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Scientists Step Down After CRU Hack Fallout
An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of the recent release of thousands of private files and emails after a server of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia was hacked, Prof. Phil Jones is stepping down as head of the CRU. Prof. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, is also under inquiry by Penn State University."
Right. Same guy. Random number input into his program produced a hockey stick. I downloaded the 61MB zip file and have read most of the emails. Those are damaging in terms of exposing several issues:
1. They manipulated the peer-review process and controlled it to the point of changing what peer-review meant, freezing out contrary authors, reviewing each others' work, getting editors fired, etc. There's a lot of that kind of manipulation revealed.
2. They colluded to avoid the FOIA and deleted emails and threatened to delete data before they would release it under FOIA. This is illegal.
3. They admitted to manipulating data to 'hide the decline' or 'get rid of the Medieval Warming Period.' I don't have a problem with 'trick' being used. No big deal, but 'hide the decline'? Not good.
4. They would manipulate the data by simply not adding it, closing a run on an increase, when the subsequent data showed a decline. They seem dismayed that the last ten years shows an overall redction in temperature, at one point calling it a travesty and suggesting the data must be wrong.
5. Because there were no thermometers 2000 years ago, they use 'proxies' such as tree rings, ice core samples, etc. However, tree ring growth can be caused by wetness and other issues, not just temperature. In ine case they 'proved; warming based on 12 trees in Siberia. When hey went back and measured many more trees, the increase disappeared.
But the more damning evidence is in the programs themselves, including REM statements where 'hide the decline' is found numerous times, data is manually manipulated, and the programs would throw an error and keep on running.
The code, written primarily in FORTAN and IDL, is a mess--not professional. The datasets are often missing or in poor shape. There's one 'Harry Read me' text file where poor Harry is trying to make sense of the code, over several years, and points out many of the flaws.
So what we've got here is email and program code evidence of manipulation, very poor data, and very poor programming.
The thing is, there are only 4 datasets in the world, two terrestrial and two satellite. There are serious problms with both terrestrial data sets. NOAA's, for example, has manually 'adjusted' data over the years as much as 500%! In other words, the observed degree difference was .1 degree C and the 'adjustment' was +.5 degrees C. You'd think the satellite data asets would be more accurate, however, they were 'calibrated' on the 'adjusted' terrestrial data sets.
Remember Gore's CO2 graph? Probably a 95% correlation between CO2 and temperature, which he presented as proof that CO2 CAUSES global warming. Except that the CO2 increased 800 years AFTER the warming trend. In other words, warming CAUSED CO2 increases, the opposite of what he implied.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Citing realclimate.org doesn't help your cause. Several contributors to that site have been implicated in the leaked emails.
With regards to the content of your post, the data was most certainly manipulated. Have you not taken the time to discover the coding travesty documented in the HARRY_READ_ME file that was leaked along with the emails? Here are a couple good links to start with.
I'm not popular enough to be different.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
How exactly does this follow? Their careers and livelihoods are only improved if they are right (through recognition maybe getting them a better job at a better uni or something).
Maybe they will get more funding to carry out more science, but you do know that they don't get to have any of that money, right? It is extremely tightly regulated and controlled by the grant providers.
Disclaimer: I am a researcher in a university lab.
You guys keep pointing back to the same realclimate.org website as if that proves anything. Shall I collect up a few DailyKos, Freeper and HillaryIs44 links to rebut? Realclimate.org is run by the same people who invented global warming. That content may be discussion, but it's not proof.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Isn't RealClimate.org pretty much the creation of Mr. Jones, et al?
this is pretty much like Wikipedia citing Wikipedia.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The source code which was leaked clearly shows the data was manipulated with garbage data and arbitrarily created fudge factors.
I notice you don't mention which data had arbitrary fudge factors applied to it - probably because it sounds more ominous that way. Data from tree cores taken in the Nothern hemisphere post-1960 had arbitrary fudge factors applied to it, and as far as anyone can tell the results were thrown away. It appears the code was part of an attempt to determine why and how the temperatures claculated from the tree cores diverged from the actual temperature. In the end, the researchers didn't find an answer and just advised not using that data.
Even the comments in the code state that this was exactly the purpose.
That didn't ring any alarm bells for you? After all, if you're secretly fudging results, the last thing you want is clear comments stating as much. Perhaps that's because, you know, the code's author didn't want the fudged results to be used...
Someone on another website ran all 0's through the algorithm and the resulting data was the same 'hockey stick' pattern. Even running random data through the algorithm produced the same 'hockey stick' pattern.
Yeah, it would do. The trouble with the conspiracy theories is that the algorithm in question wasn't the one that produced the hockey stick graph. You've got it backwards - the fudge factors make the tree data roughly agree with actual temperatures, which are of course hockey-stick shaped.
So, there's no fraud? Yeah, there is.
No there isn't.