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Scientific Journal Nature Finds Nothing Notable In CRU Leak
eldavojohn writes with an update to the CRU email leak story we've been following for the past two weeks. The peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature has published an article saying the emails do not demonstrate any sort of "scientific conspiracy," and that the journal doesn't intend to investigate earlier papers from CRU researchers without "substantive reasons for concern." The article notes, "Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers." Reader lacaprup points out related news that a global warming skeptic plans to sue NASA under the Freedom of Information Act for failing to deliver climate data and correspondence of their own, which he thinks will be "highly damaging." Meanwhile, a United Nations panel will be conducting its own investigation of the CRU emails.
The real smoking gun isn't the emails - it's the source code.
They keep talking about those emails in the hopes that no one will call them out on the "VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline"s applied liberally to the raw data.
Really take a look at the graphs in the link above. Plot that array yourself if you don't believe it. No amount of handwaving will explain away blatant lying.
There are items of interest--even if determined irrelevant in the end--to discuss.
This is as if immediately after the Kennedy assassination the government was saying "there is nothing to see, move along, move along"
A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research.
They do destroy faithfulness of the research if the premise those millions of hours spent are false.
If data that all those millions of man-hours of research is based on is bogus then the conclusions are worthless.
Here's the UN investigation outcome, "those emails mean nothing".
Just wait for it.
Is that a journal where the hockey team review each others papers anonymously? No surprise that they won't investigate anything.
I think open source is the answer here. Open source the data, methodologies, any programs used. Anybody else should be able to reproduce the results by themselves. All that research is paid for by the public dime anyway and it's used to set public policy so it shouldn't be kept secret. Oh, and no anonymous peer "reviewing" would be really nice.
"A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research."
Never mind the quality, feel the weight.
And the apparent lack of transparency regarding the code, I submit that the researchers under fire be asked to use the code in question to reproduce their results under observation, explaining how they did it.
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
Denialists.
That's right, anyone who "denies" global warming is human caused is denying the truth.
Some "climate-change-denialist fringe" (also their words in the link) who deny the "scientific case" of human-caused (their words, and honest ones. It does not rise to the level of a theory)
No, they could not be credible scientists that look at the data and see other hypothesis. Nor could they be credible in questioning the base data. The "debate is over".
Sorry Nature, epic fail.
Starting your argument with a personal attack is not good form. You expose your own bias to believe the human-caused global warming hypothesis by doing the very thing the scientists in the emails do: attack and discredit those who disagree with you.
Every scientific theory, and even "laws" like gravity, must stand up to rigorous scientific questioning... or they are merely pseudo-religious beliefs. You might as well declare Al Gore the Global Warming Pope and set up a church in Copenhagen.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
What do you see in these mails? Remember these scientists think they are talking in private and never anticipated being found out. Are there mentions or references to dark projects? Some references to their agents and their handlers? Strong ideological opinions to destroy Capitalism and install a world Government?
What happened is very simple. These scientists are used to one kind of debate and one kind of rules. Where "the conclusions reached by Kogen, et al [8] is not supported by the evidence presented by them [9],[10],[11]" would be considered a grave insult and might cause loss of reputation. In the question and answer session in a seminar someone saying, "But, Dr Kaplansky, with a sample size of 27, the correlation coefficient you have arrived at is less than experimental error" wouild result in a collective gasp and "ole!" from the assembled people, usually about 20 people who could actually understand the paper being presented.
These scientists are encountering the rough and tumble world of popular journalism, spin meistering. They are clueless about how to handle it. They feel they are being gravely insulted and highly manipulated. They think they are being quote mined, quoted out of context. The journalists are giving totally irrelevant and completely debunked theorists equal time for balance. So they go about in their clueless ways to counter it. They over react, they try to be more guarded, they are trying to write sentences that could not be quote mined.
Now that people have glimpse of the actual communications between the scientists, compare that to say, the hacked emails of Sarah Palin, See where you find more smoking guns.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
however, what matters is how they acted.
