The One & Only Global Warming Thread, Part 7 (including environmentalism and energy)

[arminius]

Originally Posted by movielib

These emails confirm many of the things skeptics had been thinking all along.

I'm still not as optimistic as Prof Ball. I think the media and politicians are still going to support these alarmists as much as they can and they will probably not lose their jobs. But the public, at least, has a fresh dose of how they stink - the biggest dose ever. It's going to make it harder for them to keep advancing an agenda that is already pretty much stalled.

This is what bothers me. Even with something this blatant that were the roles reversed skeptics would have been destroyed in the media, there is nothing happening. Where is the outrage at all the waste caused by a bunch of bastards with a get rich quick scheme based on misery for millions of people. Something is really rotten in the state of the 4th estate.

[movielib]

Another delusional post from an alarmist. I post this only because of its excessive nastiness (more than most) and because there is a very good response from another professed alarmist.

http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/200...te-not-likely/

Climategate? Not likely.
Posted on November 20, 2009 by Brian Angliss

In case you were unaware, hackers got into the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) servers and published hundreds to thousands of documents and private communications from CRU climate scientists that pertain to climate disruption. And the climate disruption denial and conservative blogs have subsequently gone completely apeshit over it. The Wonk Room has a few of the better quotes from the deniers:

“If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW,” says the Telegraph’s James Delingpole.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss “repetitive, false data of higher temperatures.”

The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, “The blue-dress moment may have arrived.”

“The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century,” blares Michelle Malkin.

The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are “proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in moderrn [sic] science.”

So, do these emails and documents represent proof of a “conspiracy” and “scandal”? At this point it seems highly unlikely, and the more that people look at the illegally-obtained emails and documents, the less likely it will become. Here’s why.

First, there has been much ado made about some emails that supposedly talk about “tricks” and procedures to “hide the decline”, as well as other words used that indicate that the CRU scientists (and their various correspondents) were lying about their data (something that RealClimate discusses). And it’s much ado about nothing (with apologies to Shakespeare). I work in electrical engineering where I use words and phrases that, taken out of context, could be misinterpreted as nefarious by people who are ignorant of the context or who have an axe to grind. For example, I regularly talk about “fiddling with” or “twiddling” the data, “faking out” something, “messing around with” testing, and so on. In the first case, I’m analyzing the data to see if I can make it make sense or if I can extract the signal from the noise. In the second case, I’m often forced to force a piece of electronics into a specific mode manually so I can test it and verify some other function, or I use the phrase to provide artificial test data for calibration and/or verification that my electronics are working correctly. And in the third case, it usually involves trying to deduce whether a problem is caused by the electronic board I;m testing or by the equipment that is doing the testing.

Second, it might be unpolitical to say that you’ll be happy when someone died, or that Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts are pricks and assholes, but that doesn’t make the statements a scandal. I personally was happy when former Senator Jesse Helms died, and I will probably enjoy a drink of expensive scotch when Marc Morano, James Inhofe, and Steve Milloy kick the bucket. And I’ve got no problem calling someone like Joe D’Aleo a liar or Steve Milloy an oxygen thief. If that makes me a bad person, well, I’m OK with that. I expect that most people hold enough contempt for some of their enemies to relish it when they die. So it’s not political and it’s not nice or decent, but it’s also not scandalous. It’s still human, and scientists are just as human as anyone else.

Third and probably most importantly, no matter how much the deniers scream, these emails aren’t likely to reveal any evidence of scientific malfeasance. And even if they do, there’s an entire globe of researchers whose independent research has bolstered the case that climate disruption is real and that it’s predominantly caused by human civilization. It will take more than even a couple of thousand emails to knock the massive, reinforced scientific foundation that underlies anthropogenic climate disruption.

And let’s not forget – the emails and documents were obtained illegally. If there is truly damning information (such as a critical scientist or three overtly saying stuff along the lines of “I fudged my data and nobody caught me. You lost the bet – pay up.”), then the illegality of the release will fade somewhat in the face of other data. But if not, this hack will be a major problem for not only the hackers who released it but also for all the people who are republishing the emails. Hacking is illegal, but in some states and countries, releasing private email correspondence is considered breach of privacy and is thus also a crime.

Finally, let’s point out that some of the people here screaming the loudest from their soapboxes are hypocrites (such as Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey). If the hackers had got into military computers and released private communications, they’d be screaming for the hackers’ blood and demanding that any site republishing the emails be brought up on federal charges. But here they’re screaming for the victim’s blood. If hacking and leaking emails is wrong, then it’s wrong. Claiming that it’s wrong when a leak targets your friends but OK when it targets your enemy makes you a hypocrite and a political hack worthy of nothing but disdain.

There’s a chance that the hack will end the career of a scientists or two, probably for political reasons. But the supposedly damning emails the conservatives and deniers are touting are nothing of the sort. And given how strong the science is, it can survive this latest round of denier dirty tricks.

For anyone interested, here’s a link to a Memeorandum page where there’s lots of links about this topic.

The comment:

#25 Ron, November 21, 2009 at 8:35 am :

As a long time AGW supporter I must say I found the emails very disturbing.

I don’t know if they qualify as “smoking gun” that the AGW science is bust, but I just cannot ignore it.

I feel ashamed for the behavior of our leading scientists. Even more than feeling ashamed – I feel betrayed.

For years I trusted that science will prevail over the unsubstantiated skeptic view. These emails reveal a very disturbing picture of ideology overriding science. Science being bent out of shape to support a hypothesis.

They reveal unbelievable arrogance. These people whom I trusted so much think they are
- above the law (destroying email, refusing FOIA, tax evasion)
- above the data (“hide the decline”, remove the cooling blimp)
- above their peers (get uncomforting journal editors fired, block skeptic publications)
- above the rest of us (manipulate the message, presentation and media)

I am sick to my stomach. I know there are so many other hard working scientists that have not tainted themselves. But this group – Phil Jones, Ken Briffa, Mike Man[n], Gavin Schmidt have casted a huge shadow of doubt over the entire field and caused a huge damage to the green movement.

I talked with many of my friends who, like most of us, continue to believe in AGW, and we think that as long as these guys continue to lead the science and the IPCC assessments they will continue to taint all of the good work done by thousands of other scientists.

We need to acknowledge that wrong was done. We need to replace the tainted leadership and continue the research without the air of doubt.

While I, of course, disagree with Ron that CAGW is viable, I respect that he recognizes this is a big deal and this cabal has not covered itself in glory. Not many alarmists are getting it.

[movielib]

Good WSJ article.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125883405294859215.html

NOVEMBER 21, 2009, 3:39 P.M. ET
Hacked Emails Show Climate Science Ridden with Rancor
By KEITH JOHNSON

The picture that emerges of prominent climate-change scientists from the more than 3,000 documents and emails accessed by hackers and put on the Internet this week is one of professional backbiting and questionable scientific practices. It could undermine the idea that the science of man-made global warming is entirely settled just weeks before a crucial climate-change summit.

Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England, were victims of a cyberattack by hackers sometime Thursday. A collection of emails dating back to the mid-1990s as well as scientific documents were splashed across the Internet. University officials confirmed the hacker attack, but couldn't immediately confirm the authenticity of all the documents posted on the Internet.

The publicly posted material includes years of correspondence among leading climate researchers, most of whom participate in the preparation of climate-change reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authoritative summaries of global climate science that influence policy makers around the world.

