Slashdot Mirror
House of Commons Finds No Evidence of Tampering In Climate E-mails
dwguenther writes "The first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from one of the world's leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved. The House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they'd seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit ... had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming."
According to the article, the head of committee which produced the report "said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish something before Britain's next national election, which is widely expected in just over a month's time"; two further inquiries are to examine the issue more closely. The "e-mails appeared to show scientists berating skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks, discussing ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discussing ways to keep skeptics' research out of peer-reviewed journals," but the committee concluded that East Anglia researcher Phil Jones was not part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that weakens the case for global warming.
No UK government investigation has found any evidence of any wrongdoing for anything in at least the last ten years - even when the previous six weeks have been wall-to-wall damning evidence reported in every UK newspaper, TV channel and website regardless of its usual political stance.
Actually the data from weather research posts is freely available to the public. All you have to do is find the relevant website (I don't have it on hand at the moment). One of the weather-scientist associations provides access to it I believe. As part of a final project for my weather science class in college, we actually had to analyze data from four different stations around the world and correlate our findings with local geographical data. Almost every student in the class found evidence of the global temperatures rising over the last 80 year period.
Oh, do you mean in this article, where he admitted that there has been no statistically significant evidence of warming since 1995?
Being a man of integrity, he of course answered that question truthfully. Here's his full response:
It's funny, because whoever wrote that question did their homework; 1995 is the latest year at which, if you run the calculation, there's no statistically significant warming until 2009 - though I'm sure that'll change when we get the 2010 data. Of course, if you run the same calculation from 1994, you do get a statistically significant result at the 95% significance level. Further, if you decrease the significance level from 95% to something like 85%, the warming trend is again significant. The thing is that a mere fifteen years is just not enough time to do actual climate science. Generally, you have to look back at least thirty years to get reasonable statistical significance; the fact that there's such a strong signal even if you start in 1995 should be good evidence in itself.
How does working to increase efficiency and reduce pollution wreck the economy?
That's a great idea. We should try it. Unfortunately, what was discussed at Copenhagen was payments from rich countries to poor countries. People have tried to hijack the global warming 'crisis' to push their own agendas.
Qxe4
He was referring to the climate model software written by CRU, I cou;dn't find an actual name for it but I did find the read me and along with it a great write up on why "open source science" would've helped avoid this scandal:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/open_science_climategate_ipcc_cru_needs_take_leaf_out_cerns_book
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8395514.stm
Nice attitude. Doesn't matter that freon was never a problem to the environment. Coincidentally the patents were due to expire, and it was claimed that chlorine was bad for the ozone layer. Doesn't matter at all that we pour gallons of chlorine into the water cycle through laundry bleach, swimming pools, and municipal water.
...
It's a hard battle. We not only have to fight against greedy politicians and corporate monsters, we have to fight against gullible over-emotional assholes like you.
Ignorance? Check!
Rambling conspiracy theory? Check!
Abusiveness? Check!
This makes the Slashdot crank trifecta.
If you knew the slightest thing about the problem with ozone destroying chemicals, of which the chlorinated freons were prime culprits, you would know that they were a problem because they were supremely stable in the lower atmosphere (pure chlorine not so at all), and were able to transport chlorine to the ozone layer (unlike natural chlorine compounds), whereupon UV light broke them down, released the chlorine, starting a chain reaction destroying the ozone.
An ocean of pure chlorine at sea level would have zero effect on the ozone layer, because it can't get up there.
Worldwide bans on the worst ozone depleting chemicals has halted growth of ozone depletion, after years of worsening, and signs of recovery are expected to become statistically detectable in the next several years.
And, BTW, the patents on the harmful freons had expired many years before the ozone destruction discovery.
This is very thoroughly established science.
The parallel between the science-bashing with the "ozone controversy" (and the "acid rain controversy") and what we are seeing today with an industry-supported noise machine is really quite striking. Not only was the science thoroughly vindicated, but the solutions imposed - bans on the most destructive chemicals - and "cap and trade" (very much favored by "free marketers" at the time as harnessing the power of markets) for acid emissions, proved quite effective.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The earth's magnetic field protects us from charged particle radiation, not from electromagnetic waves (which are 99.9999% the cause of solar heating). Thus, your entire theory was just shot down in 1 sentence.
The greenhouse effect is indisputable; earth would be at least 20C colder without it. The drastic increase in carbon dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) over the past 150 years is indisputable. You could possibly dispute mans effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but my guess is that it has been studied and verified already (I am not a climatologist). Thus, if man has an effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, man has an effect on the greenhouse effect, which has a major effect on the global average temperature.
If we could stop wasting our time trying to convince all the people incapable of logical thought, maybe we could use our ability to control the global average temperature to our advantage.
And they could not. In fact, the issue of the tree rings not cooperating calls into question using tree-ring data AT ALL. If it's not an accurate 'treemometer' how can you base historical climate on it?
The story goes something like this: Back in the good old days happy little trees got bigger rings when it was warm and smaller rings when it was cold, so tree ring data correlated quite nicely with temperatures and provided data for several hundreds of years. But then came men with its industrialization and polluted the air. Trees in turn didn't like the pollution and got sick, but a sick tree makes smaller rings and thus smaller rings no longer correlate with temperature data, thus making the tree ring data useless for temperature measurements. But scientists aren't stupid and actually figured that out and thus where able to clean up the wrong data and replacing it with good data.
"you need to classify carbon as "pollution" for your argument to make sense. And carbon is "pollution" only if it significantly contributes to global warming, so your argument has to assume its conclusion!"
Here let me free you from that infinite loop - RF = 5.35*ln(c2/c1) - Fourier 1824.
I'm assuming you call yourself a skeptic so let me give you a skeptical analysis of your argument. It's assuming every physicist since Fourier has been wrong about the properties of CO2, it's also denying some basic findings of modern science such a the QM of photon absorbtion and the science behind spectral analyis.
In otherwords accepting your infinite loop argument leads to the same sort of irrational conclusions as accepting creationist "science" does. Some examples; everything we know about the composition of the cosmos via spectral analysis is wrong; radiation such as the suns rays don't cause atoms to jiggle (heat); atoms do not spontaneously lose energy by emmitting photons. There are many more implications of refusing to acknowledge the well known properties of CO2 but I'm sure a genuine skeptic will get the idea. You are a genuine skeptic, right?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"I look in the raw data section and low and behold, there is no raw data linked to for the stratosphere. Damn. Guess I'll have to settle for processed data."
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadat/hadat2.html - go crazy.
Etc.
Raw data is easily obtainable. But I'm not going to jump through hoops to find you every single dataset. There are so many datasets that it's impossible to put them on a single page.
Several major datasets are cataloged here:
http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/
Also, learn to read dataset names. 9641C_201003_RAW.MAX contains raw unadjusted monthly data. I.e. they are not adjusted for urbanization effects and broken sensors. Since it's a MONTHLY measurement made of multiple daily measurements, they must be averaged, thus the word 'mean'.
You can ask NOAA for daily datasets for all weather stations, but they are huge and are not necessary for climate projections.
You can grab them directly from here:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/
It even has a nice README: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/readme.txt
So stop being an idiot and jumping at everything without even trying to assume that not every climate scientist is an idiot.