give me the keys.”
Scientist: “No. You don’t know how to drive a car. You need training and driver’s ed.”
McIntyre: “I drive cars in video games all the time. I know how to do it. Give me the keys.”
Scientist: “No.”
McIntyre: “Why won’t you give me the keys? You’re trying to cover up something, aren’t you? I’ll bet the car is defective! You don’t want me to know that, do you!?!”
Scientist: “You’re an idiot. Come back when you know how to drive. In the meantime, I’m going to leave the keys on the counter here so my fellow scientists can drive the car if they need to.”
\McIntyre takes keys, gets into car, starts driving. Mistakes gas pedal for brake pedal, wraps car around a tree.
McIntyre: “See, I told you the car was defective!!”

but McIntyre and the rest of the denial-o-sphere, are too desperate to wait, or they know it won't stand up to review and don't care, because they know that Copenhagen is fast approaching and their attempts to delegitimise the science of AGW will become les and less relevant.

This is like shooting fish in a barrel. Too easy. :D
 

Hawkamania!

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

Examples of comments in the global warming programming code (click on article for more info). Ripper posted a damning one earlier that is also listed in this article.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/climategate-hide-the-decline-codified/
WUWT blogging ally Ecotretas writes in to say that he has made a compendium of programming code segments that show comments by the programmer that suggest places where data may be corrected, modified, adjusted, or busted. Some the HARRY_READ_ME comments are quite revealing. For those that don’t understand computer programming, don’t fret, the comments by the programmer tell the story quite well even if the code itself makes no sense to you.
Roger Pielke Jr. with a nice piece on redefining peer review.

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/
In 2005 Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann, of Real Climate and CRU email fame, carefully explained that the process of peer review is a messy, incremental way to advance knowledge in fits and starts:
The current thinking of scientists on climate change is based on thousands of studies (Google Scholar gives 19,000 scientific articles for the full search phrase “global climate change”). Any new study will be one small grain of evidence that adds to this big pile, and it will shift the thinking of scientists slightly. Science proceeds like this in a slow, incremental way. It is extremely unlikely that any new study will immediately overthrow all the past knowledge.​
They explained that even when results are published that do not stand the test of time, the process of peer review can successfully winnow out those arguments with the greatest merit:
. . . even when it initially breaks down, the process of peer-review does usually work in the end. But sometimes it can take a while.​
With this perspective as background, one of the most damning aspects of the CRU emails was the behind-the-scenes efforts of the activist scientists to -- in their own words -- "redefine what the peer reviewed literature is."

Peer review as related to scientific publishing is a process in which experts are asked to judge the appropriateness of a paper for publication in a scientific journal. It is often cursory and focused on the merits of an argument, rather than a detailed replication or decomposition of the data or methods. Peer review does not mean that a result is right or will stand the test of time, but that it has met some minimal standards of acceptability for publication. The scientific community is replete with vignettes about papers that were rejected for publication in one venue only to be published elsewhere and which later turned out to be seminal. Similarly, every so often even Science and Nature find themselves in trouble with a paper that is badly wrong or even fraudulent. But despite these shortcomings in the process, peer review is widely viewed much as Winston Churchill viewed democracy: the worst possible system except for all the others.

Peer review works because over the long-term good ideas win out, and this process happens organically and through a decentralized process. Peer review takes place through many independent journals, with editing and reviewing conducted by many independent scholars from a diversity of disciplinary and experiential backgrounds, and with their own idiosyncratic biases and views. No one group or perspective owns the peer review process, and that diversity is part of its core strength. Truth -- meaning a convergence to agreement on scientific questions -- thus is a product of the peer review process over time. Of course the path to truth can be convoluted and indirect. For instance, it used to be true that there were 9 planets in our solar system. Now that is less true.

Some issues relevant to decisions are characterized by uncertainties and contested certainties making the distribution of scientific views not readily apparent simply by looking at the sprawling literature. In such situations a formal assessment can provide a useful perspective on the degree of consensus or disagreement among relevant experts on various claims. Such assessments are nothing more than a snapshot in time, as science is continuously evolving. When done well, an assessment will reflect the full range of views held by relevant experts, including minority views (see PDF), as well as the connections of scientific understandings to alternative possible courses of action.

Now back to the CRU emails. The emails show a consistent pattern of behavior among the activist scientists to redefine peer review in accordance with their own views of climate science. In doing so, they sought to turn the entire notion of peer review on its head.

The emails show a group of scientists frustrated with the peer review process, seeking to change how it is practiced. How so? The emails indicate concerted efforts to reshape the peer review process by managing and coordinating reviews of individual papers, by putting pressure on journal editors and editorial boards, by seeking to stack editorial boards with like-minded colleagues, by arranging boycotts of journals and other actions involving highly questionable ethics. But we might wonder why these scientists would take such steps to change peer review if, as Schmidt and Mann explained at Real Climate -- "peer review usually does work in the end." Why depart from a process that works? The answer is obvious: the short-term politics of climate change.