The release of the documents comes just weeks before a big climate-change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, meant to lay the groundwork for a new global treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change. Momentum for an agreement has been undermined by the economic slump, which has put environmental issues on the back burner in most countries, and by a 10-year cooling trend in global temperatures that runs contrary to many of the dire predictions in climate models such as the IPCC's.

A partial review of the emails shows that in many cases, climate scientists revealed that their own research wasn't always conclusive. In others, they discussed ways to paper over differences among themselves in order to present a "unified" view on climate change. On at least one occasion, climate scientists were asked to "beef up" conclusions about climate change and extreme weather events because environmental officials in one country were planning a "big public splash."

The release of the documents has given ammunition to many skeptics of man-made global warming, who for years have argued that the scientific "consensus" was less robust than the official IPCC summaries indicated and that climate researchers systematically ostracized other scientists who presented findings that differed from orthodox views.

Since the hacking, many Web sites catering to climate skeptics have pored over the material and concluded that it shows a concerted effort to distort climate science. Other Web sites catering to climate scientists have dismissed those claims.

The tension between those two camps is apparent in the emails. More recent messages showed climate scientists were increasingly concerned about blog postings and articles on leading skeptical Web sites. Much of the internal discussion over scientific papers centered on how to pre-empt attacks from prominent skeptics, for example.

Fellow scientists who disagreed with orthodox views on climate change were variously referred to as "prats" and "utter prats." In other exchanges, one climate researcher said he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap out of" a prominent, skeptical U.S. climate scientist.

In several of the emails, climate researchers discussed how to arrange for favorable reviewers for papers they planned to publish in scientific journals. At the same time, climate researchers at times appeared to pressure scientific journals not to publish research by other scientists whose findings they disagreed with.

One email from 1999, titled "CENSORED!!!!!" showed one U.S.-based scientist uncomfortable with such tactics. "As for thinking that it is 'Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us' … as though we are the gatekeepers of all that is acceptable in the world of paleoclimatology seems amazingly arrogant. Science moves forward whether we agree with individual articles or not," the email said.

More recent exchanges centered on requests by independent climate researchers for access to data used by British scientists for some of their papers. The hacked folder is labeled "FOIA," a reference to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by other scientists for access to raw data used to reach conclusions about global temperatures.

Many of the email exchanges discussed ways to decline such requests for information, on the grounds that the data was confidential or was intellectual property. In other email exchanges related to the FOIA requests, some U.K. researchers asked foreign scientists to delete all emails related to their work for the upcoming IPCC summary. In others, they discussed boycotting scientific journals that require them to make their data public.

Not much we haven't heard here but I had not seen the one mentioned in the last sentence.

Of course, skeptics have for years criticized journals for not requiring authors to release their data. It's unbelievable that that would not be a requirement. We know the alarmists have avoided releasing that data whenever possible. In fact the last of many scandals before this one was the infamous Briffa Yamal scandal where a journal finally required such data release and we found many of the Hockey Sticks were essentially dependent on one tree. That alarmists would actually boycott journals that required such information to be published only suggests they have something (or many things) to hide.

As I said above, the alarmists proved themselves guilty of at least many of the things the skeptics had long been accusing them of. But until two days ago the alarmists had always denied they were doing these things and calling the skeptics paranoid and conspiracy theorists. Now that they have been caught red handed their defense is, in effect: yes, we a bunch of petty, vindictive, nasty lowlifes who indeed have done what the skeptics have been saying. But that doesn't matter because we're still right.

Yeah, right. Keep trying to sell that garbage.

[movielib]

Australian scientist Joanne Nova, a former believer in CAGW, has released the Skeptics Handbook II. It's an excellent, easy to understand sequel to the original Skeptics Handbook.

Part I: http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarmi...ook_2-3_lq.pdf

Part II: http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarmi...ook_II-sml.pdf

Good for people who have not really looked into any of this and just accept the so-called consensus position.

[movielib]

Putting the CRU emails into context. Certainly this vindicates the fine, honest, upstanding alarmists we all know and love.

http://www.globalwarming.org/2009/11...is-everything/

CRU’s Climate Tricksters–Context is Everything
by Myron Ebell

November 21, 2009 @ 3:49 pm

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Tags: Ben Santer, cei, climate research, Climatic Research Unit, CRU, fraud, Michael Mann, patrick michaels, Phil Jones
CRU’s Climate Tricksters–Context is Everything

In the case of the apparently scandalous leaked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit in England, it’s all a matter of getting the context right. That’s what Professor Michael E Mann, the fabricator of the celebrated hockey stick graph, told the Washington Post. Here’s what he said in Juliet Eilperin’s story today:

Michael E. Mann, who directs the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said in a telephone interview from Paris that skeptics “are taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious.”

I agree with Professor Mann that the context in which something is written or said or done is always critical. So let’s look at the context of a couple of these e-mails. Here’s one that looks pretty bad until you understand the context:

From: Ben Santer

To: P.Jones

Subject: Re: CEI formal petition to derail EPA GHG endangerment finding with charge that destruction of CRU raw data undermines integrity of global temperature record

Date: Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:07:56 -0700

I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Now let’s put that in context. Dr. Ben Santer is a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. In the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment Report (1995), he was the lead author of a chapter and cleverly cut off the early and later years of a dataset, so that the resulting graph would show that global temperatures were only going in one direction in recent years–rapidly upwards. In fact, temperatures were just as high in earlier years and had declined in the most recent years, but that data at both ends was cleverly deleted. This made the graph much easier to understand correctly. So the first bit of context is that Dr. Santer is an outstanding scientist of fine and upstanding character.

The next bit of context is that CEI–the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which is where I work)–had filed a petition with the Environmental Protection Agency to re-open a regulatory decision that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare on the basis of an affidavit by Dr. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute. Michaels explained that it had recently been revealed that Professor Phil Jones, director of the CRU, had destroyed much of the original raw data he used to compile the global mean temperature record. EPA relied on the CRU global temperature record, but the lack of underlying data means that the CRU record cannot be analyzed or reproduced. That means that EPA must take Professor Jones’s work on trust, which of course is standard operating procedure in all good climate research. Dr. Michaels is clearly just being disagreeable. Everyone knows that we can trust Professor Jones’s honesty and utter scientific competence.

[Note by movielib: Dr Santer also changed much of what had been in his chapter in that IPCC Second Assessment Report to say that human caused global warming was established even though the chapter originally didn't say that and all the authors had agreed to the original wording. He made this change and deleted many statements to the effect that it was too early to blame CO2 emissions with no agreement from his co-authors. This is surely one of the most dishonest and underhanded moves in the history of science. See Christopher Booker's new book, The Real Global Warming Disaster, pages 62-68.]

Now, what is Dr. Santer writing in this e-mail to Professor Jones? Clearly this is the sort of high level scientific communication that ordinary people often can’t understand or de-code. It contains the kind of innocent remark that tip-top scientists are always making. And you can see that Dr. Santer is a real wit. I bet Professor Jones couldn’t stop laughing. The phrase “beat the crap out of him” is a common pleasantry among this tip-top scientific crowd. It merely means that the next time Dr. Santer runs into Dr. Michaels, he’ll be sure to greet him heartily and say something like, “Pat, my dear esteemed colleague, it’s so good to see you. Phil and I were just a tiny bit annoyed that you would be so silly as to call attention to the lack of data, but all is forgiven. You know that you can always trust us.”

So now that we know the context, we can plainly see that the appearance–that Dr. Santer is a nasty bully who is too cowardly to say in person to Dr. Michaels what he wrote in an e-mail–is completely misleading. Dr. Santer is transparently a prince of a fellow. Score one for Professor Michael Mann.

