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Climategate's Final Days
The Bad Astronomer writes "Climategate may be on its way out. An investigatory committee at Pennsylvania State University has formally cleared climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann of any scientific misconduct. Mann was central in the so-called Climategate scandal, where illegally leaked emails were purported to indicate examples of scientists trying to cover up any lack of global warming in their data. This finding by the committee (PDF) is another in a series of independent investigations that have all concluded that no misconduct has occurred."
Climategate's Final Days
Bullshit. If you think this means it's over, you're not familiar with the debate.
Immediately following Climategate Nature released an editorial saying no controversy found in the e-mails. That didn't seem to matter at all.
The more respected global warming papers have been published and accepted in peer reviewed journals. Point out any global warming denialist papers that have done the same. I think the most you'll find are papers that suggest global change could result in positive things in some areas. I don't know of any saying that climate change is not happening.
Your fundamental problem in arguing with a person who denies global warming is that they use erroneous logic. They find one uncertainty or minor flaw in a study and suddenly volumes of studies -- even those unrelated -- can be thrown out and dismissed. If it isn't in Mann's research, if it isn't in the East Anglian e-mails, it's somewhere else. You just have to face that logic and move on past them. Oh, and for future articles, Bad Astronomer, using cute otter lolcats to fire back at your opponents isn't exactly the hallmark of a logically sound debate. It's little more than an ad hominem attack.
If you think this is the 'final days' of this mess, you are sadly mistaken. Not until first world countries find it hard to get by will the majority of them step up and realize it. The election of Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli shows you got a whole state who would like to sweep this inconvenience under the rug and want you to stop trying to hinder their economy with your "research and science."
My work here is dung.
One can never satisfy a conspiracy theorist.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
These are the same kind of people still insisting that Obama has not proven he is an American citizen because they do not have his birth certificate in their hands, that there isn't an unbroken documented chain of custody for that document and having its validity is sworn by Jesus himself.
... of course those stuffy liberal academic types at Penn St. cleared him. They're liberals! They're protecting their own!
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
I seem to recall that
1.there were emails clearly indicating that they were politically involved, ie they'd exagerate to scare people. Hardly a scientific attitude
2.there was some pretty perverted data analysis to get to "expected results"
There's no denying there are climate changes going around. But
1.calling it man-made is complete speculation at the current point(yes it is, there's correlation at best, no proof of causality)
2.calling it warming is kind of fucked up since it's warming in some places, and cooling in others
3.no proof either that anything we do can change anything about it.
Oh and there is a non negligible part of the climate scientific community that *disagrees* with how things are being presented.
How about they study pollution and find a way to stop the billions of tonnes of garbage that still get dumped into our landfills and seas every year? Won't pollution and deforestation will kill and harm us a whole lot more than a few simple degree changes in our atmosphere?
I'm sorry, but isn't getting sick with dieases like cancer from a contaminated environment deserving more funding for research than climate research? Why are they getting all that attention and research dollars? Are we being played into fools to keep on looking up at the sky at the weather instead of the ground we're standing on and the quality of air we breath?
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
As far as the lay public is concerned, the damage has already been done. They were already convinced that these were a bunch of self-serving interests promoting their cause, and the leaked emails affirmed it for them.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
News at 11.
Hardly an independent panel. And really, they did say he was incorrect to not have real statisticians working on the results - which invalidates much of the published work.
You can say he was cleared, but that's only of purposeful intent to mislead - what the report is basically dancing around is that he misled through poor application of scientific principals. And isn't that what really matters here, that the scientific method is carefully applied instead of fitting data to a pre-concieved conclusion?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The VA State Attorney General still has his own investigation (which TFA mentions) which is supposed to root out Mann's monetary fraud when he was at UVa. Yet this is the same AG who claims his own anti-Healthcare lawsuit against the Federal government won't cost the state more than the $350 filing fee. Somehow I don't think that he gets the irony of this situation.
And yes I do realize that this comment is more fitting for Craigslist than /.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The earth has been both hotter and cooler than it is now.
That is correct... but irrelevant to the question.
Anthropogenic global warming is not instead of natural variations-- it is in addition to natural variations. Natural variations don't suddenly vanish now that we add carbon dioxide to the air.