The activist scientists decided that the peer review process would work better in service of their political agenda if it used "truth" to determine whose views would be allowed to be published in the literature and reflected in assessments. In this case "truth" simply means the views deemed acceptable among the activist scientists and their close clique of colleagues. In an interview with NPR Real Climate's Gavin Schmidt defended this very backwards view of peer review:
Journals are supposed to be impartial filters that let good ideas rise to the top and bad ideas sink to the bottom. But the stolen emails show that a group of scientists has decided that's not working well enough. So they have resorted to strong tactics — including possible boycotts — to keep any paper they think is dubious from reaching the pages of a journal.
"In any other field (a bad paper) would just be ignored," says Gavin Schmidt at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "The problem is in the climate field has become extremely politicized, and every time some nonsense paper gets into a proper journal, it gets blown out of all proportion."
Most of the papers Schmidt and his colleagues object to challenge the mainstream view of climate science. Schmidt says they may be wrong or even deceptive, but they are still picked up by politicians, pundits and businesses who are skeptical of climate change.
So Schmidt suggests that in order to short circuit the ability of their political opponents to cherry pick and blow out of proportion studies that the activists scientists did not agree with, they saw a convenient short cut: Simply reshape the peer review system such that those papers don't ever appear or go unmentioned in scientific assessments.

The problem with this strategy, of course, is that many climate scientists (and presumably others inside and outside of the scientific establishment) are unwilling to cede ownership of the "truth" to a small clique of scientists. In fact, peer review exists in the first place because there are no short cuts to the truth, and any such short cut will inevitably fail. Consider that the efforts revealed in the CRU emails to manage the peer reviewed literature went well beyond efforts to prevent so-called "skeptical" papers from being published, but included a focus on papers that fully accepted a human influence on climate, but which offered views that differed in some degree (e.g., here) from those preferred by the activist scientists. The emails reveal activist scientists busy extolling the virtues of peer review to journalists and the public, while at the same time they were busy behind the scenes working to corrupt the peer review process in a way that favored their views on the science and politics of climate change. Here we have a case study in the politicization of climate science by climate scientists.

The clique of activist scientists sees absolutely nothing wrong in what they are doing -- they are after all justifying their actions in terms of "truth" in support of the greater good. And the issue is made even more complex because those who share the political agenda of the activist scientists are ready to join their peer review coup whereas those opposed to that political agenda are happy to try to exploit for political gain the scientists' ethical lapses and failure to appreciate their role in politicizing climate science. So much of the discussion gets wrapped up in these distractions, rather than the issue of the integrity of climate science.

The sustainability of climate science depends upon our ability to distinguish the health of the scientific enterprise from the politics of climate change. The need to respond to climate change (which I support) does not justify sacrificing standards of scientific integrity for political ends. In fact, as the events of the past week show, when standards of scientific integrity are compromised, the political consequences can be double edged.
 

bit_pattern

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Re: Leading climate scientists e-mails hacked. If true very disturbing

Quoting from the HS crew and their mates again.

Amusing if nothing else.

Artic ice melt has reduced in the last two years

So it made a slight recovery from the all time low? And all the recovery is single year ice that will melt again much easier than the multi year ice that used to cover the area.

20091005_Figure5_thumb.png

Figure 5. These images compare ice age, a proxy for ice thickness, in 2007, 2008, 2009, and the 1981 to 2000 average. This year saw an increase in second-year ice (in blue) over 2008. At the end of summer 2009, 32 percent of the ice cover was second-year ice. Three-year and older ice were 19 percent of the total ice cover, the lowest in the satellite record.
—Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center courtesy C. Fowler and J. Maslanik, University of Colorado at Boulder

If you can look at that and not see a problem then you have some serious denial issues.

It is highly questionable to say Antarctica is losing ice mass.

No it's not. Satellites show that E. Antarctic is even losing mass now.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8371773.stm

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2009/s2751232.htm

Re CO2 emissions, good of them to use 2008. Conveniently ignoring that they will be quite a bit lower in the next few years than previously thought due to the GFC.

A less than 3% dip in output, that doesn't equate to very much and the savings will quickly get eaten up in the recovery - unless we actually get a plan in place at Copenhagen to reduce emissions, then we might have a chane to capitalise on the gain.

If only temperatures would do what they are meant to.

Never mind, a minor inconvenience.
This stuff is so easy to tear apart, I really dont know why you post it.

The temps have done exactly what you'd expect in an El Nina phase.

And Ripper - your two charts are mapping MEAN and MAXIMUM temps, of course there's going got be variation
 
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