Here’s another e-mail where the appearance looks bad. You’ve just got to understand it in context:

From: Phil Jones

To: ray bradley, mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx ,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim‘s got a diagram here we‘ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.

I‘ve just completed Mike‘s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from
1961 for Keith‘s to hide the decline. Mike‘s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for
1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999
with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Now let’s quickly put that in context before anyone draws the wrong conclusions. For people who don’t know any better, this looks like Professor Phil Jones, director of the CRU, is saying that he has used a “trick” that he got from Professor Michael Mann in order to “hide the decline.” First of all, we know that Professor Jones is a man of high integrity (as well as high competence in his field), so he would never do anything dishonest, sneaky, or duplicitous. Second, “trick” is a technical term often employed by the cream of climate scientists. It simply means employing a clever (or “slick”) method to accomplish some technical goal (in this case, “to hide the decline”). Anyone can see that “trick” is a much shorter and more elegant way to say that. And you’ve got to admire the verbal facility of these tip-top scientists. They are as articulate and literate as they are scientifically tip-top.

What is the clever method that Professor Jones learned from Professor Mann? I think he is referring to the way Professor Mann constructed his celebrated hockey stick graph. His proxy records showed flat temperatures for the past thousand years, including the past century. But everyone knows that temperatures have gone up rapidly in the past few decades. That’s what the surface temperature record compiled by Professor Jones at CRU shows. And everyone knows that Professor Jones’s temperature record is irreproachable, even though he destroyed the raw data. So what Professor Mann did was splice the last few decades of surface temperature records onto his proxy record. Voila!–the hockey stick. Over nine centuries of flat temperatures and then rapid warming in the late twentieth century. What Professor Mann did was simply make sure that ordinary people weren’t misled by the proxy data.

What does Professor Jones mean, then, by “to hide the decline”? I’m not sure, but I expect he’s just doing what Professor Mann did. He’s got some obviously misleading data, which he doesn’t want people to see so they won’t get confused and draw the wrong conclusion. So he’s hiding it for our own good. This just shows what a chivalrous and deeply caring man Professor Jones is.

There you have it. Context is everything. And you’ve got to hand it to Professor Michael E. Mann. He sure knows his context. Pennsylvania State University can be just as proud of him as the University of East Anglia undoubtedly is of their Climatic Research Unit and its head, Professor Phil Jones.

[movielib]

Roy Spencer, undeniably one of the top climate scientists in the world (and a skeptic) weighs in: The "elitist" alarmists.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/11/...ming-alarmism/

ClimateGate and the Elitist Roots of Global Warming Alarmism
November 21st, 2009 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

The hundreds of e-mails being made public after someone hacked into Phil Jones’ Climatic Research Unit (CRU) computer system offer a revealing peek inside the IPCC machine. It will take some time before we know whether any illegal activity has been uncovered (e.g. hiding or destruction of data to avoid Freedom of Information Act inquiries).

Some commentators even think this is the beginning of the end for the IPCC. I doubt it.

The scientists at the center of this row are defending themselves. Phil Jones has claimed that some of the more alarming statements in his e-mails have been taken out of context. The semi-official response from RealClimate.org, a website whose roots can be traced to George Soros (which I’m sure is irrelevant), claims the whole episode is much ado about nothing.

At a minimum, some of these e-mails reveal an undercurrent of elitism that many of us have always claimed existed in the IPCC. These scientists look upon us skeptics with scorn. It is well known that the IPCC machine is made up of bureaucrats and scientists who think they know how the world should be run. The language contained in a draft of the latest climate treaty (meant to replace the Kyoto treaty) involves global governance and the most authoritarian means by which people’s energy use will be restricted and monitored by the government.

Even if this language does not survive in the treaty’s final form, it illustrates the kind of people we are dealing with. The IPCC folks jet around the world to all kinds of exotic locations for their UN-organized meetings where they eat the finest food. Their gigantic carbon footprints stomp around the planet as they deride poor Brazilian farmers who convert jungle into farmland simply to survive.

Even mainstream journalists, who are usually on board with the latest environmental craze, have commented on this blatant display of hypocrisy. It seems like those participating – possibly the best example being Al Gore — are not even aware of how it looks to the rest of us.

The elitist attitudes exist elsewhere, too. While the skeptics’ blogs allow those who disagree to post opinions as long as they remain civil about it, RealClimate.org routinely ignores or deletes posts that might cast doubt on their tidy worldview. The same thing happens at Wikipedia, where a gatekeeper deletes newly posted content that departs from the IPCC party line.

A few of the CRU e-mails suggest that manipulation of climate data in order to reduce the signature of natural climate variations, and to exaggerate the supposed evidence for manmade climate change, is OK with these folks. Apparently, the ends justify the means.

The defense posted at RealClimate.org actually reinforces my point. Do the IPCC scientists assume that this is how all climate scientists behave? If it really was how the rest of us behave, why would our eyebrows be raised up to our hairlines as we read the e-mails?

If all of this sounds incompatible with the process of scientific investigation, it shouldn’t. One of the biggest misconceptions the public has about science is that research is a straightforward process of making measurements, and then seeing whether the data support hypothesis A or B. The truth is that the interpretation of data is seldom that simple.

There are all kinds of subjective decisions that must be made along the way, and the scientist must remain vigilant that he or she is not making those decisions based upon preconceived notions. Data are almost always dirty, with errors of various kinds. Which data will be ignored? Which data will be emphasized? How will the data be processed to tease out the signal we think we see?

Hopefully, the scientist is more interested in discovering how nature really works, rather than twisting the data to support some other agenda. It took me years to develop the discipline to question every research result I got. It is really easy to be wrong in this business, and very difficult to be right.

Skepticism really is at the core of scientific progress. I’m willing to admit that I could be wrong about all my views on manmade global warming. Can the IPCC scientists admit the same thing?

Year after year, the evidence keeps mounting that most climate research now being funded is for the purpose of supporting the IPCC’s politics, not to find out how nature works. The ‘data spin’ is increasingly difficult to ignore or to explain away as just sloppy science. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…

[movielib]

We've known for a long time about the alarmists' gall in complaining about maybe $20 million in funding that skeptics have received in funding from Exxon while they have reaped $80 billion from the US government alone. And the MSM, instead of exposing this discrepancy and calling out the alarmists for such hypocrisy merely parrot their complaints. This has been one of the most ridiculous story lines (and that is saying a lot) throughout this two decades long travesty.

So far, the CRU hack has been publicized mostly for the emails. Now people are starting to look more closely at the documents and more is coming out. Here is a look at that blatant discrepancy in funding and the underlying dishonesty and hypocrisy in pushing the alarmists' story line.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/...ate_alarm.html

November 22, 2009
CRU Files Betray Climate Alarmists' Funding Hypocrisy
By Marc Sheppard

It seems that while scientists who accept funding from oil companies are branded as bought-and-paid-for shills, those financed by renewable energy interests remain unchallenged authorities in their fields. Words can’t adequately express my astonishment.

Amid the thousands of files apparently misappropriated from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week sit two documents on the subject of the unit’s funding. One is a spreadsheet (pdj_grant_since1990.xls) logging the various grants CRU chief PD Jones has received since 1990. It lists 55 such endowments from agencies ranging from the U.S Department of Energy to NATO and worth a total of £13,718,547 or approximately 22.6 million USD. I guess cooking climate data can be an expensive habit, particularly for an oft-quoted and highly exalted U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief climatologist.

