Scientists Step Down After CRU Hack Fallout 874
An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of the recent release of thousands of private files and emails after a server of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia was hacked, Prof. Phil Jones is stepping down as head of the CRU. Prof. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, is also under inquiry by Penn State University."
Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that this story is posted under Politics says a lot about what's wrong with the global warming 'debate' IMO.
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
The above comment shows a complete lack of understanding of how "Science" fits into reality.
Science: eating fatty food is bad for you
Public: f*ck off
Science: oh, some fatty foods are good
Public: f*ck off
Science: oh, some fatty foods are bad, some are good, depending on you
Public: f*ck off
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You forgot government intervention :
Science: eating fatty food is bad for you
Government: we outlaw them all
Science: oh, some fatty foods are good
Government: we outlaw all other food !
Science: oh, some fatty foods are bad, some are good, depending on you ... everybody alive is breaking the law. How could this possibly happen ? People simply have no respect for the laws anymore.
Government: okay, seriously
Science: ...
Government: obviously the solution is more laws !
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
It is politics, though. People are interpreting emails in their preferred context. The most publicized emails are devoid of scientific content. The actors in those emails aren't discussing the latest paper in Nature, or research methodology. They're discussing the rhetorical merits of a graph, or whether responding to a flawed study in some third rate journal gives credence to that study. The emails might be of interest to a historian of science, but it's not as if the archive is a graduate seminar in dendrochronology.
Two caveats: I have not trawled the archive, and the leaked .zip is a bit small for ten years worth of stored email.
Re:Meanwhile, back in reality... (Score:4, Insightful)
If it were only that simple. What the emails reveal, and what skeptics have been saying for a long time, is that the science is not independent, not reproducible and relies on the same flawed data sets and models used over and over, not multiple lines of evidence. In reality, the ice caps melt during summer and refreeze during winter and the arctic has increased in the last two years, in spite of the dire predictions of an ice free summer. The last 10 years is not the hottest on any records, not even the flawed ones, and is hardly unprecedented.
The hacked emails/data/code reveal plenty of disturbing things and in reality there is much more that has already come out that points to an even wider and more egregious perversion of science. It takes some serious cojones to use a data set that is known to diverge from the only unequivocal temperature record. You can't just hand wave the skeptics away by saying that the authors gave you a note allowing you to drop the data points that don't match up with your hypothesis ,everything after 1960, and which go a long way in raising doubts about their significance prior to 1960.
Your side is being routed at this point and it is only going to get worse. Wait until the public learns how the current temperature data sets are being massaged, using only a few stations, sometimes hundreds of miles apart, and averaging for the most increase. How the rise in temperature is predominantly in areas that have no thermometers. How one small part of Antarctica that is warming has been overlaid over all of Antarctica to present the worst possible scenario.
You are right about the laws of physics, but you are sadly mistaken if you think this is a tempest in a teapot.
Re:Politics (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Politics (Score:5, Informative)
-k
Re:Politics (Score:5, Funny)
IIRC.
You, sir, are old!
Re:Politics (Score:4, Funny)
He was a beta tester for dirt.
They never did get all the bugs out.
Re:Politics (Score:4, Funny)
I've heard of dirt. Isn't that one of those grassroots projects?
I also heard it wasn't very secure, had to be root to do anything...
But I guess the effort paid off, since a lot of recent projects have grown out of it.
:P
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They were all in Wisconsin, IIRC.
Wisconsin? Did someone mention my home state? WI geology is a good example of why "global warming" is a coastie religion and midwesterners are by and large, unconverted.
See, where I grew up, they teach us geology by pointing out the glacial terrain features that a mile or two of ice carves out every 10-20K years or so... Then they move on to our local industry, such as limestone pits formed when WI, currently 600 feet ASL, was a warm -n- toasty (relatively) inland seabottom. Then there's the ancient vol
Re:Politics (Score:5, Interesting)
Now I have never been to WI but I hear from reliable sources it is also experiencing drought conditions [unl.edu]. Tell me, do they teach history [about.com] in WI?
