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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."
Your cause may be correct, but your methods damage all of science as well as your cause.
True science should not hide data or pick data to support predefined conclusions. And dissenting papers with proper methodologies should never be suppressed. This is the only way to do science right.
That's why we need to act NOW to return the glaciers to the same state they were in 30,000 years ago.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Beach Party?
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
You act as if the deniers have nothing to gain from ignoring the science. No matter what the science says, everyone that has a stake in industries that produce large amounts of CO2 will tend to fight tooth and nail against anyone claiming that CO2 does any harm. Simple selfish interest.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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
Sadly, they don't have the raw data. They threw it away. Worse, they probably have threw it away much more recently than they originally stated.
We'll never see it because they've deliberately destroyed it.
Based on my reading of the e-mails, which are available on Wikileaks for your own inspection, combined with this more recent information about the destruction of the raw data, I'd have to say they are very far towards that latter end of the spectrum.
My blog
"We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces... I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir." - Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World (Science as a candle in the dark).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Remember Ike's warning about the Military-Industrial Complex? In that same speech, he also said:
(http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html)
Think about that the next time someone tries to discredit research because it was funded by an oil company.
Ike's warning has been borne out. Public policy has become the captive of a scientific-technological elite, who, unsurprisingly, are a bunch of dishonest frauds.
See, nobody disputes that instrumental records for past 30 years are more accurate than data obtained by proxy. Anyway, if there is such a divergence of proxy data and instrumental record (proxy data pointing downwards), it casts serious doubts about validity of proxy data of the past.
Also, it means that to show the hockey stick, you in fact do not need care about proxy data too much. Instrumental record will make the right shape even if you feed anything before with noise.
I guess that the most important issue in Mann's and Briffa reconstruction is that MWP was downplayed and current warming thus became "unprecedented". Which is exactly what you get if you choose noisy unreliable proxy data, and 'stick' real temperature records where it fits...
If you see any flaws in this analysis of "trick to hide the decline", I would be glad to hear your objections.
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.
Obviously there is plenty of monetary motivation to deny AGW, but what is the motivation to fabricate it? I just don't see it. At best you could say that these scientists were duped into believing that AGW was real and, now that they know the "truth," are trying to hide that they were wrong, but this is far from compelling considering the sheer number of scientists involved all trying to dupe each other.
What am I missing?
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
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.
Oh, I got your point just fine, but it looks like you missed mine. I'll spell it out: humans don't live on geological timescales. The climate change debate is not about what the Earth's climate will be like millions, or tens of thousands, or even thousands of years from now. It's about what it will be like in our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children. And on that human timescale, things are changing very fast indeed.
Also ... dude, "Pol Pot?" Seriously? If you think any measure that will ever be taken, or even seriously proposed, to control CO2 emissions is in any way comparable to what the Khmer Rouge did, you are insane.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Meanwhile most people here in SE Australia (educated or otherwise) know all two well that a "slight change" in weather patterns can really screw up a civilization. Grain harvest have been cut in half for 8 out the last ten years, billions of dollars of hydro infrastucture built in Tasmaninia in the 90's sits idle for lack of water, the high tech bass-link cable that was to be used to export that power to the mainland is now used to import power. Firestorms convert forrest into grassland, and grassland into desert, the dust from which can be seen on most mornings simply by looking at your car. Lakes that have survived for tens of thousands of years become toxic and whole forrests of 600yo red gums wither and die. Every state capital in the country has been forced to ration water while thier governments spend billions building some of the world's largests desal plants. Had this happened over geological time scales nobody except geologists would have noticed.
Now I have never been to WI but I hear from reliable sources it is also experiencing drought conditions. Tell me, do they teach history in WI?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.