But it’s actually the second document (potential-funding.doc) that tells the more compelling tale. In addition to four government sources of potential CRU funding, it lists an equal number of “energy agencies” they might put the bite on. Three -- the Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative and the Energy Saving Trust -- are UK-based consultancy and funding specialists promoting “new energy” technologies with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth -- Renewables North West -- is an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind and geothermal energy in the Pacific Northwest.

Needless to say, all four of these CRU “potential funding sources” have an undeniably intrinsic financial interest in the promotion of the carbochondriacal reports CRU is ready, willing, and able to dish out ostensibly on-demand. And equally obvious is that Jones is all too aware that a renewable energy-funded CRU will remain the world’s premiere authority on the subject of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) despite any appearance of conflict.

And yet, no such latitude has ever been extended to scientists in the skeptical camp.

For instance, when MIT’s Richard Lindzen delivers one of his trademark brilliant presentations leading to the conclusion that climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is about 0.5°C, not the 1.5°-5°C predicted by IPCC models, all we hear from alarmists and complicit media types is that the professor once charged oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services and is therefore an unreliable big-oil hack.

Or when S. Fred Singer challenges the IPCC to explain whether water vapor and clouds represent positive or negative feedback or stands before a graph depicted temperatures decreasing over the past 10 years while CO2 climbed and declares that “the relationship is meaningless,” his words are similarly dismissed based solely on the fact that he has received funding from ExxonMobil.

Let’s set aside the fact that Lindzen had actually accepted a total of $10,000 in expenses and expert witness fees from such interests on the day he ceased such activities two decades ago. And that Singer has received only $20,000 from ExxonMobil. And that climate realists are out-funded by alarmists by several orders of magnitude, which leads to the artificial expansion of the number of scientists who appear to support alarmist views. And even that monies paid to either side of the debate have zero impact on the science of whether or not 20th century warming was caused or exacerbated by manmade CO2 emissions. And don’t get me started on carbon-millionaire Al Gore.

The issue is this – Just how is it that funding from renewable energy interests evades charges of bias yet subsidies from traditional power entities scream bloody-conflict when each is equally friendly to the recipient’s cause?

As with all things AGW, the alarmist quick-draw-canard that the science is settled but for a few outlying scientists in the pockets of the fossil-fuel industry is quickly losing whatever civic support it may have had. And the scientific subterfuge surfaced last week by the CRU emails and documents represents but the latest of many recent outrages sure to accelerate the ongoing public awakening to the hoax which has been perpetrated upon them.

In the broader scheme, the credibility blow the IPCC will likely suffer because the majority of those data manipulation revealing emails flowed from the fingertips of its senior authors and editors will weaken and perhaps ultimately break the AGW orthodoxy spine its politically-charged assessments have erected. And that can only serve to further declaw their fellow alarmists and media minions – which of course would be nothing short of stupendous.

For as Lord Christopher Monckton emphasized in his rousing speech to close the second International Conference on Climate Change in New York City last March:

“There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis.”

And it has become abundantly clear that it is not, nor was it ever, the AGW skeptics who have been the li[a]rs. Or the cheaters.

Or the bought-and-paid-for hypocrites.

[movielib]

Britain's Plane Stupid envirogroup, which specializes in demonizing air travel, illustrates once again just how plain stupid they are.



400 kg is also the weight of five average male Plane Stupid members or six average female members. If they have that many members.

[movielib]

Alarmists' logical fallacies.

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1355

Climategate Peer Review: Science red in tooth and claw
Published by William Briggs at 7:39 am, 11-22-09

I am a scientist and I have lived around fellow scientists for many years and I know their feeding habits well. I therefore know that the members of our secular priesthood are ordinary folk. But civilians were blind to this fact because our public relations department has labored hard to tell the world of our sanctity. “Scientists use peer review which is scientific and allows ex cathedra utterances. Amen.”

But the CRU “climategate” emails have revealed the truth that scientists are just people and that peer review is saturated with favoritism, and this has shocked many civilians. It has shaken their faith and left them sputtering. They awoke to the horrible truth: Scientists are just people!

Now all the world can see that scientists, like their civilians brothers, are nasty, brutish, and short-tempered. They are prejudiced, spiteful, and just downright unfriendly. They are catty, vindictive, scornful, manipulative, narrow-minded, and nearly incapable of admitting to a mistake. And they are cliquey.

Thus, we see that the CRU crew define a “good scientist” as one who agrees with them, a “bad scientist” or “no scientist” as one who does not agree with them, and a “mediocre scientist” as somebody who mostly agrees with them. Further, these judgments are carried to the peer-review process.

Claiming lack of peer review was once a reasonable weapon in scientists’ argument armamentarium. After climategate, all can see that this line of logic is as effective as a paper sword.

For example: the CRU crew publicly cry, “If our skeptics had anything to say, let them do it through peer review, otherwise their claims don’t count.” Never mind that this parry is a logical fallacy—an argument is not refuted because it was uttered outside a members-only journal. Pay attention to what they say privately:

Proving bad behavior [about peer review] is very difficult. If you think that [Geophysical Research Letters editor] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.1

They say that this journal or that one, because it dared publish peer-reviewed work that did not agree with the CRU consensus should be banished from the fold, and that its editors should resign or be booted, and that everybody should agree not to cite papers from those journals, and so on.

In other words, use muscle and not mind if you don’t like the results. Get rid of the editor and put an agreeable apparatchik in his place.

Another popular thrust: claim that it wasn’t real, genuine, honest-to-goodness peer review that led to skeptical findings being published. Something must have gone horribly wrong for those papers to have seen the light of day! Peer reviewed is thus implicitly defined as that process which publishes only those views that agree with prior convictions.

Sensing that that tactic could fail, some said, “Aha!, let’s see if we can disparage the authors of those skeptical papers: if we can successfully savage and malign them, then their findings are wrong.”

Yes, sir, dear reader, you guessed it. Another logical fallacy. It is absolutely no argument whatsoever to say a finding is wrong because its purveyor is “not a real climatologist” or “has not published much” or that he “has few citations from previous papers.”

It is also a fallacy to say that because a skeptical argument has appeared on a website—and could not pass through the gauntlet of the good-old-boy peer review system—that it need not be answered.

Here’s some advice to my fellow scientists: If an argument appears on a website, or on FOX news, or in a newspaper, or even on the back of the t-shirt, and that argument fails, then simply say so and say why. And then be done with it. Do not make an ass of yourself by claiming that answering criticisms that do not come from your circle of friends is beneath you.

If an argument that is old and has been well refuted elsewhere, say so, and say where a reliable refutation may be found. It makes you look desperate and foolish to say that the argument came from a blogger and is therefore suspect. And it makes people believe the blogger.

Anyway, do not cry foul over skeptical blogs and then simultaneously publish your own blog to disseminate your own beliefs. “They can’t publish a blog but we can.” That just looks stupid.

But don’t let’s get too carried away, everybody. These kind of behind-the-scenes activities, perhaps more heated in some respects, are the same in every field. Climate scientists are people and so are scientists in other areas. Bad behavior is nothing new and will never change, because people will always be people.

—————————————————————————–

1 I wrote to the author of those words and asked, “I can understand that you feel strongly about the matter, but does your conviction run to harming the career of a fellow scientist merely because he disagrees with you?” I’ll let you know if I receive and answer.

Skeptics are people too. Surely they don't feel charitable toward the alarmists. They may even be as nasty as the alarmists although I haven't seen evidence of that. They certainly haven't been anywhere near as illogical or dishonest as that bunch.

