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.

Comments

Nice try

[Wonko the Sane]

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.

Re:Nice try

[niiler]

The researchers did not use certain tree ring data post 1960 because it was not properly calibrated to instrumental data. There has been much hoo-hah about this "throwing out" of data when really it is the instrumental data that matters, not the proxy data. If temperature is what you are after, thermometers are the gold standard. Therefore the post 1960 results really aren't in question. Furthermore, many critics of Mann et al. have ignored the fact that this was a single line of data turning a blind eye to the numerous other data sets and proxies that support the same conclusions. I find it disingenuous to claim that all climatology is now in question due to this "trick". I will, however, admit that the researchers should have noted the issues with the tree-ring data in question.

If one completely ignores any of the above data sets (whether they be direct measurements or proxies), there exist many disparate observations of global warming ranging from the rise in sea level which threatens various nations' lands to the melting of the arctic tundra to the loss of glaciation document global warming independently of these scientists' data. All the data seem to indicate is that the warming is happening on a scale that it has not before. By itself, this should indicate that the hockey stick curve is real. But is this warming due to humans?

Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) critics seem to espouse ideas such as the solar cycle hypothesis or Milankovich hypothesis rather than admit that humans can change the atmosphere. On the BBC this morning I even heard a listener letter that explained how volcanoes were the cause of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere. This ignores some of the more obvious ways in which humans can change the atmosphere. This year, the Chinese government limited fossil fuel burning before the Olympics with apparently stunning results. When I was in Beijing for nearly a month 10 years ago, smog was a daily occurance. Even miles outside the city at Badaling (the Great Wall), it was hard to see for more than a mile. Smog is considered to be the third most important greenhouse gas by the IPCC. Evidence that we are changing our own atmosphere by fossil fuel emission is obvious just by looking.

Re:Nice try

[trickyD1ck]

"Evidence that we are changing our own atmosphere by fossil fuel emission is obvious just by looking." this nonetheless does not imply that such changes have a nontrivial impact on the climate. in other words, smog!=AGW. i would think this were obvious.

Re:Nice try

[mrsquid0]

The source code is another thing that has been taken completely out of context. For example, the "Very ARTIFICIAL correction" in was computed, but the line where it was applied was commented out. This is clearly a case of someone playing around with the output to explore various effects and scenarios. They did the experiment, then commented it out to removed that effect from the production output. Does anyone really believe that a real attempt at fraud would be blatantly labeled in the code?

Re:Nice try

[Rising Ape]

FFS, not this shit again. Frankly, given the number of times this has been pointed out, I can only assume that people still mentioning it are wilfully ignoring anything that contradicts them.

However, one last time. It's commonplace to have multiple versions of analysis code with variations including "artificial" changes. I've done it lots of times, mostly for testing purposes - it's quite useful [1] to know how the output of your analysis depends on variations in the input. Only a small fraction of the code in existence was actually used to process the data "for real". Unless you have some evidence that a) arbitrary modifications were made to published data without explanation in the publication and b) any such modifications were not scientifically justified, please stop with this ridiculous and discredited point.

[1] By which I mean "essential for any non-trivial analysis"

Re:Nice try

[Wonko the Sane]

There has been much hoo-hah about this "throwing out" of data when really it is the instrumental data that matters, not the proxy data. If temperature is what you are after, thermometers are the gold standard

You might have a point if the leaked file only demonstrated a single case of data tampering, but it's all over the place. Anyone with a copy of FOI2009.zip and grep can verify this.

Re:Nice try

[toppavak]

This year, the Chinese government limited fossil fuel burning before the Olympics with apparently stunning results. When I was in Beijing for nearly a month 10 years ago, smog was a daily occurance. Even miles outside the city at Badaling (the Great Wall), it was hard to see for more than a mile. Smog is considered to be the third most important greenhouse gas by the IPCC. Evidence that we are changing our own atmosphere by fossil fuel emission is obvious just by looking.

This kind of trend can be seen on a daily cycle in New Delhi. Overnight, the smog over the city disperses but returns over the course of the day (typically by 11am) only to dissipate again as the city slows down for the night.

Re:Nice try

[belthize]

If you look at the actual code instead of some blog you'll see the reference to the adjusted value is commented out and never used in the plotting call.

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
    2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!'
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
; ;filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy+yearlyadj,tslow=tslow ;oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=20
;
filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy,tslow=tslow
oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=21
;
oplot,!x.crange,[0.,0.],linestyle=1
;
plot,[0,1],/nodata,xstyle=4,ystyle=4

        Without revision control one can't say for certain but there's no evidence any adjusted data made it into a paper. There's only evidence that a single piece of code from the thousands of modeling sims had at one time an adjustment that was commented out.

Re:Nice try

[TapeCutter]

Yeah right, the whole "house of cards" has crumbled due to one line of source code that was never published. How about doing a bit of homework and finding out why the unpublished graph was labelled VERY ARTIFICIAL?

As for the so called "missing data" it seems the MET have noted the advice in the Nature editorial and are now petitioning 188 countries for permission to publish the remaining few percent of records still tied up in red tape.

The sad irony here is that Jones has spent most of his carrer making the other 95% of those records easily accesible to the scientific community.

Re:Nice try

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try. The tree ring data was used as a proxy for temperature. The results of this proxy formula didn't match up with actual temperature readings past 1960, so to make their method look like it had more skill (accuracy) than it did, they simply grafted the actual temperature series to the end of the tree ring proxy temperature series. This is what was meant by "hide the decline".

A real scientist would have investigated why the proxy failed to to reflect actual temperatures in recent times, and might have questioned if the methodology actually applied correctly to any time in the past. Instead, they grafted apples to oranges and then told everyone they had discovered something that they had not.

Very bad science. If this happened in any other field, these clowns would be out of a job.

Re:Nice try

[DriedClexler]

The researchers did not use certain tree ring data post 1960 because it was not properly calibrated to instrumental data. There has been much hoo-hah about this "throwing out" of data when really it is the instrumental data that matters, not the proxy data. If temperature is what you are after, thermometers are the gold standard. Therefore the post 1960 results really aren't in question

Right, so the reasonable inference would be "this proxy can't event match the temperatures we know for sure -- it's no good, throw it out entirely". However, the scientists in question are so attached to their preordained conclusions that they don't even consider this. Instead, they throw out the data they don't like, and keep what matches the conclusion they want, instead of (at least *considering*) re-evaluating the conclusion to begin with.

So they act like the proxy's correct precisely when they have less substantiation, and its failure to match the most solid data is just a problem they need to patch up later -- the so called "divergence problem". It should be called the, "Do we ever consider we might be wrong?" problem.

Re:Nice try

[sycodon]

Wasn't it so inconsiderate of those trees to change the way the respond to temperature?

I wonder why they don't include other tree ring data or the Finnish data? Instead, they used bogus data.

And "they" continue to hide other data.

Of course I know the standard responses...I'm not a climate scientist so what do I know anything, Nature is "Dr. Jones Peer Reviewed", everyone else is paid by Exxon, blah blah blah.

Fact is that this issue is now beyond science and is being fought in the public forum. Anyone who would have the world cripple itself economically needs to be 150% above board with all their data and methods. No hiding behind anything. Anyone with a reasonable background in science should be able to take their models apart, thoroughly understand what they are doing and why and be able to replicate their work, from the friggen hunk of wood to the final graph. Hire more people to fulfill FOI request if that's what it takes.

If necessary, they should set aside a few months a year to do nothing but assist others in understanding their methods (never mind that if any other scientist had to help others replicate their work, it would be seen as a sign of fraud). Too important and busy to do that? Bullshit. Given what want everyone to do, they have an OBLIGATION to do that.

And lastly...I'm sorry but if the friggin tree ring data is not valid for assessing temperature after 1960, then it is not valid assessing temperature before 1960.

Re:Nice try

[Jeremy Erwin]

grep? grep only works if you know what you're looking for.

Re:Nice try

[DMiax]

$ grep "blatant data tampering" highly_incriminating_file.txt # because conspiracies store their misdeeds in plaintext

Re:Nice try

[cirby]

If one completely ignores any of the above data sets (whether they be direct measurements or proxies), there exist many disparate observations of global warming ranging from the rise in sea level which threatens various nations' lands ...which has been either minimal or non-detectable, as opposed to what the AGW fans have been telling us. Not exactly a good point.

to the melting of the arctic tundra ...which can only melt when it's man-caused global warming, instead of the sun-caused version which is probably what's been observed for the last half century?

to the loss of glaciation document global warming independently of these scientists' data.