Re:Politics (Score:4, Informative)
Grain harvest have been cut in half for 8 out the last ten years, billions of dollars of hydro infrastucture built in Tasmaninia in the 90's sits idle for lack of water, the high tech bass-link cable that was to be used to export that power to the mainland is now used to import power. Firestorms convert forrest into grassland, and grassland into desert, the dust from which can be seen on most mornings simply by looking at your car. Lakes that have survived for tens of thousands of years become toxic and whole forrests of 600yo red gums wither and die. Every state capital in the country has been forced to ration water while thier governments spend billions building some of the world's largests desal plants. Had this happened over geological time scales nobody except geologists would have noticed.
Perhaps a little context and some actual data might be useful here.
Tasmania does not lack water. Indeed, it doesn't have water restrictions. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Firestorms, which are usually deliberately lit (most are) or caused by things like power lines are representative of land management practices, particularly green policies that have reduced hazard reduction, and planning failures such as the growth in populations in bush fire risk areas.
None of the "firestorms" (are you even Australian, because if you were, you'd call it a bushfire) turn land into grassland of desert. Indeed, I can drive out to the worst affected areas from February and see the regrowth now.
Issues with occasional dust storms date back to the first European arrivals; dust storms are everything to do with weather patterns (and occasionally poor land management) and nothing to do with global warming
Toxic lakes and dead red gums are a reflection of water management policies, of which Australia is a disgrace on. Global warming isn't stopping natural flows down the Murray or Darling Rivers, farmers raping the rivers in conjunction with state governments are.
Desal has everything to do with environmentalism and nothing to do with global warming: places like Melbourne haven't built a new dam in over 20 years while the population has grown by over a million. Governments won't build new dams because of the perceptions of voter backlash based on green policies.
"Pol Pot?" Come the frak on. That's ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me refresh your memory:
Climate scientists suggest that if we reduce the amount of sulfates, we'll have less acid rain. Sulfates reduced; the amount of acid rain shrinks.
Climate scientists suggest that aerosols are hurting the ozone layer, and point to an actual growing hole in the ozone layer. We reduce aerosols, the hole in the ozone layer shrinks.
I'm not at all suggesting climate scientists are infallible - they should be questioned like anyone else.
But to suggest that reasonable restrictions on companies that produce pollution is "going Pol Pot?" FFS.
Maybe you're right, in a way - Midwesterners may tend not to believe pollution can damage the environment, if they live somewhere that's untouched by industrial waste. If that's the case, they should go live in New Jersey for a while.
Re:"Pol Pot?" Come the frak on. That's ridiculous. (Score:4, Interesting)
Climate scientists suggest that aerosols are hurting the ozone layer, and point to an actual growing hole in the ozone layer. We reduce aerosols, the hole in the ozone layer shrinks. .
IIRC a few Australian scientists reanalyzed the "ozone hole" data awhile back, and it correlated ~100% to the output of the VOLCANO near the south pole, and did not correlate to man-made "ozone depleting" gas output well at all, indicating that industry wasted billions of dollars converting to fix a problem that didn't really exist, and converted to replacement gasses that are actually excellent greenhouse gasses in the process.
Or was this made up too?
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I got your point just fine, but it looks like you missed mine. I'll spell it out: humans don't live on geological timescales. The climate change debate is not about what the Earth's climate will be like millions, or tens of thousands, or even thousands of years from now. It's about what it will be like in our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children. And on that human timescale, things are changing very fast indeed.
Also ... dude, "Pol Pot?" Seriously? If you think any measure that will ever be taken, or even seriously proposed, to control CO2 emissions is in any way comparable to what the Khmer Rouge did, you are insane.
Re:Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
>>Then watch a dozen or so different lectures and tell me if the precautionary principle doesnt say to you that its a fair bet
If you look at the Medieval Warming Period vs the Little Ice Age, the precautionary principle would instead argue for a slight (0.5C to 1C) positive anomaly. A little bit of extra cold is much worse for humanity than a little bit of extra hot.