They weren't just saying things in those emails, they were acting on it. Scientific Journal is acting like all those emails were part of a fairytale and none of it ever happened.
In the one email, the author is quoted saying that he "adjusted the numbers." Last time I checked "adjusted" is past tense meaning that he did something. That's not the same as "I can adjust the numbers if you want me to."
If AGW was actually happening, there would be no need to "adjust" numbers and likewise no need to cover up the leaked emails.
If data that all those millions of man-hours of research is based on is bogus then the conclusions are worthless.
It's lucky then that the data comes from many different independent sources and is therefore not bogus at all then, isn't it?
Since they have no data anymore, how can anything they claim be seen as anything other than fantasy?
You realize that them throwing the data away was done for the same reasons the BBC tossed out all those videos and films of old shows -- to save space. So are you going to then use the same logic to deduce that the BBC was willfully destroying evidence of events that happened in their studios to cover up some major wrongdoing? Because that's the level of logical leap many of you are taking here. "If they didn't have something to hide, the BBC would never have destroyed those tapes."
It is not the millions of dollars in research grants that you need to worry about. It is the hundreds of billions of dollars in industries that stand to be affected if this research is true that you need to be concerned about. Follow the money.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Once thing that's certain: this, like all other climate research relating to AGW, will descend into a hyper-partisan he said-she said type argument. This guarantees it will be impossible for anyone unwilling or unable to validate and analyze the data themselves to come to a rational conclusion.
One thing is crystal clear: these guys are biased in a way that is completely antithetical to true scientific research.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
1) they're guilty of not properly responding to a FOIA request
2) they've said nasty things about certain colleagues work (but still cited it)
3) they've discarded some data for reasons they should have better explained (reasons that were valid -- it wasn't properly calibrated)
Bad for them personally, but utterly irrelevant to the scientific issue, unless you think it's some kind of surprise that scientists are human and sometimes make mistakes. As the Nature article says, it's laughable. Where's the global conspiracy? Where's the outright fraud of substantial masses of crucial data? Nowhere.
It's worth investigating for the possibility of misconduct, but, sheesh, the actual scientific impact is so overblown it's ridiculous. This is why you have many, many other scientists working on the same issues and completely independent ones: so that even if one of them makes an honest or a dishonest mistake, or one method yields incorrect results, the other people and techniques are likely to find the flaw and correct it.
The only "trick" here is the propaganda trick climate-change denialists are using to divert attention from the actual data and results of the last few decades.
Smoking gun? It's like they've (illegally) broken into the house owned by someone they've publicly accused of murder for a decade and found a plastic gun replica that shoots Nerf balls. Aha!! Gotcha!
Personally I think the premise is so obviously false that this stunt will backfire on the coal industry as did similar "scientific" arguments by the tabcoo companies in the 80's.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Why would it be lucky, since what you posted simply isn't true?
it's in my head
[citation needed]?
Next, the professional climate deniers will be accusing climate researchers of pedophilia. It is the conservative smear tactic of last resort. And since their smear campaigns are always completely bull, they are inevitably forced into using their last resort.
If it's such god-damnned good science, why then are people saying "we must not have any more debate. Debate is closed. It's time to move on."
"A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research."
Of course not. But when the main suppliers of that information to policy makers turn out to be advocates of a dogma with a vested interest in manipulating that data, in colluding to hide contrary information, in DISPOSING (whups! accident!) of the raw data sets that they've compiled, attacking critics, and generally behaving as if they have something to conceal, it IS possible for those individuals to taint that research and especially the conclusions drawn therefrom.
Who Watches the Watchmen, indeed?
It's a known psychological fact that very often the victims of a con will be the most vociferous defenders of the con artists - they are now defending their own reputation and self-image, no longer mere facts of 'does this snake oil work or not?'.
