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Climatic Research Unit Hacked, Files Leaked
huckamania was one of many readers to write with the news that the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Unit was hacked, and internal documents released. Some discussion and analysis of the leaked items can be found at Watts Up With That. The CRU has confirmed that a breach occurred, but not that all 61 MB of released material is genuine. Some of the emails would seem to raise concerns about the science as practiced — or at least beg an explanation. From the Watts Up link: "[The CRU] is widely recognized as one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change. Consisting of a staff of around thirty research scientists and students, the Unit has developed a number of the data sets widely used in climate research, including the global temperature record used to monitor the state of the climate system, as well as statistical software packages and climate models. An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertised an FTP file on a Russian FTP server. Here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today: 'We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.' The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files. It contained data, code, and emails apparently from the CRU. If proved legitimate, these bombshells could spell trouble for the AGW crowd." Reader brandaman supplied the link to the archive of pilfered data. Reader aretae characterized the emails as revealing "...lots of intrigue, data manipulation, attempting to shut out opposing points of view out of scientific journals. Almost makes you think it's a religion. Anyone surprised?" And reader bugnuts adds, for context: "These emails are certainly taken out of context, whether they are legitimate or fraudulent, which adds to the confusion."
MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen has long made these claims about global warming researchers, as he discusses in a talk from a few weeks ago: "Cooler Heads". It looks like he's slowly being vindicated in his views of both the researchers and the conclusions.
Is this the same CRU that when asked to release the original raw data used in its climate analysis claimed it had all been lost?
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/08/we-lost-original-data.html
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Let's see ALL the data, and let's not see the E-mail at all -- E-mail isn't data.
You do realize that some of the emails are about hiding data from public view, obstructing freedom of information requests, and campaign to discredit a peer reviewed journal that published something that disagreed with their public stance, right?
If there is one thing I know for sure, its that at least one of the skeptics is entirely open about the data and methodology (with source code, only free tools, etc..) he uses, and he even seeks input from anyone willing to help via his blog. That man is Steve McIntyre.
Publicly funded scientists should be forced to open up their data and methodology, with prison terms for them if they don't. Its time they stopped using public money to boost their own careers while playing fast and loose in their good ol' boy club of like-minded conspirators.
"His name was James Damore."
The bar for skeptics is always going to be higher. Otherwise we'd have to rewrite the chemistry textbooks every time some student messes up his lab assignment, because this will produce data that contradicts the theory.
Is Richard S. Lindzen of the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT an idiot media personality?
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3771
Also: "The global surface temperature record, which we update and publish every month, has shown no statistically-significant “global warming” for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now persisted for very nearly eight years. Even a strong el Nino – expected in the coming months – will be unlikely to reverse the cooling trend. More significantly, the ARGO bathythermographs deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2003 show that the top 400 fathoms of the oceans, where it is agreed between all parties that at least 80% of all heat caused by manmade “global warming” must accumulate, have been cooling over the past six years. That now prolonged ocean cooling is fatal to the “official” theory that “global warming” will happen on anything other than a minute scale. "
- SPPI Monthly CO2 Report: July 2009
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/co2_report_july_09.pdf
Hm. Who did An Inconvenient Truth again? Who is pushing for "climate change" legislation? The hype and sensationalism is the fault of conservatives?
A skeptic is someone who is dubious, but willing to be convinced by sufficient evidence.
A denialist is someone whose mind is made up, and will never be convinced by any amount of evidence.
There isn't much skepticism about anthropogenic climate change these days, but there's a hell of a lot of denial.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Actually, I read many of the emails last night.
Many are bland as hell. There's a few juicy ones, which have already been highlighted. The attitude that came across from reading email after email is that these people beleive they are doing science. They are well intentioned and don't mean to be pushing an agenda. However some of the emails indicated a desire to please governments and the IPCC. It was not as the AGW skeptics would have you believe that these scientists are forcing the policy, rather, it seems they are trying to do science that both pleases the governing bodies while still remains science.
But I think there should be no consideration of what pleases whomever. It should just report the facts. But that's hard to do when you're funded by them.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Since you didn't bother to do any research before tossing around allegations of lying, nor bothering to figure out what exactly "Mike's Nature trick" actually was, let me.
A quick google search of "michael nature global temperature" points to : "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries" by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley & Malcolm K. Hughes from Nature 392, 779-787 (23 April 1998) | doi:10.1038/33859
This was a a seminal article in the climatetology community. Mann et al took tree core samples and estimated the global temperature by measuring the spacing between tree rings. (Big rings are caused by rapid growth, which is in turn caused by warmer temperatures. Small rings, slow growth, cooler temperatures.) The fact that tree ring sizes are dependent on temperature has been a long established fact.
Let me now quote the abstract of this article in full:
Mann et al tried to create an accurate record of the global temperature by augmenting the estimated temperatures from the tree ring data with actual measured temperatures from 1981 and 1961 since these are actual known temperatures. This is known as "the MBH98 reconstruction".
Now hang on. Here's where your allegation of "systematic suppression of data" falls all apart.
In 2003, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published (*gasp*) Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series, whose abstract reads:
So the worldwide conspiracy of climatetologists breaks down when they behave like scientists, and try to duplicate each others' work, fail to, and publish corrections, and warnings saying, "Hey! You this data set we've all been using? It might be wrong."
Thus begins The Hockey Stick Controversy, named after the shape of the curve at the very end of MBH98 reconstruction. Far from being suppressed, it's investigated quite thoroughly
Theory 3, the Earth warms, the heat is radiated back out into space. The warmer it gets, the more heat is radiated back into space. Some evidence, for example Lindzen and Choi, for low climate sensitivity:
Another good writeup on the leaked emails can be found here. Summary: manipulation of evidence, private doubts about whether the world really is heating up, suppression of evidence, fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists, attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period , and communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.
Because "Can't we all just get along?" doesn't really go well with "Let's use force against individuals to make them comply."
I'd love it if the argument was "hey, why don't you guys think about reducing your pollution, it will benefit your pocketbook and your health". Unfortunately, what's being argued is more like "you will adhere to our rules regarding pollution reduction, or we will hurt your pocketbook or your health."
You make it sound like we have 150 years of data. That's like the creationist argument that we have no evidence for evolution or geology beyond human observation. We have much more than 150 years of data and your statements are misleading because you cite "C02 increases in general are caused by warming" while simultaneously ignoring the mountain of evidence which we have collected on CO2 and Temperature beyond calibrated thermometers and satellites.
Uhm.
I don't think your example proves anything, I've used similar language when investigating data (not climate data, but industrial measurement results). Such language usually means: 'if we can explain that XX% of the effect is caused by instrumentation errors then there's no problem with the rest of the data as the anomaly becomes statistically insignificant'.
"CO2 isn't air pollution, CO, Hydrogen Sulfides, Sulfuric Acid, Mercury, Nitrogen oxides DO kill animals and more importantly Plants."
The definition of a pollutant is "a resource out of place". More importantly CO2 is what is turning the ocean acic (carbonic acid) this in turn threatens the very bottom of the global food chain (ie: plankton). Covering the earth with trees would help but it is still not enough to aborb our emmissions. Ironiclly many of the traditional pollutants that you mention form areosols and have a significant cooling effect.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
English transcript: http://ohjelmat.yle.fi/mot/viime_viikon_mot/transcript_english