Then again, any arguments made using the precautionary principle are stupid.
Re:Politics (Score:4, Funny)
And there was a giant lake in Missoula Missouri, which periodically broke-through the glacier/ice dam and flooded Washington State (hence the weirdly-carved landscape).
And you, my friend, need to look at a map. Under no circumstances could a lake in Missouri flood the state of Washington. The Rocky Mountains would preclude that.
By the way, Missoula is in Montana.. Nice place, been there a number of times.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They ought to be able to use the clean data without need for obfuscation, as these climatologists were caught doing.
Um, do you have any evidence or even a link pointing to evidence for that claim? I submit this as a counter-claim [realclimate.org]:
FTFL:
"Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McInty
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
I was always taught that this was how science worked. If your "results" can't be duplicated, then it's not proving anything.
By the same token, if you hide the data so it can't be duplicated, then the "results" should be thrown out and the work redone.
Re:Politics (Score:5, Funny)
The "NOW" has to be pictured with a multi-colored fist raised in anger against the oppressors.
While at it, the humanity also ought to rise against the evil Big Business (as opposite to the beloved "Mom and Pop" shops suffering from Wal-Mart), who contribute to the Continental Drift [thepeoplescube.com]. Because every time a plane takes off on one continent and lands on another, the continents are pulled farther and farther away from the positions they were in before humanity appeared.
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Politics (Score:4, Interesting)
to keep it simple for those who don't get global warming, most people don't understand that icecaps melting/receeding like they have been lately is not at all a normal part of our weather patterns.
Really? One of the biggest fudgings of the data was the removal of an inconvenient half millennium period that was up to 10 degrees warmer than the mean average. What do you think the glaciers did then?
Re:Politics (Score:5, Funny)
Beach Party?
Re:Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
What suppression? [nature.com]
Keep it up deniers, Im sure your corporate masters are laughing all the way to the bank while you cry all the way to the grave.
A dark day for science... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A dark day for science... (Score:5, Insightful)
Right alongside the other fools that believe the opposite things without using an ounce of reason to come to their conclusions.
Despite your world view, being ignorant is not limited to only those people with whom you disagree.
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, what's the scientific consensus that we have? Is it about ocean levels rising to cover the earth? Is it about melting glaciers and polar ice caps? Is it about increases in hurricanes? Is it about a six degree increase in temperature?
Not at all. The only consensus we have is that there has been a slight increase in temperature over the last century, and that human activity (specifically CO2) has contributed to that. That's it. There is no consensus on how much CO2 has contributed to it. There is no consensus on how much temperatures will rise in the next century. There is no consensus on what the effect of that rise would be, assuming it does rise. Basically what alarmists have been saying is "AGW is a fact" and everyone agrees. Then they go on and say, "therefore disaster is coming if we don't stop it now" but not everyone agrees with that.
Re:Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is the first reputable reference [ucsusa.org] I found with a simple google search. Skip down to the section on peer-review (para 3). Note that not one of these scientists (including the handfull of lead aurthors) are paid to do this tedious and thankless job. The ippc has a budget of $5-6M
The ippc reports of which I only posted the latest summary, is widely regarded by scientists as one of the most robust reviews of any scientific question in the history of mankind. Virtually every national scientific body on the planet is represented.
And please stop cherry-picking data to suit your predetermined conclusions, it insults both of our intelligences.
MODS (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because they are normal people that see Copenhagen as nothing more than a power grab by international bodies. If there is no AGW, there is no need for world homogenizing global treaties to come out of Copenhagen, is there?
People are rising up and making noise, because they are tired of the smug blowhards looking down their noses when some "ignoramus" dares question the veracity of the aloof chosen ones and their "consensus".
Re:Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah those climatologists are just rolling in cash, perks, stock options, and golden parachutes. You know, sometimes I feel downright sorry for Oil & Gas industry executives and the embarrassingly low pay they receive for all the dedicated, selfless work they do.
