ClimateGate
tlambert | February 16, 2010World Exclusive!
Must Credit Deltoid!!
Deltoid can reveal David Rose's fan letter to Christopher Monckton written after Monckton published his famous Chinese navy disproves global warming article. Rose gushes:
Congratulations on your very important and fascinating article. I have two questions. 1. You write: 'They also found that the graph's authors had excluded from their calculations a single dataset covering the later mediaeval warm period, which had been stored in a computer file marked 'CENSORED_DATA' Where and how did they find this file? Is there any more known (or discoverable) about…
tlambert | February 16, 2010This story by Heidi Blake in the Telegraph about how Anthony Watts' findings show that surface temperature records are wrong might sound familiar. That's because it's blatantly plagiarised from Jonathan Leake's story touting Watts' report. Every element in Blake's story was drawn from Leake's story -- it's just been rearranged and reworded slightly. It looks like it would have taken her about 15 minutes to do the whole thing. To be fair to Blake, she has actually improved the story -- her version is tighter and flows more naturally, so if the Telegraph fires her for plagiarism she could…
tlambert | February 15, 2010By now I'm sure you're all familiar with Jonathan Leake's practice of misrepresenting what his sources by quote mining them. In his story that misrepreseted what the IPCC report says about natural disasters, Leake quotes Muir-Wood:
Muir-Wood himself is more cautious. He said: "The idea that catastrophes are rising in cost partly because of climate change is completely misleading. "We could not tell if it was just an association or cause and effect. Also, our study included 2004 and 2005 which was when there were some major hurricanes. If you took those years away then the significance of…
tlambert | February 13, 2010Following the heels of the Rosegate scandal where journalist David Rose was exposed as a serial quote fabricator, the credibility of Rose's newspaper, the Daily Mail, has taken another body blow with the paper publishing a false story claiming that Phil Jones had admitted that there had been no global warming since 1995.
This is false (see graph below) and Jones made no such admission. Michael Tobis has the details on the Daily Mail's dishonesty.
Ever gullible Tim Blair, of course, swallowed the lie, hook, line and sinker. Andrew Bolt will do doubt follow if he gets his voice back.
Update…
illconsidered | February 12, 2010And this one is a beauty.
Of course, like models, all analogies are wrong but some are useful! I think this hits the nail on the head in terms of CRU's perspective but I grant you it does not describe well any of the probable things that might be in the heads of the Climate Audit crowd. Undoubtably, some are sincere crusaders.
I really do prefer to take people at face value, but some impressive bit of researching over at Deep Climate kinda makes it hard to believe in the whole "gee, we're just asking" schtick Steve McIntyre puts out to the general public.
Check out the very substantial Part…
illconsidered | February 11, 2010For most of us, the F in FOI stands for "freedom". It seems for Steve McIntyre, it stands for "form letter".
Via Eli Rabett we learn that the Freedom of Information requests (FOI) that are central to the only potentially damnng aspect of the CRU "swifthacking" incident have been released. They can be found here[PDF].
I have not looked at them yet, but Eli points out a very interesting one that begins thus (and we are quoting):
I hereby make a EIR/FOI request in respect to any confidentiality agreements)restricting transmission of CRUTEM data to non-academics involing the following countries…
jstemwedel | February 5, 2010In my earlier post about the findings of the Penn State inquiry committee looking into allegations of research misconduct against Michael Mann, I mentioned that the one allegation that was found to merit further investigation may have broad implications for how the public understands what good scientific work looks like, and for how scientists themselves understand what good scientific work looks like.
Some of the commenters on that post seemed interested in discussing those implications. Others, not so much. As commenter Evan Harper notes:
It is clear that there are two discussions in…
catdynamics | February 4, 2010Penn State has released the preliminary conclusions of its inquiry into the purloined e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Dr Free-Ride provides an excellent discussion
PSU story on the internal inquiry
Full report (pdf)
In the meantime, the Grauniad reports police questioned a UEA scientist about the original cracking of the CRU e-mail archive
There has been considerable external pressure on PSU on this issue, with protests planned by conservative student groups this friday on campus, weather prermitting...
The Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy…
jstemwedel | February 4, 2010Remember "ClimateGate", that well-publicized storm of controversy that erupted when numerous email messages from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers and widely distributed? One of the events set in motion by ClimateGate was a formal inquiry concerning allegations of research conduct against Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor in the Department of Meteorology at The Pennsylvania State University.