[movielib]

Interesting graph of web traffic the last few days. All are Hockey Sticks©. Note that these three skeptic sites and the one alarmist site have all gone way up (as would be expected). But the one with the least boost by far is RealClimate, the alarmist site. This despite the fact that it has a thread going with 800+ posts. Of course, WattsUpWithThat has one going with 1400+ posts plus many other threads with lots more posts. Note also that ClimateAudit has been down or difficult to get to for the last 2½ days. The fledgling Climate Depot has perhaps received the biggest boost of all by percentage, even though it's not a comment site.

Once again, the leading alarmist site is losing out to skeptical sites.

[grundle]

Here's the wikipedia article on this subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climati...cking_incident

[movielib]

Originally Posted by grundle

Here's the wikipedia article on this subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climati...cking_incident

That thinly veiled attempt to not say much of anything but slant it toward the alarmists is no doubt the handiwork of our friend, William Connolly.

[wmansir]

It's disappointing, but not surprising, that the MSM is reporting this almost as a "he said she said" when I'm sure they have the documents and could easily do a strait report on the contents.

[wishbone]

Originally Posted by movielib

That thinly veiled attempt to not say much of anything but slant it toward the alarmists is no doubt the handiwork of our friend, William Connolly.

Sadly the concept of CAGW is "too large to fail" so I doubt there will be any due diligence from the MSM on this story anytime soon. Hopefully reporters from outside of the mainstream continue to work this story to point where the MSM has to do some reporting for fear of being left in journalistic dust.

[movielib]

The climate scandal goes on but today trhe AP's top climate science "journalist" Seth Borenstein ignores it completely and instead puts out an article with the same climate lies he's been telling for years.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091122/...FybWluZ3NpbXBh

Warming's impacts sped up, worsened since Kyoto
AP
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein – Sun Nov 22, 2:54 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated — beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen:

_The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.

_Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.

_Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.

_Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997.

Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn't forecast results quite this bad so fast.

"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

And here's why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent. Officials from across the world will convene in Copenhagen next month to seek a follow-up pact, one that President Barack Obama says "has immediate operational effect ... an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution."

The last effort didn't quite get the anticipated results.

From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; U.S. emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7 percent. Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that time period. When the U.S. Senate balked at the accord and President George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three carbon polluters — the U.S., China and India — were not part of the pact's emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered by the Kyoto Protocol and that is a major issue in Copenhagen.

And the effects of greenhouse gases are more powerful and happening sooner than predicted, scientists said.

"Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated; the rate of change has been faster," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey.

That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped broker a last-minute deal in Kyoto.

"By far the most serious differences that we've had is an acceleration of the crisis itself," Gore said in an interview this month with The Associated Press.

In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists and policy wonks. Now biologists, lawyers, economists, engineers, insurance analysts, risk managers, disaster professionals, commodity traders, nutritionists, ethicists and even psychologists are working on global warming.

"We've come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in everyone's face," said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist.

The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. It's all happening far faster than predicted.

Back in 1997 "nobody in their wildest expectations," would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. What's been lost is the size of Alaska.

Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves — adding up to the size of Delaware — came off the Antarctic peninsula.

While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn't raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles.

Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall. In multiple reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, scientists didn't anticipate ice sheet loss in Antarctica, Weaver said. And the rate of those losses is accelerating, so that Greenland's ice sheets are melting twice as fast now as they were just seven years ago, increasing sea level rise.

Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich.

"Glaciers are a good climate indicator," Zemp said. "What we see is an accelerated loss of ice."

Also, permafrost — the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines are built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane — is thawing at an alarming rate, Burkett said.

Another new post-1997 impact of global warming has scientists very concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the carbon dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water. That causes acidification, an issue that didn't even merit a name until the past few years.

More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say.

In 1997, "there was no interest in plants and animals" and how they are hampered by climate change, said Stanford University biologist Terry Root. Now scientists are talking about which species can be saved from extinction and which are goners. The polar bear became the first species put on the federal list of threatened species and the small rabbit-like American pika may be joining it.

More than 37 million acres of Canadian and U.S. pine forests have been damaged by beetles that don't die in warmer winters. And in the U.S. West, the average number of acres burned per fire has more than doubled.

The Colorado River reservoirs, major water suppliers for the U.S. West, were nearly full in 1999, but by 2007 half the water was gone after the region endured the worst multiyear drought in 100 years of record-keeping.

Insurance losses and blackouts have soared and experts say global warming is partly to blame. The number of major U.S. weather-related blackouts from 2004-2008 were more than seven times higher than from 1993-1997, said Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

"The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did in 1997 and it's all negative," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "Things are much worse than the models predicted."

Virtually everything in this article is 180 degrees from the truth or ignore all contrary evidence. But that's our Seth. Ready, willing and able to go down with the ship.

[slop101]

A friend of mine is trying to shove that yahoo article down my throat - can you point me to some counter-arguments?

[movielib]

Originally Posted by slop101

A friend of mine is trying to shove that yahoo article down my throat - can you point me to some counter-arguments?

Throughout these threads. I don't have the time or inclination to dig out them all. I've done it too many times.

Have him or her look here:

http://www.populartechnology.net/200...upporting.html

[movielib]

Originally Posted by slop101

A friend of mine is trying to shove that yahoo article down my throat - can you point me to some counter-arguments?

Throughout these threads. I don't have the time or inclination to dig out them all. I've done it too many times. The most obvious thing is that it has cooled slightly in the last seven years or so.

Have him or her look here:

http://www.populartechnology.net/200...upporting.html

[slop101]

Thanks!

[movielib]

This just goes on and on. It looks like my earlier speculation that there is much more to this than just the emails is starting to pan out.

http://cbullitt.wordpress.com/2009/1..._read_me-file/

The Harry_Read_Me File
November 22, 2009

Love the ironic title. Got this from reader, Glenn. I’m out of my depth trying to read the code–and apparently so were several folks at CRU. If what he, and the techies at the links, say is true, it’s no wonder they had to spin this for 10 years–it’s all absolute bullshit.

Here’s Glenn’s take with links:

The hacked e-mails were damning, but the problems they had handling their own data at CRU are a dagger to the heart of the global warming “theory.” There is a large file of comments by a programmer at CRU called HARRY_READ_ME documenting that their data processing and modeling functions were completely out of control.

They fudged so much that NOTHING that came out of CRU can have ANY believability. If the word can be gotten out on this and understood it is the end of the global warming myth. This much bigger than the e-mails. For techie takes on this see:

http://www.tickerforum.org/cgi-ticke...118625&page=13

http://www.neuralnetwriter.cylo42.com/node/2421

To base a re-making of the global economy (i.e. cap-and-trade) on disastrously and hopelessly messed up data like this would be insanity.

Apparently this file shows how monumentally screwed up the CRU data is. Harry is apparently Ian Harris, a climate researcher at CRU who tried to make sense of it. I don't understand all this computer code and I don't know how to read these files so I'll wait until it's deciphered by those who understand it and have credibility.

But it sounds like so much more is coming. And what has been released is still only a fraction of what the hacker has. This is going to play a long time and I think it's just going to get worse and worse for the CRU crew.