Except that much of the "glaciation loss" is probably due to lowered precipitation instead of increased temperatures.

Correlation is not causation. Just because the globe got slightly warmer doesn't mean it was CO2-based AGW that did it.

You should also note that if you go back to the beginning of serious AGW science (during the late 1980s), most of their predictions have already been falsified. The globe should be at least a half-degree warmer than observed (check the "Hockey Stick" graph in its earlier incarnations), the oceans should be at least a foot deeper (up to five feet higher today, according to some predictions), and storms should be much, much more severe (they're not). None of these things have happened over the last twenty years, therefore THEY WERE WRONG.

On the other hand, many of the skeptics have been supporting the solar variation side of the theory of global climate change, and (surprise!) it matches up quite nicely to observed temperature changes, including the prediction of the stable/cooling trend in the last ten years.

Re:Nice try

[Cyberax]

You are repeating old denialists' crap.

Do you want me to find refutations for all of your talking points in 1 min. of Google search?

Re:Nice try

[Thomas Miconi]

I will, however, admit that the researchers should have noted the issues with the tree-ring data in question.

Good thing they did, then. Only ten years ago, mind you.

Seriously, this whole "climategate" debacle tends to run like this:

1- Deniers exhume some e-mail / piece of code which they don't understand, but assume is definite proof of evil scheming on the part of the great academic conspiracy ("Trick!" "Hide the decline!" OMGconspiracy send teh copz!!) .

2- Scientists post explanation, showing the deniers' allegations to be baseless (The "hidden" decline in tree ring growth was published a decade ago - see Nature link above; in this very publication, it was shown to diverge from the actual instrumental record after 1960; so for the post-1960 period we basically replace tree rings with the actual instrumental data, because we trust thermometers more than tree rings when the two fail to agree; we cited the relevant articles in the caption for the graph just to be sure).

3- Deniers completely ignore scientists' explanation, and keep fantasising about their glorious victory over evil scheming scientists. See GP for an illustration.

Rinse. Repeat.

To GP and all the folks who keep harping about this "VERY ARTIFICIAL" correction code: the code in question is a one-time code for temporarily re-calibrating the tree ring data. The reason, and the coefficients, are ultimately derived from the Nature article I linked to above. For an interesting hypothesis concerning the source of this code, see comment #147 and linked manuscript on this thread.

Re:Nice try

[toppavak]

Anyone who would have the world cripple itself economically

[Citation needed]
Amory Lovins, Paul Krugman and many, many, many others would disagree with you on that point.

Re:Nice try

[antibryce]

Jones, as documented quite clearly in the leaked emails, has apparently spent years avoiding FOIA requests, even suggesting he'd rather delete data than share it with AGW skeptics.

Sharing data with scientists who already agree with you isn't science. These guys have clearly abandoned science in favor of politics.

Re:Nice try

[Rockoon]

The researchers did not use certain tree ring data post 1960 because it was not properly calibrated to instrumental data.

This has nothing to do with the data being 'properly calibrated' and everything to do with the faulty assumption that ring width strong correlates with temperature, which is the assumption they use for pre-1960 data. They sold you another lie to explain the first, my friend.

Tree ring width correlates strongly with precipitation, not temperature. Plenty of REAL peer reviewed studies to back this up, along with validated experimental evidence (you know, that whole scientific method shit that Mann doesnt use)

Furthermore, many critics of Mann et al. have ignored the fact that this was a single line of data turning a blind eye to the numerous other data sets and proxies that support the same conclusions.

Which data sets are those? Seriously. Which? Show my a hockey stick that does not use Mann's or Briffa's data. Do it now.

Re:Nice try

[Anonymous Coward]

A real scientist would have investigated why the proxy failed to to reflect actual temperatures in recent times, and might have questioned if the methodology actually applied correctly to any time in the past.

Which is exactly what these guys did ten years ago. Answers: we don't know (trees are living beings, not thermometers), and yes it does.

Notice the "Briffa" name in the author list? And the "University of East Anglia" in the list of institutions? Reminds you of something?

Re:Nice try

[arcticinfantry]

Really? When you're objectively trying to find something such as a temperature signal it's common to fudge this way and that? BTW, the decline is *still* in that tree ring data, but is not being shown because when tree ring data supports a fudged temperature set, it's worth reporting to the IPCC. When it doesn't, there is some unknown force burying the AGW signal. Who are the denialists again?

Re:Nice try

[ptbarnett]

You are repeating old denialists' crap.

Do you want me to find refutations for all of your talking points in 1 min. of Google search?

Yes. Or STFU.

You didn't refute his assertions, you attacked him.

When are you going to learn that this kind of behavior is exactly why many people don't believe you?

Re:Nice try

[silentsteel]

The problem is that it is not "denialist's crap." I will not deny global warming for the same reasons that I will not agree with it. The scientific research that has been presented to me, coupled with the research I have done on my own confirms that we, as a population, have no clue what exactly is going on; therefore, we are just along for the ride on a planet that we happen to inhabit. Does this mean that we should not do what we can to take care of our "house"? No, it does not. It simply means that we are trying to solve a problem that may not even exist. Any speculation on what may have happened in the past is exactly that, speculation. All I can do, as an individual who respects the planet I live on, is take care of it because I should.

Re:Nice try

[Rockoon]

Does anyone really believe that a real attempt at fraud would be blatantly labeled in the code?

When they had no intention of ever releasing it to the public, yes I do.

Jones deleted code and data ON PURPOSE so that the public would never see it, and ASKED OTHERS to do the same. Thats all right there in the emails. There is no context to understand in THOSE emails. Jones also told others in emails not to worry about FOI requests because the man in charge, and I quote, "knows what to do."

He also said he would delete EVEN MORE stuff, rather than let McIntyre get his hands on it, in those emails. You want to know why? Because McIntyre has made a name for himself correcting these people. He's done it more than a few times, and on one occasion NASA ITSELF thanked McIntyre publicly for his careful attention to detail that caught Hansen's bad data.

..and prior to this event, several years back, there was an absent minded climate scientist (Mann) who put his data up on a public FTP because of a request by the Nature journal in response to mistakes found in his work, and one of the folders was named CENSORED DATA, and contained data that didnt fit with the theory. Specifically this data was on tree ring's correlation with temperature, proving that Mann had KNOWN that tree rings were not a good proxy of temperature, but instead of working on the problem of why tree rings dont correlate well with temperature.. he simply only kept datasets that didn't conflict with the theory that tree rings correlate with temperature. To this day, Mann is allowed to use this bullshit technique of selective data.

So yes.. I really do believe that these folks really didn't think that the public will ever see their code or data. They certainly made many extensive and coordinated efforts to prevent the public from seeing it.

Re:Nice try

[Troed]

... and yet they continued to publish a dataset which they knew didn't hold up to scrutiny.

Either the proxy isn't a good proxy, or the temperature record isn't a good record. You can have either, but not both.

No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, "grafted the thermometer record onto" any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum. - Michael Mann

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7810

Re:Nice try

[belthize]

Why would you prove that which is pretty much known to be false. The retreat was likely caused by the combination of substantially less plant mass and steady state volcanic activity which slowly rose CO2 levels. The rapid acceleration of melt off was aided by establishment of the thermohaline circulation which warmed the NW coast of Europe and the NW coast of North America.

Re:Nice try

[Gadget_Guy]

It's believed that the northern U.S. was covered in a 5,000 foot thick ice cap (some time in the last 100k years). It created the 5 Great Lakes.

You should rush out and tell a scientist. Maybe they didn't know that the temperature has changed before!

OK, I am being facetious, but I can never understand why people think that they have discovered something that climate scientists didn't know (or didn't want you to know). Yes, it has been hot before and it has been cold before. The problem today is the rate of change. It is getting hot very quickly in the global scheme of things.

Also, if Anthropogenic Global Warming were true, why hasn't recorded human history, vis-a-vis, the last 1,000 years or so, shown a consistent increase in global temperatures?

The population 1000 years ago was estimated to be 300 million. Over the next 800 years, it hadn't even increased to 1 billion. Then in the last 200 years it skyrocketed to 6.7 billion. Prior to 1800 the population increased by an average of 835,000 per year. After 1800 that grew to 27.5 million per year.

We also invented new ways to really pollute the planet like never before. If technology hadn't changed, we would be polluting the planet 21 times more than we were 1000 years ago. But now we also have coal power stations, aluminium smelters, street lights that light the world while we sleep and over 600 million cars.

With all this in mind, I really can't see how anyone can think that it is not possible that we are having an impact on the planet. We can deliberately go out of our way to change the landscape, alter the course of rivers, seed clouds to make it rain, convert deserts to farmland and make the Panama Canal. So why is not possible that we could also inadvertently alter the planet?

Finally, here is a question for all the deniers out there. If the engineering feat required today was to actually warm up the planet, how would we do it? I think that the best answer would be to do what were are already doing today.

Re:Nice try

[chill]

#2 doesn't hold water, scientifically.

If they're going to throw out the tree ring data, throw it ALL out, not just the part you don't like. If it is valid before 1960, it is valid after 1960. Grafting on thermometer data because it fits your desired conclusion is bad science, pure and simple.

Re:Nice try

[TapeCutter]

"Sharing data with scientists who already agree with you isn't science."

I don't defend his apparent attempt to thwart one of the 50 odd FOI request he has on his plate by requesting Mann delete some emails. However I do defend his commitment to opening up the data sources. The HADCrut data set has been available on the web to scientists, the general public, and psudeo-skeptics alike for years due mainly to his efforts. However I don't expect easily verifyable facts to stop uninformed wankers from being lead around by nose for fun and profit.

As the Nature editorial points out a small percentage of that set is still locked up by national governments such as France and is only available to researchers willing to fillout the red tape and wait months to get it, they are leaglly bound not to publish it!!! If not for the efforts of Jones 100% of the data would still be locked up with similar red tape.

I have no doubt as to the motives of the CEI and their ilk who continually bombard climate scientists with such requests while simultaneously running inumerable front sites for the FF industry (eg:icecap), and doing their very best to smear the reputations of leading climate scientists (eg: Mann, Schmidt).

Re:Nice try

[Doormouse]

From looking at the files, this does not seem to be true in all instances. Even if it was uncommented everywhere, we still would not know if it actually made it into published results. Sounds like a job for someone of audit and figure out what actually happened and how outraged to be realistically. I wonder if they have learned their lesson and will actually cooperate instedd of stonewall.

Re:Nice try

[TapeCutter]

The N20 componet of smog is indeed the "the third most important greenhouse gas" as claimed in the GP's informative post. Note that the arosols contained in smog also has a significant cooling effect but I don't think we want to give any encouragement to the coal industry to resume killing "large numbers" of people with pea soupers

Re:Nice try

[Stephan Schulz]

grep? grep only works if you know what you're looking for.

Exactly. I loved it when the "sceptics" started claiming widespread fraud at a time nobody could have read all the emails, let alone the rest of the data. The only way to find "incriminating" material this way is by grep or similar tools. Can somebody say confirmation bias?

I know my mailbox contains some things I would not have said in public - and I would dearly love to see some of the mail dumps from the Heartland Institute "scientists".

Re:Nice try

[TapeCutter]

"it's all over the place"

So lets have some examples. Or are you just another hand waving "skeptic"?

BTW: The single case you refer to has been explained numerous times as an attemp to DISPROVE a signal had been found. You seem unfamiliar with the concept of self-skepticisim so I can see how that might have escaped your notice. The fact remains that In the end the code was never used and the graph labeled VERY ARTIFICIAL was never published. I'm sure as hell that if I was fiddling data for a global conspiracy I would not put a label like that on the resulting graph, would you?

Re:Nice try

[DriedClexler]

I'm not demanding perfection. I'm saying that, as a minimal threshold for using a proxy for past data is that it should match our most solid data. When you're allowed to arbitrarily graft new data at arbitrary points to data sets, you can make any data say anything -- that's not what science is supposed to be.

Are there other proxies that meet this minimum threshold I described? Great. Use those. But you don't get to count these tree rings in question as additional, independent confirmation. That would be like saying, "We manipulated data set B to look like data set A, therefore we have two data sets validating the hypothesis." And it's that kind of information cascade that has allowed the CRU to be held as the gold standard that all the other data sets get adjusted to match, destroying the notion of independence of the data sets.

At best, this data is too unreliable to incorporate. At worst, it's showing that temperatures actually went down. But these scientists are so far off the scientific method that they think it's okay to tweak them to say whatever they want, and call any deviation from what they wanted to see, a "problem" that needs to be corrected.

Re:Nice try

[Alef]

If anything, this code tells me that whoever wrote it was very careful not to use bad data. Why else would you mark the modification with a three line comment with big letters and double exclamation marks pointing out that the following lines are artificial? The only time I write comments like that is when I want to make sure nobody accidentally compiles the code with it still in there.

This is the opposite of what I would expect from someone in a conspiracy.

Re:Nice try

[sycodon]

So if you search for "insert fake data here" and you then find it, that's some kind of bias?

OOOkkkkaayyyy.

Re:Nice try

[TapeCutter]

"The real smoking gun.."

Please study the propoganda you have been fed more carefully, it's not a smoking gun, it's a smoking iceberg.

Re:Nice try

[MindlessAutomata]

And first most important greenhouse gas is water vapor. Regardless of the truth of AGW, it is not immediately obvious that smog in cities indicates or leads to a significant effect in the atmosphere. I believe in AGW but let's not claim the climate science is easy to understand or obvious. 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.

Re:Nice try

[Lars T.]

So what happens when you don't use any tree-ring proxies? Yup, you still get the "Hockeystick" - because we have fucking Global Warming. I wonder why Steve "Bad Math" McIntyre doesn't mention that, even when it's plain visible in what he calls the 'WMO diagram without "Mike's Nature trick" ' which "I think the graph speaks for itself, see especially "Keith's series" (green)." - Gee, Stevie, look at the fucking graph that speaks for itself: note the Hockeystick that is still there?

Re:Nice try

[Steve Franklin]

Ah, a logical person. And on Slashdot no less!

What all of this "data" leaves out is the tree-ring minima and ice core acidity peaks that, when integrated with other regional and global climatological events stretching back, at the very least, to 4375 BCE, present a picture of some kind of cyclical, apparently cosmically induced climate cycle. The current period of this cycle is just over 105 years, so any theory that doesn't take into account our position in this cycle--101 out of 105 years (2009-1908)--is suspect. 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.

Re:Nice try

[Rising Ape]

If it is valid before 1960, it is valid after 1960.

Not if there's some environmental factor skewing the results that's significant after 1960 but not before it.

Re:Nice try

[Rising Ape]

Except that legitimate scientists don't pester for data via legal force, such as FoI requests. They may request it, or not believe results if it's not provided, but the fact that they're resorting to such means suggests bad intent.

Using the force of law to conduct science? Not legitimate in my book.

Re:Nice try

[HertzaHaeon]

Which data sets are those? Seriously. Which? Show my a hockey stick that does not use Mann's or Briffa's data. Do it now.

This straw man is old and has been debunked so often it's silly. Realclimate deals with it on their page Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick":

Paleoclimate evidence is simply one in a number of independent lines of evidence indicating the strong likelihood that human influences on climate play a dominant role in the observed 20th century warming of the earth’s surface.

Nearly a dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature by different groups all suggest that late 20th century warmth is anomalous in a long-term (multi-century to millennial) context (see Figures 1 and 2 in “Temperature Variations in Past Centuries and The So-Called ‘Hockey Stick’”).

Mann et al produced an updated paper in 2008 using a more diverse and larger dataset, showing that recent increases in northern hemisphere surface temperature are anomalous relative to at least the past 1300 years.

You didn't seriously think all of climate science hinged on one study, did you?

Re:Nice try

[Dobeln]

"Finally, here is a question for all the deniers out there. If the engineering feat required today was to actually warm up the planet, how would we do it? I think that the best answer would be to do what were are already doing today."

Depends on the feedback mechanisms between CO2 and the really potent greenhouse gasses. Which it is now very clear that the researchers in question haven't got a very good handle on.

Finally, about the term "denier" - this little "trick" (sorry) to tie a broad range of "unacceptable" opinions to holocaust denial, etc. is a departure from good science, which is not supposed to be conducted through invective and ostracism against differing viewpoints, etc.

That the AGW club have taken the right to depart from this, in order to behave as assholes when silencing non-conformist voices places an immense burden on them to follow the most stringent scientific protocol imaginable.

I think it's pretty clear by now that they fail to live up even to that standard.