The report (PDF) from that inquiry has been released, so we're going to have a look at it here.
This report contains a lot of discussion of…
tlambert | January 26, 2010Imagine, if you will, that the emails stolen from CRU had included fawning comments from an MSM journalist to a climate scientist like this:
As a veteran member of the MSM (Vanity Fair and the UK's Mail on Sunday) may I state for the record: Sir, I salute you. Bravo!
or this:
without Steve's brilliant work and this magnificent website, it could not have been written.
What do you think the denialists would have said? Since a perfectly innocuous query from Seth Borenstein in the stolen emails lead to Anthony Watts calling for "AP to remove Seth Borenstein as 'science reporter'", you can bet…
sastyk | January 21, 2010There's yet another kerfuffle about climatology going on. First, of course, there was climategate, whose total revealed knowledge is "if you hack into people's private emails you might find out that some people, even climate scientists, are jerks sometimes." Now there's another one - in the IPCC report, there's an error. That is, scientists took a non-peer reviewed source and transposed it into the report, and didn't back check that source. This was stupid, of course, and should be criticized and corrected.
That said, since the material in the IPCC is overwhelmingly peer-reviewed science…
illconsidered | January 15, 2010Just in case anyone out there has10 more minutes they are prepared to throw down the bottomless CRU Email hack hole, I found this YouTube video rather thourough and amusing:
One happy data point about this affair is that it clearly did not have much impact outside of the Denial-o-sphere. Copenhagen need no such aid to end in tatters all on its own.
On that note, have a good weekend!
illconsidered | January 14, 2010Apropos the recent spate of commenting about the hacked CRU emails, Kevin Trenberth has an article at The Daily Camera.
He makes this remark about his constantly mischaracterized "travesty" quote ("The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."):
The quote has been taken out of context. It relates to our ability to track energy flow through the climate system. We can do this very well from 1992 to 2003, when large warming occurred, but not from 2004 to 2008. The quote refers to our observation system which is inadequate to observe…
terrasig | January 1, 2010Steve Silberman and Rebecca Skloot just pointed out to me an editorial from science writer Chris Mooney that has appeared online and will be in the Sunday, January 3rd edition of The Washington Post.
In the essay, "On issues like global warming and evolution, scientists need to speak up," Mooney continues his longstanding call to scientists to take ownership in combating scientific misinformation, invoking the very weak response of the scientific community to the aftermath of e-mails and documents hacked from the Climatic Research Institute at the University of East Anglia.
The central lesson…
tlambert | December 17, 2009The latest story exciting the denialosphere is being put about by novelist James Delingpole and is based on an analysis (translated here) by a right-wing Russian think tank. Delingpole quotes from a news story:
On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming…
illconsidered | December 14, 2009 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsThis weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News December 13, 2009 Chuckles, COP15, COP15 Dailies, COP15 Tools, COP15 Alternate Forums, COP15 The Editorial, COP15 Demonstrators GermanWatch, Mediterranean Flood, CRU, Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, In the Balance Melting Arctic, Arctic Mode Switch, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Pledges, Baseline…
tlambert | December 11, 2009The phrase "hide the decline" from the stolen CRU emails has been taken out of context and construed to refer to a decline in temperatures this century when in fact it was a reference to a decline in tree-ring density since 1961. Steve McIntyre knows this, but instead of a correction, he offers another misrepesentation of its meaning, quote mining the stolen emails to argue that the IPCC was hiding stuff:
IPCC Lead Authors met in Arusha, Tanzania from September 1 to 3, 1999 ... at which the final version of the "zero-order" draft of the Third Assessment Report was presented and discussed…
tlambert | December 9, 2009Remember how the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition made the warming trend in New Zealand go away by treating measurements from different sites as if they came from the same site? Well, Willis Eschenbach has followed in their foot steps by using the same scam on Australian data. He claims that for Darwin "the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling". Here's his graph:
That blue line for raw temperature in his graph combines different records without any adjustment, even though Eschenbach could see that there was a step change…
tlambert | December 8, 2009Not content with publishing George Will's fabrications about the stolen emails (for which, see Carl Zimmer), they now have a piece by climate expert Sarah Palin. The Washington Post simply does not care about the accuracy of the columns it publishes. Let's look at just one paragraph:
The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even…
illconsidered | December 8, 2009greenman has done a fine job of debunking the various exagerations, misrepresentations and lies circulating about the recent Swiftwacking of CRU (aka Climategate).
I recommend having a look, below: