December 5, 2009

CLIMATE-GATE SUMMARY

Around November 16, 2009 an unknown individual hacked into the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU). The hacker copied e-mails, documents, data, and pictures and published them on the internet. The result has been an explosive story bringing into question the science behind man-made global warming. Some say it proves AGW is a fraud, others say it is no big deal, but Phil Jones, the director of the CRU has resigned over the controversy. I have downloaded all the material and will give a few examples.

The stolen documents seem to show an ongoing attempt to hide data, alter data analysis to get desired results and shut down critical papers and scientists:

Item 1 (email 1256765544)
Phil Jones complains about a professor Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen who is critical of his research and data. He asks a professor, Graham Haughton, at Hull University if he can keep her from using her Hull affiliation title now that she is retired. Graham says no, but now that she is gone he is "a lot more free to push my environmental interests without ongoing critique...I've signed my department up to 10:10 campaign and have a taskforce of staff and students involved in it".

Item 2 (email 1047388489)
Michael Mann proposes to Phil Jones a way to shut down a scientific journal "Climate Research" that is publishing peer-reviewed papers skeptical of AGW. "What do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to , or cite papers in, this journal."
Phil Jones then emails "I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor."

Item 3 (email 0939154709)
Tim Osborn sends data to Mike Mann. He discusses various ways to manipulate the data to make the recent decline in the data less obvious. They assume the recent decline in the data is caused by non-temperature signals. "We usually stop the series in 1960 because of the recent non-temperature signal that is superimposed on the tree-ring data" "One could, of course, shift the mean of our reconstruction so that it matched the observed series over a different period - say 1931-60 - but I don't see that this improves things. Indeed, if the non-temperature signal that causes the decline in tree-ring density begins before 1960, then a short 1931-60 period might yield a more biased result than using a longer 1881-1960 period."

Item 4 (email 1212063122)
Michael Mann emails everyone to delete any emails they have had dealing with Freedom of Information requests they have received. "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

Item 5 (email 0942777075)
Phil Jones comments on his data manipulation to make more alarming warming graphs.
"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."



Item 6 (email 1255352257)
Several scientist were discussing the extremely cold October we had this year (I wrote about it earlier) and the fact that there has been no warming over the last decade. They are all dismayed that the BBC has done a story about the lack of warming. "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." "It is extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard Black's beat at BBC (and he does a great job)."
So, according to the scientists, if we have hot weather the media should be trumpeting it as global warming, but if it is cold it should be ignored.

Item 7 (email 1054736277)
Scientists discuss how nice it would be to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). "I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2[000 years], rather than the usual 1[000 years], addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "MWP", even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back"

Item 8 (email 1255523796)
In response to Item 6 above, Tom disagrees and says he has two methods to work with the data to show the cooling. Kevin replies "How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter? We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!"

Item 9 (email 1139521913)
After a skeptic article came out in Science magazine, Michael Mann explains how he will manipulate comments on the Real Climate website so skeptics can't use it to promote the article. "We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you'd like us to include."

Item 10 (email 1106322460)
Tom Wigley had some resistance publishing a paper of his about glaciers in GRL. He and Mann thought the GRL editor-in-chief James Saiers may be a skeptic. He writes to Mann "If you think that 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. "

There is much much more... including:
- Briffa saying there is political pressure to produce a graph showing unprecedented warming (email 0938018124)
- Climate organisations are coordinating to resist freedom of information requests (email 1219239172)
- Revkin and Von Storch say they should toss the hockey stick chart back in 2004, this is 2 years before Al Gore used the chart in his "documentary" (email 1096382684)
- Funkhouser says he's used every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. He doesn't think it's productive to juggle the statistics any more than he has.(email 0843161829)
-Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (email 1254108338)
-David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn't be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(emial 1105019698)
-Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. (email 1107454306)



Countries around the world are debating carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs to stop global warming including the US. The British people have already paid billions in carbon taxes, and Spain has invested billions also. Politicians are creating hundreds of new laws and regulations in the name of saving the planet. If this huge cost and invasion of rights is to continue, the science behind the catastrophe should be sound! We should know exactly what the costs to us will be, both monetarily and in standard of living, and what effect it will have on cooling the planet. If cap-and-trade is a huge cost with little or no impact on climate, then why are we even having the debate? Anyone suggesting it should be laughed (and voted) out of office. On the other hand, if we are in certain doom if even one more SUV is built, than we must do what is necessary to survive. I don't think the doom has been proven yet though!

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1 comment:

  1. Yes, interesting.
    Recycle. Don't litter.
    But, is it OK to pee in a lake?
    K.

    ReplyDelete