Inconvenient GW emails?

[cjolley]

That all still sounds like run of the mill shop talk to me.

[Dr Mordrid]

George Monbiot apparently doesn't agree with you. "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging."

[Wulfman]

wo menschen sind, da menschelts.

mfg
wulfman

[cjolley]

George Monbiot apparently doesn't agree with you. "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging."

I can quote Monbiot too.
And this time not out of context. From the same article.

...
But do these revelations justify the sceptics’ claims that this is “the final nail in the coffin” of global warming theory?(8,9) Not at all. They damage the credibility of three or four scientists. They raise questions about the integrity of one or perhaps two out of several hundred lines of evidence. To bury manmade climate change, a far wider conspiracy would have to be revealed. Luckily for the sceptics, and to my intense disappointment, I have now been passed the damning email which confirms that the entire science of global warming is indeed a scam. Had I known that it was this easy to rig the evidence, I wouldn’t have wasted years of my life promoting a bogus discipline. In the interests of open discourse, I feel obliged to reproduce it here.

“From: ernst.kattweizel@redcar.ac.uk
Sent: 29th October 2009
To: The Knights Carbonic
Gentlemen, the culmination of our great plan approaches fast. What the Master called “the ordering of men’s affairs by a transcendent world state, ordained by God and answerable to no man”, which we now know as Communist World Government, advances towards its climax at Copenhagen. For 185 years since the Master, known to the laity as Joseph Fourier, launched his scheme for world domination, the entire physical science community has been working towards this moment.
The early phases of the plan worked magnificently. First the Master’s initial thesis - that the release of infrared radiation is delayed by the atmosphere - had to be accepted by the scientific establishment. I will not bother you with details of the gold paid, the threats made and the blood spilt to achieve this end. But the result was the elimination of the naysayers and the disgrace or incarceration of the Master’s rivals. Within 35 years the 3rd Warden of the Grand Temple of the Knights Carbonic (our revered prophet John Tyndall) was able to “demonstrate” the Master’s thesis. Our control of physical science was by then so tight that no major objections were sustained.
More resistence was encountered (and swiftly despatched) when we sought to install the 6th Warden (Svante Arrhenius) first as professor of physics at Stockholm University, then as rector. From this position he was able to project the Master’s second grand law - that the infrared radiation trapped in a planet’s atmosphere increases in line with the quantity of carbon dioxide the atmosphere contains. He and his followers (led by the Junior Warden Max Planck) were then able to adapt the entire canon of physical and chemical science to sustain the second law.
Then began the most hazardous task of all: our attempt to control the instrumental record. Securing the consent of the scientific establishment was a simple matter. But thermometers had by then become widely available, and amateur meteorologists were making their own readings. We needed to show a steady rise as industrialisation proceeded, but some of these unfortunates had other ideas. The global co-option of police and coroners required unprecedented resources, but so far we have been able to cover our tracks.
The over-enthusiasm of certain of the Knights Carbonic in 1998 was most regrettable. The high reading in that year has proved impossibly costly to sustain. Those of our enemies who have yet to be silenced maintain that the lower temperatures after that date provide evidence of global cooling, even though we have ensured that eight of the ten warmest years since 1850 have occurred since 2001(10). From now on we will engineer a smoother progression.
Our co-option of the physical world has been just as successful. The thinning of the Arctic ice cap was a masterstroke. The ring of secret nuclear power stations around the Arctic Circle, attached to giant immersion heaters, remains undetected, as do the space-based lasers dissolving the world’s glaciers.
Altering the migratory and reproductive patterns of the world’s wildlife has proved more challenging. Though we have now asserted control over the world’s biologists, there is no accounting for the unauthorised observations of farmers, gardeners, bird-watchers and other troublemakers. We have therefore been forced to drive migrating birds, fish and insects into higher latitudes, and to release several million tonnes of plant pheromones every year to accelerate flowering and fruiting. None of this is cheap, and ever more public money, secretly diverted from national accounts by compliant governments, is required to sustain it.
The co-operation of these governments requires unflagging effort. The capture of George W. Bush, a late convert to the cause of Communist World Government, was made possible only by the threatened release of footage filmed by a knight at Yale, showing the future president engaged in coitus with a Ford Mustang. Most ostensibly-capitalist governments remain apprised of where their real interests lie, though I note with disappointment that we have so far failed to eliminate Vaclav Klaus. Through the offices of compliant states, the Master’s third grand law has been accepted: world government will be established under the guise of controlling manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.
Keeping the scientific community in line remains a challenge. The national academies are becoming ever more querulous and greedy, and require higher pay-offs each year. The inexplicable events of the past month, in which the windows of all the leading scientific institutions were broken and a horse’s head turned up in James Hansen’s bed, appear to have staved off the immediate crisis, but for how much longer can we maintain the consensus?
Knights Carbonic, now that the hour of our triumph is at hand, I urge you all to redouble your efforts. In the name of the Master, go forth and terrify.
Professor Ernst Kattweizel, University of Redcar. 21st Grand Warden of the Temple of the Knights Carbonic.”