Re:Nice try

[coastwalker]

Greed as usual defines what we will support. But hang on a minute, in the west we have become blind to the economic model we live with. Producing something has become so cheap that it comprises less than 20% of what you as a consumer end up paying for it. If protecting the life of your offspring is going to increase the fundamental cost of a thing by 5% for a couple of decades then I think we should be looking at that 80% of the cost of a product to find the savings to pay for the change. Ask yourself if the way our businesses operate today that they cant find 5% of their methods to save the planet and the story looks different. All it requires is that we invest in new technology instead of sticking with old models of business rather faster than the old busineses would like. Can I put up with a 5% decrease in my pension when the recent collapse of the world economic system has reduced my pension by 50%? What planet are you people living on if you belive that existing business models are going to look after you after they have so resoundingly failed us? We can fix the planet at almost no personal cost and you hold out against it because you trust the bankers and their failed economic system, the data says you are crazy. Lets start a new boom based on climate change technology, wake up and stop listening to those who have failed us.

Re:Nice try

[bheerssen]

It is true that water vapor is the strongest greenhouse gas. However, that's certainly not the entire story. It is also true that it is carbon dioxide that is upsetting the balance in the Earth's ability to regulate itself. As humans pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while simultaneously cutting down huge swaths of forest (and thereby harming the Earth's ability to scrub carbon dioxide), the Earth's ability to cool itself is significantly reduced. As this process accelerates, the ice caps melt, releasing more water vapor into the atmosphere via evaporation, further compounding the effect caused by unregulated carbon dioxide emissions.

This all adds up to an accelerating snowball effect that by the end of the century could see average global temperatures increase by six degrees Celsius. That means no more year-round snow and ice on the polar ice caps, sea levels meters above "normal" and a whole host of problems for flora and fauna (us) alike. The science is in, and the denialists are endagering us all.

This is a classic case of Pascal's Wager, except that in this case it is actually a good argument. If we do nothing and anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real, we risk the end of civilization as we know it. If we take aggressive action and AGW turns out to be hogwash, then we'll have taken long steps toward cleaning up our environment: a net positive for many reasons unrelated to AGW, including reduced loss of habitat, healthier oceans (and fisheries), and fewer pollutants in our food and water. Why some people insist that we should continue to rape our planet as we've always done seems, in this light, grossly irresponsible and short-sighted.

I should add that AGW denialists are in the same camp as creationists because they willfully disbelieve science they do not understand so that they can rationalize closely held, pig-headed beliefs which only serve to preserve the status quo. Change is often hard and uncomfortable; even costly. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't embrace it. Read some ACTUAL science instead of letting people with an agenda spoon-feed you lies.

Re:Nice try

[Blakey Rat]

Flash!

Website written by Mann supports Mann's theories!

Full story at 11:00!

Re:Nice try

[HertzaHaeon]

If you had bothered to read my links you'd see that Mann refers to other such studies.

Again, do you seriously think that all of climate science hinges of this one study?

Re:Nice try

[antibryce]

Jones suggested deleting data (not emails, actually temp data) rather than share it:

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=490&filename=1107454306.txt

The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear
there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than
send to anyone.

So before filing FOI requests it sounds like they were making requests through normal channels. Of course I'm sure Jones was only joking about deleting the data before he would share it, right? Note that Jones also makes numerous references to "hiding" behind various things (non-publishing agreements, data secrecy acts, etc.) This is hardly the acts of someone who loves to share data.

Also note that the data he was "sharing" is his already "adjusted" numbers. Yes there are perfectly valid reasons to adjust data, however the CRU kept no record (apparently) of how or why the numbers were adjusted. Now they say the raw data was thrown out in the 80's (even though they were discussing how to keep it hidden as recently as this summer.)

Whether you agree or disagree with the whole AGW thing, the fact is these guys were not conducting science so much as politics. Anyone looking at this who loves science and believes fully in the peer-review process should be disgusted by what these guys were up to. We essentially have a giant table of numbers they created and their word that nothing is wrong and we should believe them. That's not science.

Re:Nice try

[toppavak]

I do support nuclear, very strongly in fact. The way its being done in the US currently is retarded however. American utilities have taken a very short-term view on project pay-back and cite $7,500 + per-kW prices on new reactors and outlandish per-kWh costs to customers (Lovins has a piece denouncing nuclear because of this, but he doesn't take into consideration that its been done much cheaper elsewhere). Compare that to new reactors being built in India of both Indian and Russian design and its almost shameful. Two Russian 1MW reactors are going up in southern India at a total project cost of around $4 Billion. This is extremely competitive with other alternative energy sources and has the advantage of reliable, predictable and clean power output. By comparison a recent proposal for a 2.7MW plant near Houston reached something to the tune of a $17 Billion initial costing with the manufacturer refusing to commit to any price leaving the door open for massive cost overruns. The NCPIL (Nuclear power corporation of India Limited) by contrast has done amazing work in bringing new nuclear power stations ranging from 220 MW to 2GW online while being very profitable and maintaining forward-thinking policies on nuclear waste recycling through the construction of fast breeder reactors to produce and burn plutonium.

Re:Nice try

[Rockoon]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.clientsize.aspx

No he doesnt. He just claims to. Examine what he cites.

His first citation (myth #0) is to an IPCC Assessment Report. As you may or may not know, the IPCC does not do peer reviewed studies. The IPCC produces what are called Assessment Reports where they cite peer reviewed studies. In this case, they cite Mann.

His second citation (myth #1) links to his own site, again, and that page cites himself.

His third citation (myth #2) links to a hit piece attacking the messanger.
His fourth citation (also myth #2) links to very unhockey-like stuff.

His fifth and sixth citations (myth #3) links to his own site again.

This goes on and on.

One last time. Care to cite an independent study (one that does not use Mann's or Briffa's data) that produces a hockey sticks? Can you actually do that?

Re:Nice try

[HertzaHaeon]

Yes and yes (yes, Realclimate again, but try clicking the links and reading this time).

If you did read the links, you'd see that Mann refers to "dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature by different groups". And that was in in 2005. Do your homework.

I guess this means you seriously do think that all of climate science hinges on one single study.

Re:Nice try

[yndrd1984]

I liked your post, it was passionate and articulate, except for this bit of drivel you stuck in there:

This is a classic case of Pascal's Wager, except that in this case it is actually a good argument.

Pascal's wager is never a good argument. It's still a false dichotomy, and even without the usual issue of whether a person can simply choose to change their beliefs (like the original version), it allows the one proposing the wager to set up outcomes favorable to them while ignoring other possibilities.

If we do nothing and anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real, we risk the end of civilization as we know it.

Even if AGW is completely real, it may be more mild that we expect and turn out to be a mere nuisance. Or it may be easy to geoengineer global cooling 60 years from now. Or it might be fairly cheap to build levees around cities, move and rebuild other bit of civilization, ect. Or there may be some other solution that I haven't thought of, or even that nobody has thought of yet.

If we take aggressive action and AGW turns out to be hogwash, then we'll have taken long steps toward cleaning up our environment: a net positive for many reasons unrelated to AGW, including reduced loss of habitat, healthier oceans (and fisheries), and fewer pollutants in our food and water.

If AGW isn't real, and we take aggressive action, we will have wasted trillions that could have been spent on cleaning up real pollution more effectively. And millions die in third-world nations because they aren't allowed to use their fossil fuels to industrialize. And dictators use the threat of AGW to get other countries to give them nuclear tech, which they use to make weapons. And many other things that could possibly go wrong.

Re:Nice try

[Rising Ape]

If they don't publish enough data to support their research, you can say "I don't believe your result" - and in fact journals do require you to publish enough detail and background before they'll accept your paper. If you don't provide enough detail for someone to be able to reproduce your result, your paper will (well, should) be rejected.

Replication of a result means independent replication, not necessarily using the same data or software. A lot of people here seem confused on this point - scientific results are not dependent on the person who did them, so they should be reproducible without resort to the original work.

Occasionally there are some where there simply is no way of getting equivalent data, e.g. if your result depends on some observation of an astronomical event which only you recorded, but that doesn't seem to apply here. Someone else could do the same thing as the CRU team did. Given the importance of the result, this has most likely been done a long time ago. I haven't checked, but that would be typical of an important result - it's rarely the sole example for long.

Re:Nice try

[Rockoon]

Yes and yes (yes, Realclimate again, but try clicking the links and reading this time).

I click on them, and then I actually read them.

#1 cites Mann. Thats right, its cites Mann. Do you even comprehend the stupidity of using Mann to validate Mann? Why do you keep doing it.

#2 shows a graph, with something similar to Mann's stick produced by Oerlemans, Moberg, and Esper. Before I roast your citation, I am going to point out that Moberg has co-authored at least 8 papers with Jones. Now on with the show.