[movielib]

More computerese that I don't understand but again we're being told what a mess the CRU codes are and how they are intended to manipulate data.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/2...he-real-story/

CRU Emails “may” be open to interpretation, but commented code by the programmer tells the real story
22 11 2009

When the CRU emails first made it into news stories, there was immediate reaction from the head of CRU, Dr. Phil Jones over this passage in an email:

From a yahoo.com news story:

In one leaked e-mail, the research center’s director, Phil Jones, writes to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. Some evidence appears to show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but is contradicted by other evidence which appears to show a rise in temperatures is continuing.

Jones wrote that, in compiling new data, he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” according to a leaked e-mail, which the author confirmed was genuine.

Dr. Jones responded.

However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.

Ok fine, but how Dr. Jones, do you explain this?

There’s a file of code also in the collection of emails and documents from CRU. A commenter named Neal on climate audit writes:

People are talking about the emails being smoking guns but I find the remarks in the code and the code more of a smoking gun. The code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show. The code after a quick scan is quite a mess. Anyone with any pride would be to ashamed of to let it out public viewing. As examples [of] bias take a look at the following remarks from the MANN code files:

Here’s the code with the comments left by the programmer:

function mkp2correlation,indts,depts,remts,t,filter=filter,refperiod=refperiod,$
datathresh=datathresh
;
; THIS WORKS WITH REMTS BEING A 2D ARRAY (nseries,ntime) OF MULTIPLE TIMESERIES
; WHOSE INFLUENCE IS TO BE REMOVED. UNFORTUNATELY THE IDL5.4 p_correlate
; FAILS WITH >1 SERIES TO HOLD CONSTANT, SO I HAVE TO REMOVE THEIR INFLUENCE
; FROM BOTH INDTS AND DEPTS USING MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION AND THEN USE THE
; USUAL correlate FUNCTION ON THE RESIDUALS.
;
pro maps12,yrstart,doinfill=doinfill
;
; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
;

and later the same programming comment again in another routine:

;
; Plots (1 at a time) yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD
; reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.


You can claim an email you wrote years ago isn’t accurate saying it was “taken out of context”, but a programmer making notes in the code does so that he/she can document what the code is actually doing at that stage, so that anyone who looks at it later can figure out why this function doesn’t plot past 1960. In this case, it is not allowing all of the temperature data to be plotted. Growing season data (summer months when the new tree rings are formed) past 1960 is thrown out because “these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”, which implies some post processing routine.

Spin that, spin it to the moon if you want. I’ll believe programmer notes over the word of somebody who stands to gain from suggesting there’s nothing “untowards” about it.

Either the data tells the story of nature or it does not. Data that has been “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” is false data, yielding a false result.

Again, I'll wait for those who understand it to explain it in English but I think we've seen only the tip of the iceberg so far.

[chrisih8u]

movielib,

1. Is this stuff true?

2. Are we all going to die before you get a chance to answer this post?

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/gree...d_since_kyoto/

WASHINGTON - Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated, beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages have opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa have been shrinking faster than before.

And it’s not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the years leading up to next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen:

■ The world’s oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.

■ Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the US West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.

■ Species now in trouble because of changing climate include not just the polar bear, which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs, and entire stands of North American pine forests.

■ Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than in the dozen years leading up to 1997.

The reason is that since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent.

“Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn’t forecast results quite this bad so fast,’’ said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Officials from across the world will convene in Copenhagen from Dec. 7 to 18 to seek a follow-up agreement. Sixty-five world leaders so far have said they will attend, including those from Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

When the US Senate balked at the Kyoto Protocol and President George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three carbon polluters - the United States, China, and India - were not part of the pact’s emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered by the protocol and that will be a major issue in Copenhagen.

From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; US emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7 percent. Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that time period.

In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists, and policy specialists. Now even psychologists are working on global warming.

“We’ve come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in everyone’s face,’’ said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist.

The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. Back in 1997 “nobody in their wildest expectations,’’ would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. What’s been lost is the size of Alaska.

Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves - adding up to the size of Delaware - came off the Antarctic peninsula.

While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn’t raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles. Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall.

Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich.

[movielib]

Originally Posted by chrisih8u

movielib,

1. Is this stuff true?

2. Are we all going to die before you get a chance to answer this post?

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/gree...d_since_kyoto/

See Post #690. Before it's too late.

[movielib]

Gleaned from the CRU emails, a chronological study of the recent Briffa/Yamal incident:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archive.../11/024995.php

The Alarmists Do "Science": A Case Study
November 21, 2009 Posted by John [H. Hinderaker] at 8:18 AM

A fascinating, hot-off-the-presses story emerges from the emails that were hacked yesterday from the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre. It is one of many exchanges that shed light on the priority that the global warming alarmists give to politics and career advancement over science.

The story began when Steve McIntyre, the same researcher who was largely responsible for destroying Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph purporting to show unprecedented warming in the 20th century, turned his attention to a famous article published by Keith Briffa of East Anglia's CRU in 2000. This article analyzed the diameters of tree rings, including rings from an area called Yamal in Siberia, and conveniently generated another hockey-stick shaped graph. You can read an account of the ensuing controversy here. McIntyre's work appeared to show that Briffa had cherry-picked trees in order to get the result he was looking for. One fact that this story highlights is that global warming alarmists publish their results in scientific journals, but refuse to make the underlying data publicly available so that the validity of their analyses can be checked.

McIntyre's revelations caused a firestorm of controversy, in response to which the alarmist community circled its wagons to fend off the threat from an outsider. This process can be clearly seen in the East Anglia emails.

The alarmists' effort to respond to McIntyre was complicated by the fact that Briffa had been ill and undergone surgery, and was then recuperating. So several of them wrote to Briffa's co-author, Tim Osborn, for advice on how to respond to McIntyre's critique. Osborn replied on September 29, 2009:

Hi Mike and Gavin, thanks for your emails re McIntyre, Yamal and Keith. I'll pass on your best wishes for his recovery when I next speak to Keith. He's been off almost 4 months now and won't be back for at least another month ....

Regarding Yamal, I'm afraid I know very little about the whole thing -- other than that I am 100% confident that "The tree ring data was hand-picked to get the desired result" is complete crap. Having one's integrity questioned like this must make your blood boil....

Apart from Keith, I think Tom Melvin here is the only person who could shed light on the McIntyre criticisms of Yamal. But he can be a rather loose cannon and shouldn't be directly contacted about this....

So: these scientists don't really have any idea whether McIntyre's critique of Briffa's work is correct or not. Even Briffa's co-author professes ignorance. There is one person they could approach who could "shed light on the McIntyre criticisms of Yamal." But they don't do it. Why? Because "he can be rather a loose cannon and shouldn't be directly contacted...." In other words, his loyalty to the cause of climate alarmism may not be absolute. This is much like the case noted here where Michael Mann, one of the recipients of the above email, warns against sharing information with someone named Andy because he is "not as predictable as we'd like."

Despite having no idea what the facts are, the alarmists don't hesitate to formulate a position. Thus, on the next day, September 30, Osborn writes:

Keith's temporarily come in to get a handle on all this, but it will take time. Likely outcome is (1) brief holding note that no cherry-picking was done and demonstrating data selection is defendable by our time tomorrow; (2) longer piece with more evaluation etc. in around a week. No point is posting something that turns out to be wrong.

That's good enough for Osborn's fellow alarmists. Michael Mann replies:

great--thanks Tim, sounds like we have a plan. in our post, which we'll target for tomorrow as well, we'll simply link to whatever CRU puts up and re-iterate the sentiment of the temporary short response (i.e. that there was no cherry-picking, a careful and defensible selection procedure was used) and we'll mostly focus on the broader issues, i.e. that any impact of this one series in the vast array of paleoclimate reconstructions (and the importance of the paleoclimate reconstructions themselves) has been over-stated, why these sorts of attacks are not legitimate science, etc.