-Styopa
To be blunt, here's a list of things that I think need to be done. First, all data and processes need to be made public domain. Simply put, proprietary data that can't be released to the public has no place in scientific research. It doesn't matter if industry-paid hacks attack anything they can find. If we can't duplicate the calculations, using your data and programs that went into your research, then we can't say whether you did it at all in the first place.
Second, there needs to be some degree of separation between the politics and the science. For example, James Hansen who currently heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (which is NASA's group for studying the climate) has engaged in a great deal of politics over the years, throwing away any pretense of objectivity. For example, he says:
In Hansen's view, dealing with climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. "This is analagous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill," he said. "On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%."
Ignoring that carbon emissions can be dealt with through compromise (even in the worst cases) and hence are not like slavery or the spread of totalitarian ideologies, would a person with this sort of viewpoint "cook the books" when it comes to their science? Why not? When I see accusations of NASA data manipulation coupled with refusal to honor FOIA requests and highly ideological, crude public statements like the above of key officials, then it looks like a pattern of unscientific behavior to me. They can at least act like grownups.
The people trying to force carbon emission reduction need to take their time. If they're right, then a little more time will simply solidify their position further, especially since there's no urgency in the matter according to current research. If they're wrong about the need to reduce human carbon emissions, then that'll help humanity collectively. For example, Hanson has been crying "wolf" since 1989. Even if the science is determined now (I still don't believe we've shown that human activity has a significant global warming effect), it wasn't then.
Finally, there needs to be a genuine cost/benefit analysis of the possible choices, including various geoengineering options and procrastination. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I'm tired of the nebulous claims of disaster made by anthropic global warming proponents (Hanson in the linked story above claims "tens of meters" of sea level rise, but doesn't bother to say over what time period this rise occurs).
Why would it be lucky, since what you posted simply isn't true?
Your post isn't true.
Argument ad infinitum.
My UID is prime. Hah!
How do you people find the time to watch silly videos? Is there an accurate transcript? With still images? Perhaps a normal web page?
Yeah, that's why this controversy doesn't exist because there in fact were NOT scientists refuting the existing science and there was no group of scientists trying to silence them, nor were there any emails speaking of how these scientists would do so.
Seriously, did you miss that part in this whole scandal?
Just because you want something to be true and you can come up with a rationalized answer for why it is true, doesn't mean it is true.
More expensive energy and more expensive products are by definition more expensive. I understand that everything needs to be ramped up. As we develop our understanding and the infrastructure, the costs will come down. But you don't know for a fact it will work. That's why capitalism is great. Risk your own money, not mine. Risk your own financial future, not mine.
Even if someone is right about global warming, that doesn't mean their solution will fix the problem.
The review must not have been that thorough.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
When you have gigabytes of private correspondence to sift through of course you can cherry pick / quote mine something to make it look like a conspiracy. That is all some anti-global warmer bloggers have done. They have engaged in the same sort of quotemining that creationists like to go in for which says a lot about the strength of their arguments.
Other than the CRU and NASA, who else publishes this data? I was under the impression they were the only two generating global temperature data sets and neither has been willing to show all of their work.
When you have a minute though, you should update the Wikipedia page to add your list of the many independent sources.
Anthropogenic global warming is just a conspiracy by the evil climatologists to steal our money and freedom. Never mind that it's an entire scientific field and thus a massive amount of people would have to be involved in this conspiracy, so many there's no chance they'd go even a day without a leak. Never mind that they've known about and been researching global warming for far longer than governments have been paying it attention, and thus they must've been working on this for decades on the minor chance they'd be able to expand the influence of the next generation of climatologists (or was the earlier research valid but the newer research is somehow flawed?). Never mind that pretty much every major scientific organization backs the theory of AGW; clearly the broader scientific community is just in the pockets of the powerful green lobby (note how green is a color just like red CONNECT THE DOTS MY FRIENDS). Also I'm pretty sure the Freemasons figure into it somehow.
Teach the controversy!
Since when does the right care about science? They can't even get an issue as simple and data-rich as sex education right, but now I'm supposed to believe that it's all about the evidence?