This is the RealClimate version of Oerlemans graph.
But this is NASA's version of the graph. AND THEY PROVIDE THE ACTUAL DATA

Why doesnt Mann's version of the graph (hosted by Mann and used in defense of Mann) look anything like NASA's version(hosted by NASA and used to illustrate whats in the paper?)

You really are a sucker.

Re:Nice try

[Ambitwistor]

The graph was not a demonstration of the skill of their method, it was the cover graph for a report for policymakers. Their actual scientific publications show the proxy record directly. And they did not ignore the discrepancy between the two time series. The "divergence problem" is well known, well cited, and frequently discussed among dendroclimatologists. There are some reasons to believe that trees are now responding to non-climatic human influences which they previously were not subject to, such as changes in atmospheric aerosol loading, CO2 content, and pH of precipitation in some locations. You can debate whether these causes are legitimate or not, but in a graph for policymakers it's not inappropriate to drop the data where you suspect it's contaminated and switch to data you think is more trustworthy. Again, their actual publications indicate the decline which is the whole basis for the divergence problem literature in the first place. It's not like this is some huge secret that nobody knew about or the authors refused to acknowledge.

Re:Nice try

[Thomas Miconi]

If one completely ignores any of the above data sets (whether they be direct measurements or proxies), there exist many disparate observations of global warming ranging from the rise in sea level which threatens various nations' lands ...which has been either minimal or non-detectable, as opposed to what the AGW fans have been telling us. Not exactly a good point.

Sea level changes from 1970 to 2009, compared with IPCC predictions. (from the Copenhagen Diagnosis, via Tim Lambert on Scienceblogs).

You should also note that if you go back to the beginning of serious AGW science (during the late 1980s), most of their predictions have already been falsified. The globe should be at least a half-degree warmer than observed (check the "Hockey Stick" graph in its earlier incarnations), the oceans should be at least a foot deeper (up to five feet higher today, according to some predictions), and storms should be much, much more severe (they're not). None of these things have happened over the last twenty years, therefore THEY WERE WRONG.

Let us assume that what you say is true. You are basically telling us that we should dismiss climate change research, because (according to you) some of the early papers got it wrong. Can you see the problem with your "reasoning"?

Re:Nice try

[Sparky McGruff]

And lastly...I'm sorry but if the friggin tree ring data is not valid for assessing temperature after 1960, then it is not valid assessing temperature before 1960.

There's about a million possible reasons why tree-ring observations don't seem to work for relatively recent data. It's possible that newly formed tree rings change somewhat in the 30 or 40 years after they are initially formed until they reach a "stable" form. It's possible that the substantial increases in CO2 in the atmosphere in recent years has altered the way that tree rings form.

All measurement methods have their anomalies. MRI scans are a great way to look at the structure of the brain, but they have substantial distortions, that change from machine to machine. Some of these have to do with the type of machine, and some distortions are due to things like the earth's magnetic field or the building that houses the machine. Those have to be corrected for, and it's standard practice. And, scans of young children don't give the same results, because the brain structures haven't matured, so it's difficult if not impossible to distinguish many brain structures. That doesn't mean it's not a useful method, but one does need to keep the limitations and difficulties of each measuring methodology in mind.

There are very accurate temperature measurements recorded for many places dating back to the late 1700s, recorded using a thermometer. If the tree rings for those areas match very well for the 150 years prior to 1960, but begin to diverge after that, it wouldn't be that outrageous to suggest that the inability to use them as a measurement proxy for recent times is just a limitation of the system.

It would be nice to have perfect measurements for everything. However, for those of us in the real world, all measurements have errors and limitations, and we have to adapt for these. Simply dumping uncorrected, uncalibrated, or inaccurate measurements into the pool of data does not make things clearer.

Re:Nice try

[luzr]

OK. Basically: We do not know why tree rings do not match temperatures in last 30 years, but we are sure they did 1000 years ago.

Sorry, but I do not buy that. Call me denier.

Re:Nice try

[Rising Ape]

A: "Behold, I have arrived at a shocking result which I have published in this paper!"
B: "How did you do it?"
A: "I won't tell you. You'll have to guess."

Papers have to include a description of how the conclusions were arrived at. That's why "conclusions" is only the last section of a paper, not the whole thing. The principle is that someone can read the paper, go off and do an equivalent experiment of their own and obtain the same result.

The actual raw data doesn't matter. What does you gain by having it? If the result is really revolutionary, people will be rushing to try to independently reproduce it and get a paper of their own. If it can't be reproduced despite much effort, the original paper doesn't look credible.

Re:Nice try

[Rising Ape]

No, it's not flawed. You can't just *assume* that the factor didn't matter before 1960, but it's certainly possible, and if you can provide evidence to support that, what's wrong with it?

I was responding to the statement "If it is valid before 1960, it is valid after 1960".

Re:Nice try

[mpe]

Anyone with a reasonable background in science should be able to take their models apart, thoroughly understand what they are doing and why and be able to replicate their work, from the friggen hunk of wood to the final graph.

Instead people are looking at their models and trying not to laugh.

Re:Nice try

[TapeCutter]

I have no idea wether he was joking or not. What is important is not what he said, but how he acted.

Re:Nice try

[chrb]

North America was covered by an ice sheet until about 10,000 years ago.

Strawman argument. Nobody is denying that there have been ice ages in the past. And ice in the last glacial period didn't cover all of North America, just parts of it - have you even read the article you link to? "ice covered most of Canada, the Upper Midwest, and New England, as well as parts of Montana and Washington".

That Mars is suffering "climate change" too.

Ah, that old chestnut. Climate myths: Mars and Pluto are warming too

Re:Nice try

[Citizen of Earth]

You are basically telling us that we should dismiss climate change research, because (according to you) some of the early papers got it wrong.

Perhaps he is saying that we should defer committing trillions of dollars to science that has proven to be this poorly done.

Re:Nice try

[chrb]

The United States National Academy of Science investigated the "Hockey Stick" and found it to be valid. Their report states:

"The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world". (see Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong)

Or do you believe that the U.S. National Academy of Science is also taking part in this supposed global conspiracy?

Re:Nice try

[mrsalty]

I look at the graph on the Realclimate page and see the line labeled "Oerlemans-2005" showing a roughly .2 degree increase and the "instuments Data" showing around a .7 degree increase. The NASA graphs show temperature ranges between -.2 and +.4 degree changes with the "Tglobal" coming in at about .2 degree increase. Sure a ,5 degree difference is pretty big, but since, as you say, the Realclimate graph does not provide the data, can we even be sure that they are using the same data sets? This is only a "smoking gun" if they are using the same data. If it is from different sets then all you have here are different graphs of different data.

Re:Nice try

[HertzaHaeon]

You asked for other sources, and you got them. In reply to your question, yes, there does exist other studies.

I repeat; do you seriously think all of climate science hinges on one single study?

#1 cites Mann, yes, but not only Mann.

As other have pointed out already, there's no reason to see a conspiracy because you percieve a difference between these two graphs. Do they use the same datasets and the same reconstructions?

Harsh personal remarks from climate scientists apparently disqualifies them by denialist logic. I guess that logic only applies one way?

Re:Nice try

[Lars T.]

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MobergEtAl2005.pdf - so now cite a peer-reviewed paper saying the MPW was warmer than today. Not warmer than in the 70s, but today.

Re:Nice try

[Paradigma11]

No, what you do is you look if there is a systematic bias between the different measurements and assign a higher uncertainty to the tree ring data before 1960. Otherwise every new and more accurate instrument would make all previous data obsolete and you would never be able to do long term studies.

Re:Nice try

[silburnl]

Right, so the reasonable inference would be "this proxy can't event match the temperatures we know for sure -- it's no good, throw it out entirely".

The proxy *may* be fundamentally flawed and the modern divergence from instrumental records *may* be a clue to that flaw, but you do not know that.

What you do know (if you were Keith Briffa, rather than some guy on the internet second guessing him over a decade later) is that the site was carefully selected so that the growth of trees there would be temperature constrained, that the proxy matches well to instrumental temperature records prior to the divergence point, that outside the instrumental era it matches well to other proxy reconstructions going back for hundreds or thousands of years and that these other proxies *do not* diverge with modern instrumental temperatures in the way that this proxy does.

So a reasonable conclusion is that there is a confounding factor which has superceded temperature as the limiting factor on tree growth from 1960 onwards.