Note that the alarmists are willing to denounce McIntyre's work as "not legitimate science" even though, at this point, they still have no idea whether his analysis was right or wrong. That is not, however, what they tell the outside world. On September 29, Andrew Revkin, environmental reporter for the New York Times, wrote to Mann asking about McIntyre's critique:

needless to say, seems the 2008 pnas paper showing that without tree rings still solid picture of unusual recent warmth, but McIntyre is getting wide play for his statements about Yamal data-set selectivity.

Has he communicated directly to you on this and/or is there any indication he's seeking journal publication for his deconstruct?

Mann, ignorant of the facts, responds by slandering McIntyre:

Hi Andy, I'm fairly certain Keith is out of contact right now recovering from an operation, and is not in a position to respond to these attacks. However, the preliminary information I have from others familiar with these data is that the attacks are bogus.

It is unclear that this particular series was used in any of our reconstructions (some of the underlying chronologies may be the same, but I'm fairly certain the versions of these data we have used are based on a different composite and standardization method), let alone any of the dozen other reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature shown in the most recent IPCC report, which come to the conclusion that recent warming is anomalous in a long-term context.

So, even if there were a problem w/ these data, it wouldn't matter as far as the key conclusions regarding past warmth are concerned. But I don't think there is any problem with these data, rather it appears that McIntyre has greatly distorted the actual information content of these data.

Given what is said in the other emails, that last attack on McIntyre appears to be simply fabricated out of whole cloth. Mann concludes by buttering up Revkin:

Fortunately, the prestige press doesn't fall for this sort of stuff, right?

mike

Of course not! Revkin replies, "Thanks heaps."

At the same time they were issuing these assurances to outsiders, however, the alarmists' internal communications were much more equivocal. On September 30, the day after he corresponded with Revkin, Mann asked Tim Osborn to confirm that a key 2006 paper co-authored by Osborn and Briffa was untainted by what is implicitly acknowledged to be Briffa's bad Yamal data:

And Osborn and Briffa '06 is also immune to this issue, as it eliminated any combination of up to 3 of the proxies and showed the result was essentially the same (fair to say this Tim?).

Osborn's reply is hedged at best, and includes a rather insouciant admission that he is "amazed" that the journal Science agreed to publish his paper in the first place:

Mike,

yes, you're right: figs S4-S6 in our supplementary information do indeed show results leaving out individual, groups of two, and groups of three proxies, respectively. It's attached.

I wouldn't say we were immune to the issue -- results are similar for these leave 1, 2 or 3 out cases, but they certainly are not as strong as the case with all 14 proxies.

Certainly in figure S6, there are some cases with 3 omitted (i.e. some sets of 11) where modern results are comparable with intermittent periods between 800 and 1100. Plus there is the additional uncertainty, discussed on the final page of the supplementary information, associated with linking the proxy records to real temperatures (remember we have no formal calibration, we're just counting proxies -- I'm still amazed that Science agreed to publish something where the main analysis only involves counting from 1 to 14!

:-)).

But this is fine, since the IPCC AR4 and other assessments are not saying the evidence is 100% conclusive (or even 90% conclusive) but just "likely" that modern is warmer than M[edieval] W[arm] P[eriod]. ...

So, this Yamal thing doesn't damage Osborn & Briffa (2006), but important to note that O&B (2006) and others support the "likely" statement rather than being conclusive.

Cheers
Tim

Another member of the climate alarmist cabal, Tom Wigley, gave this darker assessment of Briffa's errors with regard to the tree ring data on October 5. Note in particular his concern about the alarmists' practice of withholding data from public review:

Phil,

It is distressing to read that American Stinker item. But Keith does seem to have got himself into a mess. As I pointed out in emails, Yamal is insignificant. And you say that (contrary to what M&M say) Yamal is *not* used in MBH, etc. ...

But, more generally, (even if it *is* irrelevant) how does Keith explain the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And how does he explain the apparent "selection" of the less well-replicated chronology rather that the later (better replicated) chronology?

Of course, I don't know how often Yamal-12 has really been used in recent, post-1995, work. I suspect from what you say it is much less often that M&M say -- but where did they get their information? I presume they went thru papers to see if Yamal was cited, a pretty foolproof method if you ask me. Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and concisely -- but I am not sure Keith is able to do this as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of[f].

And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons -- but many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden.

I think Keith needs to be very, very careful in how he handles this. I'd be willing to check over anything he puts together.

Tom.

This strikes me as a damning commentary on the entire alarmist enterprise. Meanwhile, not only are Briffa's data flawed and seemingly cherry-picked, the assumptions on which the tree-ring studies are based may be bogus in the first place. The email collection includes these two messages from a plant scientist, both within the last 60 days:

Dear Professor Briffa, my apologies for contacting you directly, particularly since I hear that you are unwell. However the recent release of tree ring data by CRU has prompted much discussion and indeed disquiet about the methodology and conclusions of a number of key papers by you and co-workers.

As an environmental plant physiologist, I have followed the long debate starting with Mann et al (1998) and through to Kaufman et al (2009). As time has progressed I have found myself more concerned with the whole scientific basis of dendroclimatology. In particular;

1) The appropriateness of the statistical analyses employed
2) The reliance on the same small datasets in these multiple studies
3) The concept of "teleconnection" by which certain trees respond to the "Global Temperature Field", rather than local climate
4) The assumption that tree ring width and density are related to temperature in a linear manner.

Whilst I would not describe myself as an expert statistician, I do use inferential statistics routinely for both research and teaching and find difficulty in understanding the statistical rationale in these papers. As a plant physiologist I can say without hesitation that points 3 and 4 do not agree with the accepted science.

There is a saying that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". Given the scientific, political and economic importance of these papers, further detailed explanation is urgently required.

Yours sincerely,
Dr. Don Keiller.

Tree ring studies are vitally important to the conclusions reached by the U.N.'s IPCC report, which is the main foundation for the claim that anthropogenic global warming has been "proved." That being the case, one would think that Briffa, one of the two or three primary authors of the tree ring studies, would have a ready response to these very basic questions. But no: he did not reply to Dr. Keiller's email. That prompted this second inquiry from Dr. Keiller:

Dear Professor Briffa, I am pleased to hear that you appear to have recovered from your recent illness sufficiently to post a response to the controversy surrounding the use of the Yamal chronology; ([5]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/cautious/cautious.htm) and the chronology itself; ([6]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/)

Unfortunately I find your explanations lacking in scientific rigour and I am more inclined to believe the analysis of McIntyre ([7]http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7588) Can I have a straightforward answer to the following questions

1) Are the reconstructions sensitive to the removal of either the Yamal data and Strip pine bristlecones, either when present singly or in combination?

2) Why these series, when incorporated with white noise as a background, can still produce a Hockey-Stick shaped graph if they have, as you suggest, a low individual weighting?

And once you have done this, please do me the courtesy of answering my initial email.
Dr. D.R. Keiller

Again, one might assume that if the science surrounding global warming is settled, the alarmists would have good answers to such basic questions, and certainly would be willing to engage in debate in a spirit of open-minded inquiry. Such, however, is not the case. Phil Jones of East Anglia advised Briffa against trying to respond to the plant scientist on October 20:

Keith,

There is a lot more there on CA now. [I'm pretty sure CA is Climate Audit, a web site where McIntyre posts.] I would be very wary about responding to this person now having seen what McIntyre has put up.