I used to have doubts about AGW because I heard so many skeptics, but now that they've dropped their masks and are trying to move in for the kill I see that the whole thing is just like the evolution "debate". Conspiracy theories ("It's the evil liberals! They want to destroy capitalism!"), quotes out of context, repeating the same tired debunked arguments year after year... The only difference is that the ideology behind it is a little more popular -- the strawman liberal is apparently a more plausible villain to most people than the strawman atheist.
Visit the
I neither work for an oil company or drive an SUV, but I can tell you what I don't like about the emails (not that you have to believe any of that from an internet person).
No one can deny that AGW is a highly politicized topic: you have affirmed this by talking about shills. Nonetheless, it would be hoped that scientists have managed to largely stay away from the politicization. These emails show they haven't. They show that even some of the top scientists in the field have been caught up in the political process.
This is bad. It means if you want to know the truth about a topic, you have to investigate it personally. How many of you have even read the IPCC report to see if its conclusions are valid or not? Have you looked at the computer models to see how accurate they are? Because if you've gotten all your information from realclimate.org, or climate-skeptic.com, or any non-peer-reviewed place, you are stepping into the quicksands of politicalization, and as likely as not have been mislead. That may sound like flamebait, but if you think about it, you'll realize it's true.
Qxe4
"And first most important greenhouse gas is water vapor
The water vapour red-herring is #26 on this list of the most common bogus arguments repeated ad-nausem by "skeptics". Sure the water vapour in the atmosphere warms the planet signifigantly. However the atmosphere is basically saturated with water vapour, pump as much water vapour into the atmosphere as you like and it will fall out as rain with a few days.
You cannot staurate the atmosphere with CO2 (re: Venus) or N20, however you can saturate the oceans with CO2 to form carbolic acid and severly disrupt the very roots of the global food chain.
"I believe in AGW but let's not claim the climate science is easy to understand or obvious.
I agree, the science is not settled, philosophically speaking science is never settled.
"This is why I get angry when AGWers equate those that disbelieve in AGW with creationists; the principles behind evolution are much easier and more intuitive to understand than climate science is."
Every scientists is a skeptic and the best of them are self-skeptical. However what people like me get angry about is the huge amount of deliberate and coordinated disinformation from lobbyists such as the CEI and the heartland institute. It's bad enough that the intellectually incurious simply accepted their crap on face value and endlessly repeat but what really pisses me off are the large number of politicians who actively push the same nonesense (Senator Inhofe is a particularly bad example).
There is a name for this kind of propoganda it's called "teaching the contraversy" They teach their contraversy in exactly the same manner as creationist teach their's; ie: via paid astroturfer's and web sites such as icecap, WUWT, ClimateAudit and countless other fronts for the FF industry. These are the people I routinely refer to a psuedo-skeptics, many others call them deniers.
Agrguing with these people and their avid followers is very much like arguing with creationists, evolution may seem a simple idea these days but when I went to school in the 60's it was every bit as contraversial and complex as climate science is today.
More recently the well established fact that smoking causes cancer was also vigoursly disputed by so called scientists. It should come as no surprise that some of the "scientists" spreading FUD on climate are the very same "scientists" who spread FUD for the tabcoo industry in the 80's and 90's (eg: Fred S Singer).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And did you "forget" that of the two cases of suggested conspiracy, in the first case the paper discussed was such a travesty against real science half the board of editors of the "peer reviewed publication" resigned in protest, with plenty of evidence that this did not happen after any pressure from the CRU people and that in the second case, the "conspiracy" actually failed to blacklist the publications, since they were actually included in the report being discussed?
So even if there was a conspiracy, it must have been a pretty weak one, failing at getting the desired results?
Or is that too inconvenient a truth for you?
Well, we all know that Nature, NASA, and the U.N. are prime players in the conspiracy. As are NOAA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the science academies of Brazil, China and India.