...I'm all for taking better care of the planet, but the global warming nuts haven't really provided much evidence and they're the ones making the allegations.
The way I see things, if you make a bunch of claims, the burden of proof is ON YOU... not the people you're speaking to.
By "global warming nuts," you apparently mean "the scientists who actually study the problem."
By "the burden of proof is on you" you apparently mean "...to prove the correctness of scientific results to people who aren't willing to take any effort to look at the actual science, but will believe any criticism with no skepticism whatsoever."
There is a lot of science... this is not made up. (And it dates to way before Al Gore, who's not a scientist.) Have you actually read, for a start, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Working Group I Report on Physical Science Basis of Climate Science? What? No? Because you already read in a blog somewhere that it's a hoax, so you don't need to read it?
So, uh, if you won't actually read the evidence, how can any possible amount of evidence convince you?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Yes...openess will always allow dissent and that is not allowed. I believe that the earth is warming and also that man has contributed to the warming trend. Having said that I find the nutiness on the side of climate change to be as bad as that against. I find it strange that the "enlightened" believers in science can see the ridiculous behavior on the side of the deniers and ignore that same kind of behavior in their own camp. I've heard some of the most ridiculous claims by climate change advocates about how we're all going to be dead in a decade or two, how we'll see the oceans rise to cover almost all the land masses and other extreme nonsense. Yes the earth is warming, yes we should try to alter how we do things to reduce our contribution to the warming, No we don't have to destroy our entire way of life to do it. It's not the facts I reject, it's the extremism that says I have to give up my quality of life or we'll all die.
Mann gets millions from NSF and Penn State doesn't want that to stop. What a shock they exonerated him! Once again, the scientific community shows that when it all comes down to feasting on taxpayer money, they don't let the truth get in the way. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004575010931344004278.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
So?
Ok, good...
Citation needed. And the conclusion doesn't follow. Just because birds ocassionally shit into the pool, and kids ocassionally pee into it doesn't mean you can empty a septic tank into it, then claim that the former two things mean it's not your fault it's a cesspool now.
Good quote, but doesn't favour your position. It's precisely what worries me. The planet will keep on existing, life will survive and even thrive in the most poisonous environments. But just because some bacteria can live in such conditions doesn't mean I can, or even if I can find a way it doesn't mean it's going to be pleasant. And I'd rather have a pleasant life.
People on the right (not necessarily applying that label to you, mind) seem really hung up on the question of whether human action is causing global warming (those that are able to get past arguing over whether it's even happening, that is).
I'm not as interested in that question, frankly. The way I look at it is this: every single homo sapien that lives or has ever lived has been on this one planet. As far as we've been able to tell, homo sapiens is the only "intelligent" life that's ever evolved anywhere, certainly in local space. I'm of the mind that that's fairly important and worth preserving. And this planet is the only one we know of that can support homo sapien life on some of it's surface some of the time, and even then we're on a climactic knife-edge. A little bit of change in any direction and we have reasonable concerns that the whole semi-stable equilibrium we're in will skew off wildly. It looks like that's what happened on Mars, and there's no reason to assume it can't happen here.
Taking all that in mind, until we have a way to live and thrive off-planet, we absolutely have to do what we can to keep this planet healthy, where healthy is defined as "able to support a large human population". If Earth winds up looking like Mars, knowing the planet is just going through a normal geological cycle that we didn't cause is not much comfort. Not that there will be any complex life anywhere in the Sol system to mourn us.
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The more respected global warming papers have been published and accepted in peer reviewed journals.
Whose panels were controlled by the Warmists.
That was a big part of the controversy, that serious scientific articles were being prevented from being published by excerting control over the acceptance panels of said "peer reviewed journals". And that was really the worst part, because that's when it stopped being science and started being a cult. Real science accepts debate on an issue without demonizing anyone for asking questions.
If you don't think there's any demonizing going on then I invite you to read any post on Slashdot talking about "Denialists" (the term is of course demonization as well, so you can see the root of the problem).
