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Scientific Journal Nature Finds Nothing Notable In CRU Leak
eldavojohn writes with an update to the CRU email leak story we've been following for the past two weeks. The peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature has published an article saying the emails do not demonstrate any sort of "scientific conspiracy," and that the journal doesn't intend to investigate earlier papers from CRU researchers without "substantive reasons for concern." The article notes, "Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers." Reader lacaprup points out related news that a global warming skeptic plans to sue NASA under the Freedom of Information Act for failing to deliver climate data and correspondence of their own, which he thinks will be "highly damaging." Meanwhile, a United Nations panel will be conducting its own investigation of the CRU emails.
The real smoking gun isn't the emails - it's the source code.
They keep talking about those emails in the hopes that no one will call them out on the "VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline"s applied liberally to the raw data.
Really take a look at the graphs in the link above. Plot that array yourself if you don't believe it. No amount of handwaving will explain away blatant lying.
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.
"A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research."
Never mind the quality, feel the weight.
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
Dependency hell? =>
And the apparent lack of transparency regarding the code, I submit that the researchers under fire be asked to use the code in question to reproduce their results under observation, explaining how they did it.
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
What do you see in these mails? Remember these scientists think they are talking in private and never anticipated being found out. Are there mentions or references to dark projects? Some references to their agents and their handlers? Strong ideological opinions to destroy Capitalism and install a world Government?
What happened is very simple. These scientists are used to one kind of debate and one kind of rules. Where "the conclusions reached by Kogen, et al [8] is not supported by the evidence presented by them [9],[10],[11]" would be considered a grave insult and might cause loss of reputation. In the question and answer session in a seminar someone saying, "But, Dr Kaplansky, with a sample size of 27, the correlation coefficient you have arrived at is less than experimental error" wouild result in a collective gasp and "ole!" from the assembled people, usually about 20 people who could actually understand the paper being presented.
These scientists are encountering the rough and tumble world of popular journalism, spin meistering. They are clueless about how to handle it. They feel they are being gravely insulted and highly manipulated. They think they are being quote mined, quoted out of context. The journalists are giving totally irrelevant and completely debunked theorists equal time for balance. So they go about in their clueless ways to counter it. They over react, they try to be more guarded, they are trying to write sentences that could not be quote mined.
Now that people have glimpse of the actual communications between the scientists, compare that to say, the hacked emails of Sarah Palin, See where you find more smoking guns.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... 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.
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.
This guy's the limit!
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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.
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...
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.
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
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!
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.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Since when does the right care about science? They can't even get an issue as simple and data-rich as sex education right, but now I'm supposed to believe that it's all about the evidence?
I used to have doubts about AGW because I heard so many skeptics, but now that they've dropped their masks and are trying to move in for the kill I see that the whole thing is just like the evolution "debate". Conspiracy theories ("It's the evil liberals! They want to destroy capitalism!"), quotes out of context, repeating the same tired debunked arguments year after year... The only difference is that the ideology behind it is a little more popular -- the strawman liberal is apparently a more plausible villain to most people than the strawman atheist.
Visit the
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.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Well, we all know that Nature, NASA, and the U.N. are prime players in the conspiracy. As are NOAA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the science academies of Brazil, China and India.
I mean, either there's a massive conspiracy by climatologists all around the world, or a handful of corporate shills and religious true believers (including both fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist propertarians) have the media's ear and are quoting stuff out of context and flat-out inventing shit. And that's impossible, right?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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."
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...
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)...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.