Now it's possible that the confounding factor is one that is 'naturally occurring' and thus could have polluted the record at random intervals going back throughout the entire duration of the data series rendering it useless as a proxy, but if that were the case you would expect to see declines in this proxy which don't match other proxies (unless those other proxies are also affected, but then that begs the quesion why aren't these other proxies affected today?).

A more parsimonious explanation is that the confounding factor is modern in origin and that the data series is perfectly fine as a proxy up until the modern era. Given that we know that modern industrial civilisation has had massive impacts upon the biosphere, the idea that there is something about the modern world that has hit these trees in the last few decades and rendered them useless as proxy thermometers isn't especially outrageous.

But what do you do whilst you try to figure out what the confounding factor might be? Do you sit on the data even though you have good reason to believe that it's OK prior to 1960? Or do you publish it with appropriate caveats and warnings?

Keith Briffa took the second approach and I, for one, think that it was both eminently reasonable and the scientifically proper thing for him to have done.

Regards
Luke

Re:Nice try

[Flambergius]

You're wrong about the poor science part too, but I want to address the real issue.

There's no "let's wait and see" option. We committing those trillions of dollars right now to making things worse very fast. That's the reason for the urgency.

Re:Nice try

[Ambitwistor]

The article merely repeats the same claims as the original poster, and so does not constitute a refutation of my response.

The fact remains, the divergence problem is not some secret that is being hidden. It is cited and discussed by these very authors (e.g., by Briffa at least back to 1998). As I said, you may disagree with their interpretation of the divergence problem (namely, that it's a non-climatic artifact that only affects recent reconstructions), but you can't claim that they pretended it didn't exist. And, as I said, you can find the actual tree ring series unblended with instrumental data in their journal publications (e.g., Briffa again in 2000, with further discussion of the divergence). Finally, as I said, it is not "fraud" to either truncate the series where you don't believe it's accurate nor to substitute data you believe is more accurate in place of the inaccurate data.

Re:Nice try

[Ambitwistor]

Pay attention. I already read the American Thinker article you linked previously. As I said in my very first response to you, it does not actually refute anything I've said. You have not "falsified" anything in my post.

I said that in the policy document they combined the proxy and instrumental time series into one synthesis time series, which they did. You have merely reaffirmed this statement of mine, rather than "falsified" it. You then claimed they are "fraudulently" hiding the fact that the series declines, I in turn said that they explicitly discuss the decline in their scientific papers and their reasons for dropping it, and so on. Perhaps you'd like to refresh your memory of the thread before making such statements.

I know you have some emotional need to think that there has been "fraud" proven here, but mindlessly parroting poorly-argued websites that you do not yourself appear to understand does not help to make your case.

Same with newscientist

[Idiomatick]

Same with newscientist
I imagine all scientific journals will be quite clear on this point. A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research.

Re:Same with newscientist

[glueball]

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.

Re:Same with newscientist

[Wonko the Sane]

A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research.

If data that all those millions of man-hours of research is based on is bogus then the conclusions are worthless.

Re:Same with newscientist

[hcpxvi]

Both the Nature article mentioned in the summary and the NS article linked by Idiomatick are clear and sensible articles and well worth a read. I do not, of course, hold out any hope that they will prevent the oil company shills and SUV drivers from baying for blood.

Re:Same with newscientist

[mikechant]

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?

Re:Same with newscientist

[aurispector]

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.

Re:Same with newscientist

[TapeCutter]

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.

Re:Same with newscientist

[argStyopa]

"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?'.

Re:Same with newscientist

[khallow]

From what I gather, the sources may be independent, but there are a few middle men that this data has to go through simply because it has to be normalized with other data. One of the most important of these middle men (who as far as I can tell controls significant aggregates of historical data) has been shown to engage in systemic and unscientific bias. Further, this group has significant connections to the IPCC working groups. Similar biases have been found against the other major groups (NOAA and NASA related groups in the US).

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).

Re:Same with newscientist

[qmaqdk]

Why would it be lucky, since what you posted simply isn't true?

Your post isn't true.

Argument ad infinitum.

Re:Same with newscientist

[limaxray]

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.

Re:Same with newscientist

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:Same with newscientist

[tiqui]

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

Re:Same with newscientist

[Attila Dimedici]

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.

Re:Same with newscientist

[khallow]

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.

re:A few suspect emails do not destroy millions...

[Anonymous Coward]

"A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research."

Never mind the quality, feel the weight.

Nice explanation in potholer54's video

[sucker_muts]

This video explains quite clearly how these leaks and the reactions on it should be placed in their correct context:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg

Re:Nice explanation in potholer54's video

[Jeremy Erwin]

How do you people find the time to watch silly videos? Is there an accurate transcript? With still images? Perhaps a normal web page?

With all the moeny invested

[Blappo]

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.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

I would compare it more to 9/11, the artificial choice of it's all a conspiracy or there is nothing to see move along. Instead of there are a lot of facts we don't want you to know so please don't look any deeper.

Same thing, "Oh, the EMAILS!". The emails, it's all about the email and a conspiracy! Either you support global warming or your a conspiracy nutter tin-foil hat and all. When really it is the fact that while global climate change is a reality, it is also being used to support an agenda.

The most telling word in the whole article:

[funwithBSD]

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.

Re:The most telling word in the whole article:

[bhima]

I find it fascinating that denailists like yourself express wild fantasies with religious overtones when complaining about science. I also find it interesting how you are so willing to assert conspiracies of gigantic proportions to explain consensus in the scientific community. It's pretty pathetic to see people so divorced from reality.

Re:The most telling word in the whole article:

[Anonymous Coward]

There comes a point where the scientific evidence in support of a theory is so overwhelming that those who deny its truth are either ignorant or denialists.

We don't take HIV/AIDS denialism seriously, we don't take tobacco/lung cancer denialists seriously, we don't take moon landing conspiracy theorists seriously, we don't take young earth creationists seriously. While there is some uncertainty in the ultimate extent of climate change (as with any scientific prediction), the fundamentals (i.e. radiative forcing due to CO2, the fact that we are responsible for recent increases in CO2, the fact that feedback mechanisms exist which enhance our climate sensitivity) are very well understood, and multiple independent measurements of the temperature confirm that the earth is indeed heating at a statistically significant rate.

It's actually funny watching the denialists backtrack further and further at each step that they are debunked. Carbon dioxide levels haven't increased. Okay, they have increased, but humans aren't responsible. Okay, we are responsible, but temperatures haven't increased as a result. Okay, temperatures are increasing, carbon dioxide levels are increasing, and we are responsible for it, but Glenn Beck tells me it's a conspiracy by Obama to introduce a global socialist government. Okay, these conspiracy theories are a little nutty - what's the problem with global warming? We should embrace it. Okay, maybe we shouldn't embrace it, but it's too hard to stop it. Let's give up.

For those who understand the science, there is no doubt in the fact that man is contributing to increases in the global temperature. For everyone else, there's always Fox News.

Honestly, I expected better from Slashdot. Most here seem to have taken the conspiracy theorist nonsense hook, line and sinker.

Re:The most telling word in the whole article:

[Flambergius]

"must stand up to rigorous scientific questioning" - true, indeed. The problem is that Global Warming has done so convincingly several times over and still some people refuse to bulge. Hence, denialists.

If this was an ordinary scientific issue it really wouldn't matter: graduate students tend to avoid bad scientists and so denialists die out. Unfortunately, this is not a ordinary scientific issue, but one that begets an extremely important current policy issue; one that may require all sorts of weird things, like actual global governance. I, personally, would very much prefer if the lunatics would shut up and let the rest of us get on to figure out what to do.

The dog that did not bark

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Everyone seems to be focused on what is found in the emails and what is significant and what is not etc. But just look at what is NOT there. For years the skeptics side has been alleging a conspiracy, funded by communists, socialists, George Soros, Al Gore... Some global anti-American organization slyly orchestrating a campaign to emasculate America!

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.

Re:The dog that did not bark

[pitchpipe]

The people who are trying to sow FUD against AGW know that it doesn't matter what was actually in those emails. What matters is the accusations that they can hurl about without anyone really challenging them.

We thought that the media had grown a pair of proverbial balls after the Bush fiasco, but we were wrong. It almost seems to be going in the wrong direction, where they are less challenging than they were before for fear of *not* getting that interview.

Re:The dog that did not bark

[JackDW]

Yet, there are some scientists who end up seeing things that aren't there.