And yes, I did use the term "Warmist", because if demonization is OK one way then you have to accept a bi-directional flow until you work to stamp out such terms on both sides.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's because that's not what the debate is about. The Earth's climate is ALWAYS changing, as everyone well knows. Examining ice cores, fossils, geologic record, etc, prove that the Earth's climate is never steady and has always been changing. In fact, it has been both much warmer and much colder than today at various times in history.
The people you bash as "deniers" are actually not denying climate change, but are instead debating the following points that you seem to be ignoring. They argue that:
So you are right that the debate isn't over, but not for the reasons you describe. The debate will continue because people like you don't understand what the debate is about (you seem to think it's about whether or not climate change is happening), and because people like you are making a crisis out of nothing. If man-made global warming is happening, is that a crisis? It may be, if it can be proven that human activity is truly the primary cause. But is climate change in and of itself a crisis? Given that it always changes back and forth, I would say definitely not. Should we shut down our economies and destroy our industry just because the climate is changing, just like it always has? Definitely not! It's just something life has to adapt to. But as long as people like you continue to stick their heads in the sand and scream that change that always happens is "a crisis", and as long as you refuse to see what the debate is actually about, then people like me will keep fighting to educate you.
Main Point: We don't argue that climate change isn't happening, and if that's what you think the debate is about then you are completely wrong.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
It's weird how people think they can add to a debate with experts while being absolute non-experts themselves.
It's even more weird how some people claim you must be an "expert" in something in the days when anyone can educate themselves in anything if they chose to apply themselves seriously enough.
In this golden age of education where a degree in one subject does not necessarily mean you know more about a subject than someone who simply has been studying it longer than you, it seems rather quant to complain about lack of credentials.
After all, many people arguing against the mainstream AGW ideas were people with greater statistical understanding than the supposed "experts" (and that is part of what the study concluded as well, that they had a poor grasp of real statistics - something the rest of us were trying to tell you after looking at the code released along with the emails).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wait, who have you ever heard say that humans are the only thing affecting climate?
Anyone who has ever said that expensive changes in industry will result in significant change in global warming. So, basically any policy maker, and pretty much every single person at those AGW global summits.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I never understood why it's so hard to find other people who don't subscribe to one extreme or the other when it comes to climate change.
Because people are inherently unsatisfied with the answer "we don't know, and cannot know".
And at the higher levels, because trillions of dollars are at stake going either direction. It pushes the rhetoric and arguments to one side or the other - by necessity, since the tendency is for each side to engage in greater and greater bombast until those of us in the middle have a hard time being heard as neutral without being cast to one side or the other, because all people know is either extreme.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As for "code", do you even know what the "code" you were looking at was from and where it is used, if at all?
No. Do you?
I know the code had flaws, and some code that was basically making up data to massage the output into a desired form.
So neither of us know which graphs this code may or may not have been used in. But if the code was never used, why was it written? And why is it OK for YOU to blindly assume it was not used in published results?
The core of the problem is that because they would not let outside people audit the code and data used to make the graphs, we CANNOT KNOW if that code was used or not. And that is really the worst thing of all. That is the thing that makes what they were doing Not Science. I don't know if that code was used or not but I know as a result of seeing it I cannot trust the graphs they produced without seeing the data and code used to derive them - which they will not produce themselves.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A university investigating itself is not "independent". BP investigating itself would not be "independent". Some government functionary group of scared for their jobs or worse bureaucrats, investigating a potentially explosive revelation of some government involvement with a "terrorist" attack, is not an "independent investigation".
We are running an article below on how scientists don't get it, have no clue on how to talk to "the people". This article another example of their arrogance and idiocy combined into "talking down" to people to prove a rather dubious point that they didn't screw up, when in fact *they did* screw up and are continuing their whitewash because enough people now have seen through their BS.
The so called science is tainted, you need to scrap it, start over, admit to the reality everyone sees now, and take wall street bailout number 3 "cap and trade" right off the table in the beginning, just take that out of the equation and stop with the fairy tale it has nothing to do with it, or people will not believe a thing you say anymore. Global warming alarmists are "in the pockets" of the wall street crooks on this, irrefutable fact, whether they realize it or not. H1N1 is another science hoax that got pushed so a few could make millions/billions off of contrived hysteria. Yes, it was a bad flu, but actually milder than "normal" flu which never gets that sort of attention and scare mongering thrown at it.