This is the kind of conspiracy the deniers need to reveal to show that manmade climate change is a con. The hacked emails are a hard knock, but the science of global warming withstands much more than that.

[Dr Mordrid]

My quote is more recent and in context to the situation, meaning the effect of the release of these documents. October is then, this is now.

[cjolley]

My quote is more recent and in context to the situation, meaning the effect of the release of these documents. October is then, this is now.

No it isn't. It's from exactly the same article.
"The Knights Carbonic" Nov. 23


PS You think it's October because you didn't actually read it.

[Dr Mordrid]

WSJ....

How to Forge a Consensus

The impression left by the Climategate emails is that the global warming game has been rigged from the start.

The climatologists at the center of last week's leaked-email and document scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes, the wording of the some of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this in no way undermines the underlying science, which is as certain as ever.

"What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world," Penn State's Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made "something innocent into something nefarious."

Phil Jones, Director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues," he said this week.

We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. His May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report: "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?" does not "read well," it's true. (Mr. Mann has said he didn't delete any such emails.)

But the furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or even whether climatologists are nice people in private. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at in the first place, and how even now a single view is being enforced. In short, the impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.

According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the "peer-review" process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges that critics have lobbed at climatologists from outside this clique are routinely dismissed and disparaged.

This past September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who fact-checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds—including some in Mr. Mann's work—on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more-famous papers.

As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted to several colleagues in an email from March 2003, when the journal "Climate Research" published a paper not to Mr. Mann's liking, that "This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to that—take over a journal!"

The scare quotes around "peer-reviewed literature," by the way, are Mr. Mann's. He went on in the email to suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board." In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, re-define what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views. It's easy to manufacture a scientific consensus when you get to decide what counts as science.

The response to this among the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science we've got. The proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.

Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know how good it really is. And then, one is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim. If there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd love to hear it.

[cjolley]

I'm sure that with that much material a lot of quote mining is to be had.
Such as the one going around re Manbiot that you picked up.

Doesn't change the science one whit.
Just gives the right something to chatter about for a while.

And I would think that the WSJ opinion page would be just about the last place anyone should go to be informed about science.

[Brian Ellis]

For me, there is a more telling reason than climate change why we should cut down on fossil fuel use:

Public health

For me, this is the most telling argument to act rapidly. If carbon dioxide were the only problem, then the urgency would be less. The problem is that every vehicle exhaust pipe, every power station stack, every domestic chimney, if these are all using fossil fuels directly or indirectly, are emitting other pollutants. These are causing diseases of epidemic proportions. Skin and lung diseases, including cancer, emphysema and asthma are just the tip of the iceberg, the visible results. The invisible results are damage to the body's immune system and a whole host of other new and old diseases find it even easier to gain a strong foothold. These indirect costs of our fossil-fuel economy are swingeing and are bleeding health services dry in most countries. If we reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent, the cost may be high but the collectivity would save far more than it would cost.

I ask all those who are over about 50 to think back to how many kids in your class suffered from asthma. Then ask how many kids in a class of 30 have an inhaler in their pocket today. This report shows that, in the USA, school absence days due to asthma in 1980-82 were 6.6 million, rising to 14.0 million in 1994-1996. Other reports evoke a 160 percent increase in the last ten years. Other juvenile diseases, such as severe migraines, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes have been following similar progressions. I am not saying that these are all directly due to pollution from burning fossil fuels, but I am sure that it is contributory.

Over the past few years, we have seen outbreaks of a number of apparently new diseases or an increase in the apparent virulence of previously known diseases. These include bird 'flu, SARS, ebola, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and a number of others. Have you not thought that the reason why these are becoming serious is not because they are new (they have always been around in other species) but that the human immune system is weakened and cannot fight against trans-species transmission? I have no proof of this hypothesis, but neither can I rule it out. What we do know is that the immune system is weaker, partly because improved hygiene does not expose us to as many pathogens as in the past and partly as a result of pollution-related effects.

Perhaps the most telling argument is that the World Health Organisation estimates that 3,000,000 persons die each year from diseases caused by pollution from energy use. At least ten times this number receive treatment − often for long periods of time − for the same diseases, many of them being so afflicted as being unable to work. This is 2½ times the number of people killed or incapacitated in road accidents and is about equal to deaths from AIDS (the propagation of which, incidentally, may also be aggravated by energy-related pollution reducing the body's effectiveness of the immune system).

I therefore state, quite categorically, that we cannot afford NOT to act against fossil fuels for fear that the cost of health care will be out of the reach of ordinary people. Health care and insurance is the biggest economic inflationary influence in most countries, developed and developing alike.