An example from recent times is Benveniste and his "memory of water" results. Benveniste had become convinced that he and his team had discovered compelling evidence for a real, measurable mechanism behind homeopathy (other than the placebo effect). He had gathered plenty of data to support his hypothesis that water had "memory", and Nature agreed to publish his paper if the science could be verified independently. Benveniste was forced to open his lab and his methods to investigation, and eventually James Randi (for it was he) discovered that bias was being introduced into the experiments because the researchers knew which water samples were supposed to have "memory". With double-blind testing, the evidence for "memory" vanished into the statistical noise.

This is firstly an example of the scientific method working correctly. An extraordinary claim is made, independently tested, and found to be either true or (in this case) false. But, more importantly, it is an example of the scientific method failing spectacularly for Benveniste: a scientist who managed to fool himself. Pons and Fleischmann, the "inventors of cold fusion", are also good examples. Robert Park, author of "Voodoo Science", has filled an entire book with examples like this.

Generally, these people did not intend to mislead. Instead, they fooled themselves. No conspiracy, just humanity.

When I say I am skeptical about AGW, it is because I suspect that climate scientists may also have been fooling themselves. The evidence they present seems (to me) to be very noisy, and I think there may be some degree of "seeing what you expect to see" in the data. Because they have deliberately sought to shut out independent investigators who might have identified problems in the experiments and models, this problem has not been addressed. They may be right about AGW, they may not, but in either case they have not given the impression of sticking to the proper scientific process. Given the massive importance of this issue, and the extraordinary claims that have been made, I feel that extraordinary evidence is warranted. I do not think this makes me a "denialist". I think this makes me a skeptic: someone unwilling to assume that things are true, just because an authority figure says they are.

It makes me very sad to see that Nature is not raising these points and instead brushing them aside.

How they acted?

[ryanduff]

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.

Re:How they acted?

[gEvil (beta)]

If AGW was actually happening, there would be no need to "adjust" numbers and likewise no need to cover up the leaked emails.

So normalization of data should never happen, no matter what? Have you ever taken even the most basic of statistics classes?

This is the problem with the whole argument right here. You have people that don't have the first clue what they're talking about telling people how they're supposed to do their job.

Re:How they acted?

[Gadget_Guy]

If AGW was actually happening, there would be no need to "adjust" numbers and likewise no need to cover up the leaked emails

Here in the southern hemisphere we have just started our summer. According to my measurements, it is hotter now than it was six months ago. As you say, there is no need to adjust any numbers, so this means we have proof of global warming.

But seriously, there are plenty of reasons why you might need to adjust some data. New measuring equipment (from alternative manufacturers), procedural changes meaning measurements are taken at different times of the day or even a different place. An organisation might stop measuring a particular reading and you have to go to another source.

Remember, these measurements have been taken over many decades through different political administrations, through budget cuts, and through technology changes. Even the reasons for taking a certain measurement might change over time, resulting in new methodologies for data collection.

This is not just one big experiment. This is a series of thousands of different scientific endeavours all coming together. There will have to be a normalisation process involved.

Re:How they acted?

[nadaou]

This is the problem with the whole argument right here. You have people that don't have the first clue what they're talking about telling people how they're supposed to do their job.

"Welcome to Slashdot, you must be new here."

(usually I find the whole meme thing as tired as any old dumb joke, but in this case it seems rather apt)

Smart but insecure mostly-guys attacking true experts in a broken effort to raise their own status among their peer group. It's the old young-gun-figher's
or little-man's syndrome & certainly nothing new here... Well, it's better than the usual method of attacking the weak to show how strong you are.

Those that want to be bamboozled...

[mbone]

... will be bamboozled. There is nothing new in that. It lies behind all political folly.

The data that was adjusted was paleoclimate data, and what it was being adjusted to was temperature data (i.e., the more reliable modern temperature data). As far as I can tell, they neither could nor did adjust the measured temperature data.

The OP did not quote the really important part of the Nature piece :

Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

The evidence for this is literally all around us. Throw all of the CRU data out if you want. It won't change a thing.

Re:Almost

[mrsquid0]

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.

Oh, come on.

[Grendel Drago]

The "VERY ARTIFICIAL correction" you describe is never actually used. It's commented out. You can plot that array, but I'm not sure what you think you're demonstrating.

Re:Oh, come on.

[mi]

On that same blog you link to, there is an "Update": Read the comments below. It's been pointed out to me that there's a later version of code in the archive in which similar correction code is not commented out. Details and link below.

Re:Oh, come on.

[mrsquid0]

Which version was used to produce the plot that is in the Nature paper? It is easy enough to tell by looking at the Nature paper. Hint, the plot in the paper does not have this correction applied.

Re:Oh, come on.

[mrsquid0]

It is not a matter of trust. It is a matter of learning to read IDL code (which is not that hard) and comparing the plotting commands to the published plot.

As for the "hopeless state" comment, that sounds quite plausible, and it is fully consistent with the way the code appears to have been use to experiment with various ways of correcting the data for the various problems in the data. This sort of thing goes on all the time. It is called experimentation, and it is the way that science is done. In real life things do not wok like they do on CSI.

Re:Data thrown away

[niiler]

Here's a small portion of the data which is opensource: (see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/#Climate_data_raw)

• GHCN v.2 (Global Historical Climate Network: weather station records from around the world, temperature and precipitation)
• USHCN US. Historical Climate Network (v.1 and v.2)
• Antarctic weather stations
• European weather stations (ECA)
• Satellite feeds (AMSU, SORCE (Solar irradiance), NASA A-train)
• Tide Gauges (Proudman Oceanographic Lab)
• World Glacier Monitoring Service
• Argo float data
• International Comprehensive Ocean/Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) (Oceanic in situ observations)
• AERONET Aerosol information

You can follow the original link to realclimate.org to find many other links to data sources. I have posted the data sources above only because many critics of AGW won't even bother with realclimate.org as they are thought to be part of the conspiracy. The data exists and is public as is the source code.

Re:Peer-reviewed journal?

[BlueParrot]

Is that a journal where the hockey team review each others papers anonymously? No surprise that they won't investigate anything.

Dude, you're not just talking about any journal here. You're talking about THE journal for the physical sciences. This journal has more than a century of scientific reporting as testament to its quality. It predates the Nobel price. It predates the work of Einstein and Schrödinger. Interestingly though it is not older than the discovery of the atmospheric greenhouse effect, which was first described by Fourier in 1824.

Just to give you a clue what you're actually implying in your post...

Re:Peer-reviewed journal?

[schon]

Is that a journal where the hockey team review each others papers anonymously?

No, it's a scientific journal. They don't write about sports.

No surprise that they won't investigate anything.

If you read the article and summary, you'll discover that they did investigate, and found nothing wrong.

Perhaps you should brush up on your reading comprehension skills. Learning a bit about the scientific method would help too.

Re:Indirection, folks

[belthize]

Two points.

1) That paper is nearly a year old so the logic that "Now finally counter arguments can be heard" seems a bit specious.

2) That paper is a complete crock of unrefereed shit. I read 92-94 which are the conclusions and was so confused I went and read the earlier portions. There are numerous fallacies in their assumptions and they get some pretty fundamental thermo issues flat wrong.

      If you'd like to read physicists (not climatologist) opinion of the paper go here:
http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-300667.html

Worst case

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Worst case

[Attila Dimedici]

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)

4) they arranged to have a journal editor fired for publishing a peer reviewed article that questioned conclusions reached by AGW promoters.

Re:Worst case

[khallow]

1) they're guilty of not properly responding to a FOIA request

It's more than that. Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, wrote that he'd delete the data before he'd turn it over to "skeptics". Then they claim that they "lost" the data some time in the 80's. That seems to imply that he deleted the data far more recently than the 80's, say in the last couple of years. That would be a crime, not merely "not properly responding to an 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)

4) they arranged to have a journal editor fired for publishing a peer reviewed article that questioned conclusions reached by AGW promoters.

5) They arranged to have certain research excluded from IPCC's survey of climate science literature. The influence of the CRU on the IPCC process (which in turn provides the primary political justification for carbon emission reduction) was significant.
6) The code comments indicate that much of the data was poor quality, further that much of the "improperly calibrated" data wasn't afterwards "properly calibrated" (at least to the knowledge of the programmer).

Why the need to supress debate?

[Saint Stephen]

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."

Re:Why the need to supress debate?

[dbIII]

Mostly because the "debate" was in the 1980s and the current situation is PR versus reality. Consider that most of this crap is coming out of the "Heartland Institute", a bunch that will also tell you that smoking does not cause any health problems.

Re:Peer-reviewed journal?