Should we go towards cleaner energy sources, and stuff like electric cars and so on? Sure, great idea. but not because of this tainted junk science. There are any number of other more legitimate reasons for those moves. Scare mongering and outright threats and planning on more taxes and fees for people so a few billionaires, washed out has been politicians, and entrenched energy cartels can get richer and a few ethically challenged academics can get some larger grants and dick measuring papers published in those expensive elitist closed off journals are not good reasons.
Okay, if I were to follow the money as you'd suggest, I'd wind up at the front door of Big Oil. Thanks. Now I know what drives the denier camp.
Have YOU looked into the problems with said report? Because science doesn't stop with one report .
But the IPCC report isn't just one report. It is actually a meta study that summarizes all the other reports out there. So if you find a problem with one of the reports that is cited by the IPCC then you can just ignore that and look at all the rest.
The problems that have been found with the IPCC reports have not changed the findings because they are such a tiny proportion of the referred works. And none of the problems have been with the actual science that underlies climate change (which is what the Working Group 1 Report is all about). The original poster is correct: the science still stands.
This still doesn't change the fact that the AGW argument is supported by insufficient evidence and flawed computer models. Much of North America and Europe used to be covered in glaciers, and they were gone before man existed. GW was happening long before fossil fuels were dug out of the ground.
There's actual hard evidence of this. AGW is a scam to guilt people into spending money on "Green" technology utilizing a naturally occurring phenomena that was already in full swing before man existed.
I drive a small fuel efficient car, use CFL's and generally do what all the granola munching, tree hugging liberal rabid AGW alarmists do. Mainly because pollution is dirty, it stinks, and burning a lot of gas is a waste of money. Those are all good enough reasons to me. I don't need Al Gore to make up a reason for me to do it.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
They didn't challenge the credibility of a scientist. To do that, they would do the difficult work of producing incongruous reproducible scientific results.
Instead, they did the easy thing, which was to illegally hack into a computer system and leak private, misleading emails to a conspiracy-minded population of kooks ready to take individual words or phrases far out of context to reinforce their preconceived notions.
But, like you said, if they had "challenged the credibility of a scientist or his research", then that would be fine.
I don't deny the Earth has shown some slight warming, warming which brings us nowhere near the levels that Earth has successfully endured in the past. I have concerns with CO2 being named as the scapegoat. I take issue with models being called science. Models are part of the hypothesis. Every other field of science requires a testable, and repeatable experiments. It's what makes science great, because it can weed out free energy nuts that power their cars with cold fusion and water. Evolution, for a long time, really was a hypothesis that fit the facts. It needed DNA to tie it all together and really put the last nail in the Creationist coffin. It appears that climate science is exempt from this requirement (a test of what the model concludes) before calling conclusions facts. The problem with the Warmers is that when a question is asked, the debate that follows is usually just a bunch of name calling. Two things separate science from religion. Science assumes a lack of knowledge or that the knowledge we currently have is incorrect. Religion assumes it is right. Science wants to be challenged by anyone, where religion demands it be challenged by no one. When you deny anyone's right to ask "why?", then you are spewing dogma.
CO2 is rising, no doubt about that. My issue is that it only makes up about .04% of the atmosphere. Venus and Mars both have vastly higher amounts of CO2 compared to us (~95%). One planet is scorching hot, and the other is very cold (with some tolerably warm spots for our future explorers). Venus is fairly convincingly attributed to the Greenhouse Effect. Mars has an atmospheric CO2 content that by volume and mass is greater than Earths. Why is Mars not hot? Why does the greenhouse effect not slip out of control there? The odds of IR radiation striking a CO2 molecule on the way up on Earth is extremely small. If this weren't true, IR pictures of fields and cities would be blurred by the scattering caused by CO2. Increasing CO2 from .04% to .05% still keeps those odds extremely small. If it is absorbed, the CO2 with kick out a another IR photon, the whole idea of the Greenhouse Effect. To anything in the atmosphere, most directions lead to space. For me to accept a model, it must apply to Mars and Venus equally, without modifying constants. Yes that means the must account for all the variations, from deflection from our magnetic field of higher energy particles to atmospheric density to distance from the Sun. Without these factors, people are taking variables and assuming constants out of them. If you take a model for Earth and plug in all the same factors for Mars or any other planet into it, but are stuck with "we don't have that variable in this model" then your model is incomplete and inaccurate. That model should work anywhere, like all other physics does. If you want to convince me you've pegged the source of a less than %1 difference in temperature, then you better account for all these variables much wider than %1 difference.