I mean, either there's a massive conspiracy by climatologists all around the world, or a handful of corporate shills and religious true believers (including both fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist propertarians) have the media's ear and are quoting stuff out of context and flat-out inventing shit. And that's impossible, right?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The continual stream of false accusations that their opponents are all funded by the oil industry was probably the first thing that got me to suspect something was wrong with AGW. If the sciencee is on your side, then you have no need to ascribe false motives and paymasters to everyone who disagrees with you.
Why is it that nobody assumes all these government-funded people who produce results that say governments should get bigger and more powerful are themselves biased by their funding sources?
Governments have spent billions on AGW research, and are preparing to spend trillions on it. The power and money that governments will control if they can convince everyone of AGW dwarfs anything any corporation ever dreamed of
Right, because the guys who got millions in grants because they said the "sky is falling" are so much more trustworthy? Dr. Phil Jones received grants in the 90s in the thousands of dollars, since 1998 the grants he has received have been in the millions of dollars.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No, they're biased in precisely the way scientists should be biased - they've studied the data, drawn conclusions based on this data, and they're passionately arguing for these conclusions in the public sphere. Science isn't some kind of abstract, isolated ratiocination, it's a collective process carried out by a huge number of diverse individual human beings, and the CRU scientists are playing precisely the role they should in this process.
Nonsense. They aren't just arguing for an interpretation, they're manipulating data in unknown ways (admittedly you have to do so in order to aggregate it as they have to), blocking rival research from peer-reviewed journals, refusing to reveal their data, methods, and programs, and generally acting in a way that doesn't allow others to second guess their work. My view is that at this point, if we go the route of some sort of game where the science doesn't matter, then it's everyone for themselves.
In short, lay the average temperature rise from 1908 until 2009 over that for 1803 until 1904 and see what you get. I would strongly suspect that you will see little if any change cycle to cycle.
Good thinking. It's a lock that in decades of research, no one else has ever thought to test for cyclical patterns in temperature data.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Don't you see??? By saying that their investigation found nothing wrong, they have proven their complicity in the conspiracy!!
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Either the AGW proponents have proved their case, or they have not. It shouldn't matter that their opponents are even less credible than they are.
Ideally, yes. The problem is that I'm not a climate scientist or anything close. Even if I were capable of finding all the relevant journal articles (doubtful) and had time to read and comprehend them (also doubtful), would I be able to interpret them correctly? Probably not. As with most issues I'm not directly involved in, I rely on experts to interpret and summarize the raw research. But even the summaries may not be reliable. It turns out that it's much easier to come up with intellectually dishonest arguments than it is to refute them. My role thus becomes that of a jury -- deciding the credibility of the experts themselves.
The tricky part is that it's not too hard to sound credible even if your arguments are total bunk. Again, I direct you to the evolution debate, in which the proportion of Americans who accept biological evolution hasn't changed in decades despite overwhelming evidence for one side. There are a few things I can work with, though:
1. Most of the skeptics seem to be concentrated in the same chunk of the political spectrum (right/libertarian) and have very strong political, economic, and emotional motivations for their skepticism.
2. The skeptics promote a conspiracy theory involving thousands of people.
3. The motivations given for these conspirators rely on strawman versions of environmentalist and left-leaning positions. Being a left-leaning person myself, I know for a fact that almost none of us are out to destroy capitalism, wreck the global economy, or live out some gaia hypothesis-based escape fantasy, and the few who are have no influence among scientists.
4. The skeptics seem to be almost entirely outside of the earth science community. According to Wikipedia, there are no major scientific bodies who oppose the idea of human-caused climate change.
And a few other things, but I don't want to draw too much from a Slashdot discussion. Against this I have some cherry-picked emails being interpreted by people who seem to have unrealistic expectations for the purity of data, the sorts of things people say in private, and the implications that actually has for a worldwide consensus. Having taken my share of data under time and budget constraints, I'm not that excited by a bit of fudging, and given the items I listed above I don't trust the skeptics to make honest, informed, and in-context criticisms.
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