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.
RTFA, it does find that they had a keen interest in stonewalling critics. So much for peer review, taking some criticism, and I dunno integrity?
Truth should be easy to defend. There's not much scientific integrity if you have to stifle descent.
Also FTFA: "Lawmakers stressed that their report — which was written after only a single day of oral testimony — did not cover all the issues and would not be as in-depth as the two other inquiries into the e-mail scandal that are still pending."
As Winston Wolfe said: "Let's not start sucking each other's dicks just yet, Gentlemen."
I'm one of those people who downloaded the 40MB foia.zip file. I've read the emails. I've read the HARRYREADME file, and I've looked at the code examples. I get the impression from reading the comments here that most people have not actually done that. Oh, they'll say "The data proves" but they haven't actually LOOKED at the data. I would have thought that slashdot readers, being the objective technically-minded people they say they are, would have wanted to tear into that code and take a look.
What you will find is really fascinating. It's not very good. Climate scientists, on the whole, aren't really very good programmers; and they are not good statisticians. Why should they be? You can't be expert in everything. So you have a situation where Michael Mann, for example, rather than use the statistical manipulation suite "R" instead used Fortran, sometimes. When you read through poor "Harry's" lament you find a kind of frustration only a programmer could feel. Missing data, bad data, programs that throw an error, don't tell you, and keep on going. Missing data sets for entire countries.
Now, the essence of science is replicability, correct? If you're going to claim 'cold fusion' you publish your data and your methods and other scientists attempt to replicate your findings, or not. But the climate gate folks have steadfastly refused to release their methods, including their computer code, and the data they did release was not the data they used in their publications. Further, they 'lost' some data altogether.
Let us turn to the most famous of the emails: "I've just used Mike's Nature trick to hide the decline." Jones says he used the word "trick" to mean a "clever thing to do." Let's look at his "cleverness." What he actually did is meld together the historical record, based on proxies like tree rings, and the more recent instrumental record. On the surface that looks like an okay thing to do, but why did he do it?
The reason is that the tree ring data showed a warming since the early 1800's, and the instruments showed a warming since 1960 or so. Meld them together and you get warming! Global Warmimng! Yay! But why take out the tree ring data? Did it not continue and show warming into the nineties along with the instruments, thus verifying what these guys were saying?
No, it did not, thus you have the problem of "divergence" which is a fancy way of saying the tree ring data wasn't cooperating and showed COOLING since 1960! Well, these Climategate guys decided it 'must be something else' so rather than include the tree ring signal, they CUT IT OFF to HIDE THE DECLINE it showed. Thus an 'inconvenient truth' was 'disappeared' in favor of not 'confusing' the issue. They were afraid that if they showed just this one tree-ring line in their spaghetti chart declining, they'd have to explain it.
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? This is but one example of dozens and dozens of manipulations done by the Hockey Team as they attempt to salvage their careers and grants. It is simply not true that 'thousands of scientists' have replicated Global Warming. They have not. They have all used the same corrupted data sets in their calculations.
The Himalayan glaciers are not disappearing. The rain foretss are not turning into grasslands. African crops are not failing. Arctic ice is normal in every respect. There were 2500 polar bears a couple of decades ago and now there are 15,000. The Antarctic has record ice. The Netherlands is not 50% below sea level and the sea levels are not rising any faster than they have since 1800. Hurricanes are not more frequent, nor are tornados. Forty years ago there were 6,000 surface-temperature measuring stations, but only 1,500 by 1990, which coincides with what global warming alarmists say was a record temperature increase. Most of the deleted stations were in colder regions. Geologists for Space
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.