You and Tim talked about Yamal. Why have the bristlecones come in now. [1]http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7588#comments

This is what happens - they just keep moving the goalposts. Maybe get Tim to redo OB2006 without a few more series.

Cheers
Phil

As far as I can tell from the email archive, Briffa never did respond to the plant scientist. Jones's email warning Briffa to be "very wary about responding to this person now having seen what McIntyre has put up" was written just three weeks ago. It, along with the rest of the email archive, makes an utter mockery of the alarmists' claim that the science of global warming is settled in their favor.

On the contrary, the conclusion an observer is likely to draw from the CRU archive is that the climate alarmists are making up the science as they go along and are fitting facts to reach a predetermined conclusion rather than objectively seeking after truth. What they are doing is politics, not science. When I was in law school, this story was told about accountants: A CEO is going to hire a new accountant and summons a series of candidates. He asks each applicant, "What is two plus two?" The first two candidates answer, "Four." They don't get the job. The third responds, "What do you want it to be?" He gets hired. The climate alarmists' attitude toward data appears to me much the same as that fictional accountant's attitude toward arithmetic.

This is an amazing "reconstruction" which tells much more than any of those temperature "reconstructions" the alarmists do to mass produce their Hockey Sticks. The conclusion in the last paragraph in the above link seems to be completely justified.

And to the CRU crew's complaints about emails taken out of context: How's that for context?

[movielib]

For some unfathomable reason, NYT columnist Tom Friedman has become a best selling author (The World is Flat; Hot, Fat and Crowded) and people actually listen to him. Why we shouldn't listen to him:

http://www.masterresource.org/2009/1...u-to-get-well/

Dear Tom Friedman: Don’t Want You to Die Off … Just Get Well!
by Donald Hertzmark
November 21, 2009

In the New York Times editorial page’s latest excursion into shrill climate alarmism, foreign affairs correspondent Thomas Friedman accuses those opposing the current cap-and-tax bill as wanting a few people, say 2.5 billion to die off. And us bad guys are just grasping at straws. “. . . you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims,” he says. “One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.”

Gosh, Tom, I suppose that the pace of global warming has accelerated in the last decade, and hurricanes are getting more frequent and stronger too. And those emails from the alarmist in-crowd that the climate world (and general public!) are reading about right now–those are the good guys, the real disinterested scholars at work.

So, Tom, you claim that cap and tax opponents are calling forth a mass plague–a modern Black Death–that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. (Well, I guess this simply extrapolates what John Holdren is postulating by 2020–a possible billion deaths!) In your world that is an inevitable result of modern living using hydrocarbon fuels.

Unlike his imaginative colleague Maureen Dowd, what Tom Friedman writes actually matters. Many people believe that he is proficient about energy and climate. So I must again call this charlatan to task.

A Gulfstream Malthusian

As we have seen, Friedman’s musings on energy and climate don’t stand up very well to actual events, data, or logic. Or as the courtroom wag once put it: if you have the facts, argue the facts, if you don’t have the facts argue the law, if you have neither pound the table. Tom is pounding the table on energy and environment, accusing those who oppose his pet legislation of wishing a dreadful calamity upon mankind.

Unlike Thomas Friedman I actually know people who oppose the cap and tax monstrosity, and there is not a Malthusian among them; and not one wishes a return of the plague. I challenge you to produce more than one or two kooks who happen to oppose cap and tax and who also wish a plague on the human race (contact me here for the terms of the bet). As Friedman surely knows, the Malthusians are pretty much confined to their own loony corner of the left. Oh, and you can always identify the Malthusians at the airport, they are ones headed for the Net Jets terminal (from their 20,000 sq ft homes).

Indeed, unlike the Malthusians, who wish developing countries to stay that way, preferably forever, the “bad people” who oppose cap and tax actually wish to see the Indians, Zambians, Peruvians and whoever else gain as much access to modern technology, including energy, as they can produce, purchase and create. Not from us is the message that the world cannot afford for developing countries to access modern energy.

Renewables as the New WPA? Or Is There Some Other Point to All This?

Point one of Friedman’s “thesis” is that the globe is getting crowded and we cannot therefore provide energy for all of these people the way we do now. Let’s stipulate that your assumption about crowding is correct. So why would we choose, on an increasingly crowded planet, to use land-hog energy technologies – wind, solar and biomass – rather than using compact fuels and prime movers; we know them as oil and gas engines and power plants. As recent articles on wind have increasingly shown, deployment of wind energy to an extent that can make an actual contribution to supplies, uses (and spoils) vast tracts of our countryside, and does not really reduce emissions much. But to Friedman, we need this renewable energy because otherwise we will create so much pollution that the next 2.5 billion inhabitants of earth will die (that’s where the plague nonsense comes from). Well, anyone who was alive in the US in the 1960s remembers what the air and water looked like then. We invested a lot of money in clean up and the air and water in the US are far better now than they were in 1965 with half the population and less than a quarter the real GDP. Everywhere you look rich countries are clean countries – air, water food.

Point two has something to do with making sure the US is the leader in renewable energy or otherwise we will be forced to despoil our land with useless renewable energy conversion devices manufactured elsewhere, or something like that. My colleague, Marlo Lewis, has addressed this particular gem of incoherence. He rebuts the idea that leadership in renewable energy is essential for the future by noting that:

1. Renewable energy generally destroys wealth, therefore the more of it you have, the less of anything else you can have (or, as the Eagles put it – you can spend all your time making love, or spend all your love making time);
2. Wind and solar do not reduce emissions much since they are intermittent and require hydrocarbon backups;
3. Renewable energy jobs require external cash infusions, and therefore are not actually self-sustaining

Point three is posterity. According to Friedman our children will not be able to afford to live well since energy will have become so expensive. That is an almost perfectly self-fulfilling prophecy should we be so foolish as to follow Tom Friedman’s recommendations for our new energy sources.

Sure, energy will become really expensive if (i) you prohibit the production of economical forms of energy, such as domestic oil and gas; (ii) you force us to purchase very expensive and unreliable energy from wind; (iii) you jack up the price of the “legacy” energy output of coal and gas plants with carbon taxes; (iv) you prohibit the deployment of advanced combustion technologies for coal that reduce carbon (and other) emissions by 15-35%; and (v) you have missed a massive revolution in US energy supplies, brought to us by hydraulic fracturing of shale gas reservoirs.

Gas is Energy’s Rodney Dangerfield – No Respect from Friedman

Somehow, the US Congress in its cap and tax extravaganza, the NY Times Foreign Affairs Correspondent, and many others have managed to miss the biggest development in domestic energy supplies in the last 40 or 50 years. What Tom Friedman does not know is that the US has gone from a gas have not, with just 15 years of reserves, to a gas giant, with more than 100 years of gas supplies, due largely to new technology to exploit shale gas deposits. Tom, you need to read your own paper. They have had this issue covered for more than one year.

With enough natural gas reserves to maintain current levels of gas use for another hundred years we have lots of time to figure out what comes next, and to figure out how some of the wealth created thereby can be reinvested in new energy sources that actually produce net wealth for our country. Natural gas plants are compact (hits that crowded thing, Tom), fuel is domestically sourced (so much for the people who hate us supplying our energy), the fuel is clean (no plague there), and they are reliable – can you say that for wind and solar?

Of course, you might try to sabotage the gas bonanza to make renewable more attractive, the Governor of New York has already tried. Apparently someone explained the facts of (re)electoral life to him. For you, elementary economic common sense should suffice. And common courtesy, too.