If you do want to argue the toss about the pros and cons of climate change, like kids in the schoolyard, I recommend the book reviewed at http://www.cypenv.info/books/files/pittock.aspx:

Unlike the many other books I have read on the subject, the points of view of the naysayers, the sceptics and the ignorant (grouped as 'contrarians') are also discussed with their pros and cons. Dr Pittock does not hesitate to discuss the pros and cons of the ayesayers, as well, and the IPCC position, into the bargain. This is one good reason why I say the book is unique.

[Dr Mordrid]

National and economic security are better arguments to make, especially in the US (imported oil) and Europe (Russian pipeline manipulations).

As for asthma: something I have a great deal of experience with since I've been asthmatic since age 18 months - 58+ years. Just blaming it on fossil fuels is being too simplistic.

1. Genetic predisposition. Some people are just born with hyperactive immune systems, some so active that they cause problems of their own. Some aren't. See Darwin.

2. The hygiene hypothesis, which I very much agree with. Excessive medical treatments, excessive cleanliness and modern environmental factors bring on most asthmas;

a. Excessive cleanliness. Our sometimes overly-clean culture reduces the opportunities a child's immune system has to train itself in fighting off organisms. In the absence of something 'real' to fight it takes on everything else foreign to excess.

Lesson: let the kid eat dirt pies now and then.

b. Early use of antibiotics. Using antibiotics can modify the gut flora, causing fundamental changes in the immune system. Recently this has also been associated with obesity as 'normal' and morbidly obese persons have radically different flora colonies growing in their guts.

c. Caesarean birth. Again a different gut flora profile in those born using c-section causing a +20% rate of asthma over other populations.

d. Environmental. Pollens, tobacco smoke, pollutants, particulates etc. as both exacerbating and causal factors. This can tie into example a as in an effort to be hyper-hygienic (see the TV commercials targeted at housewives) we introduce cleaning chemicals that are problems in themselves.

2. Use of Tylenol/acetaminophen/paracetamol. Several mechanisms under study, but one under close scrutiny is an IgE (immunoglobulin E) interaction with acetaminophen being the antigenic agent.

and the research goes on.

[cjolley]

Brian,
I get a 404 error when I go to your link.

[Brian Ellis]

Brian,
I get a 404 error when I go to your link.

Sorry, colon got into the URL. Now corrected

[Dr Mordrid]

Toronto Sun.....

Botch after botch after botch'

Leaked 'climategate' documents show huge flaws in the backbone of climate change science

I've been poring over one of many leaked computer files from the "climategate" scandal.

It's worse than those e-mails revealing leading climate scientists did a "trick" to "hide the decline" in global temperatures and privately called it a "travesty" they couldn't explain recent cooling.

This document has the innocuous header "HARRY_READ_Me.txt."

- "But what are all those monthly files? DON'T KNOW, UNDOCUMENTED. Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names. And that's useless ..." (Page 17)

- "It's botch after botch after botch." (18)

- "The biggest immediate problem was the loss of an hour's edits to the program, when the network died ... no explanation from anyone, I hope it's not a return to last year's troubles ... This surely is the worst project I've ever attempted. Eeeek." (31)

- "Oh, GOD, if I could start this project again and actually argue the case for junking the inherited program suite." (37)

- "... this should all have been rewritten from scratch a year ago!" (45)

- "Am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!!" (47)

- "As far as I can see, this renders the (weather) station counts totally meaningless." (57)

- "COBAR AIRPORT AWS (data from an Australian weather station) cannot start in 1962, it didn't open until 1993!" (71)

- "What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah -- there is no 'supposed,' I can make it up. So I have : - )" (98)

- "You can't imagine what this has cost me -- to actually allow the operator to assign false WMO (World Meteorological Organization) codes!! But what else is there in such situations? Especially when dealing with a 'Master' database of dubious provenance ..." (98)

- "So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option -- to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations ... In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad ..." (98-9)

- "OH F--- THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done, I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases." (241).

- "This whole project is SUCH A MESS ..." (266)

[Dr Mordrid]

James Corbett's Corbett Report interview with Dr. Tim Ball (climatologist)

YouTube link...

10 minutes.

[Dr Mordrid]

So...we are to believe that they never heard of data archival services or terabyte HDD's?

I can understand not archiving intermediate or redundant data, but to throw away your RAW samples in a major research? Would your Masters supervisor accept that kind of data handling? Doctoral? Would you accept that kind of practice with your medical records? I don't think so.

Ex: medical records - we microfilmed everything going back to the 1880's before a paper dump that started in the 1970's and digitized the microfilms as soon as the tech became available. All that data is still available.

I'm sorry, but the more that comes out the more this sounds like the GW thesis is based on highly questionable smooged data and that the RAW data was thrown under the bus to avoid skeptics from discovering that fact.

A select few who do each others "peer review" and try to keep from publication all who question their ideas and stop same from getting any RAW data in the first place. Then, when criticized (ex: the Wegman Report), they scream "NOT PEER REVIEWED!!"- which of course means any criticism of their work should be submitted to their social network for approval

More theology than science.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

Climate change data dumped

Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.