[qmaqdk]

If you're this sceptical of the peer-review process, then why aren't you dismissing everything else in science as well? It's done by exactly the same process.

Civilization was on trial

[mi]

A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research.

The Humanity in general and the Western civilization in particular were on trial. We are accused of "destroying Gaia" and facing the punishment of huge fines and severe drop in the quality of life (such as living with worms composting our garbage).

So, guess what? When, suddenly, thanks to a whistle-blower (whom the prominent Illiberals in Congress want prosecuted, BTW), we learn of the massive prosecutorial misconduct (some of it, such as deleting files after receiving Freedom of Information requests, outright criminal), that affects a substantial amount of evidence against us, we move for the "court" to dismiss the entire case.

Those "millions of man hours" are now tainted.

Wishful thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wishful thinking

[toppavak]

Watch Amory Lovin's TED talk. Buying energy is more expensive than saving energy. We don't need to radically shift to more costly energy sources like solar to avert the risk of climate change. Regardless of whether the effects we see today are of human origin, the fact is that continuing to burn fossil fuels at current rates is not environmentally sound policy. The pollution produced has a tangible and real impact on peoples' health, the energy infrastructure in place motivates a great deal of humanitarian damage around the world and the continued release of massive amounts of acidifying CO2 and other greenhouse gases will eventually cause massive problems with the global climate, problems which we may or may not be observing yet, although the vast majority of the data out there does support the conclusion that we are indeed seeing the results of human activity. Investing in sane nuclear power (India, France and Russia build power plants at less than a third of the price-per-kW of new proposals in the US and severely mitigate the waste problem by reprocessing in fast breeders), wind power where it makes sense, biofuels from non-food crops in regions where the land use will not interfere with agriculture, all of these combined with investments in energy efficiency (many investments of this sort are being made privately without a government mandate because, again, its cheaper to save energy than buy energy!) and efficient infrastructure, gentle government policies to encourage these developments through feebates and R&D investment we can completely revolutionize the American economy, become a technology exporter again instead of an importer, create millions of jobs, make ludicrous profits and prevent long-term damage to the environment regardless of whether you believe climate change is currently occurring (mountaintop removal, smog, freshwater pollution etc are real issues that face people worldwide already).

The Smoking Code

[scorp1us]

The review must not have been that thorough.

Re:Peer-reviewed journal?

[dusanv]

So past accomplishments (not denying Nature has had more than a few) pretty much make you permanently infallible, is that what you're saying?

I don't think there should be anything above scrutiny. That's how I understand science.

Of course there is nothing notable

[DrXym]

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.

It's all a conspiracy, I tell you!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Loss of trust

[AdamHaun]

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.

Re:Except it wasn't one tree

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an AC. Why the fuck should any believe anything you say?

Peer reviewed?

[MSTCrow5429]

I'm sorry, but did someone at /. forget to mention that the CRU emails did have evidence of a conspiracy to blacklist opposing scientific viewpoints from peer reviewed publications? Did someone forget that Nature, for some years, has been itself criticized for such blacklisting?

War is Peace: The Exponential Growth of Nonsense

[catchblue22]

On reading many of these posts that show up whenever climate change is mentioned, I am reminded of the following article, which I will quote below in its entirety. I found it in Scientific American.

War Is Peace: Can Science Fight Media Disinformation?
In the 24/7 Internet world, people make lots of claims. Science provides a guide for testing them
By Lawrence M. Krauss

When I saw the statement repeated online that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge would be dead by now if he lived in the U.K. and had to depend on the National Health Service (he, of course, is alive and working in the U.K., where he always has), I reflected on something I had written a dozen years ago, in one of my first published commentaries:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

As I listen to the manifest nonsense that has been promulgated by the likes of right-wing fanatic radio hosts and moronic ex-governors in response to the effort to bring the U.S. into alignment with other industrial countries in providing reasonable and affordable health care for all its citizens, it seems that things have only gotten worse in the years since I first wrote those words.

English novelist George Orwell was remarkably prescient about many things, and one of the most disturbing aspects of his masterpiece 1984 involved the blatant perversion of objective reality, using constant repetition of propaganda by a militaristic government in control of all the media.

Centrally coordinated and fully effective reinvention of reality has not yet come about in the U.S. (even though a White House aide in the past administration came chillingly close when he said to a New York Times reporter, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”). I am concerned, however that something equally pernicious, at least to the free exercise of democracy, has.

The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation. Nonsense claims had more difficulty gaining traction in the days when print journalism held sway and newspaper editors had the final word on what made its way into homes and when television news consisted of a half-hour summary of what a trained producer thought were the most essential stories of the day.

Now fabrications about “death panels” and oxymoronic claims that ”government needs to keep its hands off of Medicare” flow freely on the Internet, driving thousands of zombielike protesters to Washington to argue that access to health care will undermine their fundamental freedom to have their insurance canceled if they get sick. And 24-hour news channels, desperate to provide ”breaking” coverage at all hours, end up serving as public relations vehicles for any celebrity who happens to make an outrageous claim or, worse, decide that the competition for ratings requires them to be anything but ”fair and balanced” in their reporting.

“Fair and balanced,” however, doesn’t mean putting all viewpoints, regardless of their underlying logic or validity, on an equal footing. Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by

the conspiracy

[Mr. Slippery]

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?

1950-2000 warming nothing to be afraid of

[thule]

I thought people have been questioning the modern temp data for a while due to land use and urban heat effect. Climate Audit has been tracking this aspect for a while now. We might be warming, but the warming is not universal and nothing more than what has happened in the past. In the context of 1000-1500 years, the warming that happene between 1950-2000 is nothing to be afraid of. To quote CRU:

"The principal conclusion from these studies (summarized in IPCC AR4) is that the second half of the 20th century was very likely (90% probable) warmer than any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely (66% probable) the warmest in the past 1300 years."

Before any of this email stuff, climateaudit caught NASA adjusting the output so that the 1940's blip was not more than the latter half of the century. I seem to recall it was a error in how the program was rounding the numbers. Climateaudit made a new graph with 1940's showing the warmest year. NASA reproduced the results and then later produced a new chart that showed the 1990's having the warming year with the 1940's the second warmest.

To quote another post of this subject (a href="http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11531">strata-sphere.com):

"Well, the raw CRU data shows that the first half of the last century (1900-1960) was as warm or warmer than it is today. But even if it was not warmer, it was within the uncertainty of the processed data. But let’s assume this claim still holds water, so what if this was the warmest half century since the beginning of the Little Ice Age! We have only had 3 half centuries since the LIA ended! We all know the Earth has been thankfully warming since this bleak time in humanity’’s brief existence."

Church of Climatology

[mi]

Those lost cities have nothing to do with warming one way or the other. Hint: geological processes exist.

Exactly! You got it! So, when we talk about ancient history, we can calmly attribute things to geological processes, that we have no control over. But when dealing with our own times, we aren't going to skip a good opportunity to raise taxes and give more control to the government. Scratch almost every modern "environmentalist" and you'll find a worn-out Che Guevara T-shirt underneath...

Nobody tried to argue that anthropogenic global warning traveled back in time to make it a desert.

Actually, you can be sure, there were people explaining the climate change and/or the rising sea levels, that flooded the entire cities, by the anger of the gods. You can also bet safely, that various priests back then suggested (and demanded) large sacrifices to appease the supernaturals.

Kinda like what Al Gore is doing now (warning, unsafe amounts of sarcasm at the link)...

This is a joke, right?

[snowwrestler]

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.

Clearly you have the improper mindset

[snowwrestler]

Don't you see??? By saying that their investigation found nothing wrong, they have proven their complicity in the conspiracy!!

Re:Loss of trust

[AdamHaun]

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.

Re:psuedo-skeptics

[TapeCutter]

Thanks for the link, note the headline on the report includes the caveat "some". Here is a link supporting my claim from a similarly reputable source, note the conclusions are derived from observations not modelling. The WP entry on ocean acidification is also quite informative and includes a number of references. Also the ocean has been acidic in the distant past, softbodied animals dominated during those periods.

Finally I quote from your link - "“The oceans absorb much of the CO2 that we release to the atmosphere,” Ries says. However, he warns that this natural buffer may ultimately come at a great cost. “It’s hard to predict the overall net effect on benthic marine ecosystems," he says. “In the short term, I would guess that the net effect will be negative. In the long term, ecosystems could re-stabilize at a new steady state. “The bottom line is that we really need to bring down CO2 levels in the atmosphere.”"