The Sun is the primary sources of heat on Earth, far outpacing every other source. Are there any direct recordings (not by tree ring proxy) of variations in luminosity over the same period of time? We are kept warm by it at 150 million kilometers away. Think of the vast amount of energy that has to be releasing to do that. Even slight variations would affect us. The Earth is a very good black body, like the other planets. By the math for black body radiation, the Earth is emitting around 10% more heat that it gets from the Sun, due to geothermal heat.
I am seriously concerned that real ecological issues like pollution and conservation of resources have been hijacked by the invisible, marketable demon of CO2.
Anyone who has ever said that expensive changes in industry will result in significant change in global warming.
Really? So by saying that changing human industry will affect global warming, that implies that only human industry affects global warming?
Hey, my solution that includes HCL and H2SO4 is too acidic! I claim that if I decrease the amount of HCL, it will be less acidic. Ergo I am implying that H2SO4 does not affect the pH of the solution.
Wow. Pojut complained about people at the two extremes, but what about people who think only the two extremes exist?
The enemies of Democracy are
Actually that's exactly what the leaked data and source code do not show. That's why all these investigations have found no wrongdoing. In science, cherrypicking or fabricating data is wrongdoing, whereas merely being a couple degrees shy of completely transparent is imperfect but forgivable.
GL: Have you actually read, for a start, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Working Group I Report on Physical Science Basis of Climate Science?
SuperKendall: Yes. Have YOU looked into the problems with said report?
Gadget Guy: [...] And none of the problems have been with the actual science that underlies climate change (which is what the Working Group 1 Report is all about). The original poster is correct: the science still stands.
Wow, somebody who gets it. That's exactly right; I was citing the Working Group I Report-- The Physical Science Basis-- because that is the one summarizing the basic science, which is what the deniers are denying. (And, as someone pointed out, it's a summary of the science, not the actual science. It references review articles that summarize real science, so it's a place to start learning about the science, not the place to end.)
Moving on from this, there are very real questions such as, what are the effects? Is this bad? If so, how bad? What should we do about it, if anything? What are the effects of these possible actions we might take?
Those are good questions; some of them are very hard questions, and they are worth a serious debate. But that serious debate has been short circuited, because there is a very loud contingent of deniers who basically shout down the very existence of the effect.
The result is that, by denying the physics in the first place, the deniers have pretty much abandoned the actual debate to other extreme.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It is well known that Al gore has invested in carbon credit and other green-energy related companies.
Great! Somebody needs to. That said, it seems like you're coming from a libertarian/laissez-faire capitalism viewpoint, but you have some problem with Al Gore investing in and profiting from companies that are moving the ball forward on sustainable technology? I'm a left liberal (shocking, I know) and I don't see a bit of a problem with Al Gore or anybody else profiting by supporting businesses that serve such an enormous benefit to society.
You want to help the environment at all costs. Even if it means lying to the public.
I expressed myself very poorly if I left anyone with the impression that I support or advocate lying to the public. I want to see the true, unvarnished results of all climate studies become common knowledge so we can all make educated policy/electoral decisions.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I just go to say it.
I was hearing some other doomsday scenario and recently googled a bit around a kind of volcanic event. Oh, it was associated with Obama's oil spill.
About 70k years ago there was a big volcanic event in Indonesia. Seems it pretty well covered the planet in ash. Estimates of surviving human population range from 5k to 15k.
A near extinction event for humans.
Tell me about how your doomsday scenario is in fact an actual human extinction event coming on in the next 200 years.
You seem to be a fine example of what the "deniers" complain about around fearmongering. Hmm, troll? Worse?