Translation for the irony-impaired: you want to play the follow-the-money game? Guess where it leads? Maybe not to you because you've somehow been convinced to act as an unpaid shill for an industry you don't even understand, but it certainly do
Re:Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see
As for those climatologists, who were facing the traditional career full of angst over tenure or grants? For people like that, a steady job is rolling in cash. If you can also crank out an alarmist book or two, and score some face time on BBC so that you'll be invited to travel the world and get in some rubber chicken meals at conferences on someone else's account? Frosting on the cake.
Re:Politics (Score:4, Interesting)
Spend a little time reading up on the company he and partners founded for exactly this purpose. GIM ("Generation Investment Management") sells carbon offset credits. So, when people complain that Al's burning up a whole lot of carbon when he flies to global warming religious events, he says it's OK, because he purchases carbon offset credits that make his carbon footprint completely neutral. What a relief! It's also extra convenient that he buys those credit from his own company, and that he gets millions in grants to carry on this way. His firm also invests in companies that are lined up to get enormous new grants as our supposed run-away man-made global warming is combatted through the spending of colossal amounts of federal borrowed-from-China dollars on anything labeled "green" or "alernative."
It helps that some of the people who have helped him set up arrangements in this area had investigations of their dealings called off by Janet Reno at the time. Yes, we wouldn't want a lot of extra scrutiny while setting up investment vehicles and finaancial instruments so that you can be the first mover to offer services in a market that you then publicly create by whipping up fear over bad PR and cropped photographs of polar bears.
His company handles over a billion in investment cash that chases any green-smelling contract or startup. It's no surprise that his associations with the very people who generate the hype, and his connections with the party in power that is now screaming about the need to spend trillions in new taxes on the use of carbon, happen to result in firms that use his capital being ready to get incredibly rich. And of course he's busy establishing carbon exchanges that will allow guilty carbon users to swap cash for guilt, and he, of course, will reap huge commissions in facilitating those trades. Hey, somebody has to do it, right? Why not the guy who had movie posters with hurricanes coming out of factory cooling towers? He must know a lot about that market right? Of course, because he's created it.
Re:Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Politics (Score:5, Informative)
Over the last 10 years Exxon has given about 23 million in research grants for climate research projects (pro and con but you can assume mostly con if you want). In that same period the US government alone has given over 2 Billion in grants for just global warming research.
In the last 20 years the US government has spent almost 70 billion on general climate research and anti-global warming technologies (about 50/50). And all this is just for the US government spending. Other governments spend hundreds of million to billions on global warming as well as the various 'green' companies.
The director of the CRU, Phil Jones, alone has collected almost 27 million in grants since 1990. That's $27,000,000 (figured I'd write it out long hand since you don't seem to understand that that is a LOT of money).
So if you follow the money you'll most likely find yourself starting in Washington or some other capital and then straight to a University Campus with no "Big Oil" boogie man anywhere in sight.
Re:Politics (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe they will get more funding to carry out more science, but you do know that they don't get to have any of that money, right? It is extremely tightly regulated and controlled by the grant providers.
Disclaimer: I am a researcher in a university lab.
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
Sir, you are a moron. Just where do you think the salaries of the professors and graduate students and research assistants doing research into global warming comes from? Grants.
It is extremely tightly regulated and controlled by the grant providers.
Unless a grant has money included to buy lots of equipment or rent ship time, the vast majority of the money in a grant is salary. This "tightly controlled" money destined for salary GOES to salary. A certain percentage of the grant goes to "overhead" -- money skimmed right off the top, taken by the University to fund management and physical plant, etc. And to fund professors in stuff like English and History.
After you reach 100% grant funding for the principal investigator salary, new grants go to fund more students and more research assistants and post-docs. The more students and post-docs a PI has, the more prestige and the bigger his realm. The more overhead he provides to the Uni the more respect and more prestige he's given by the Uni. The more he can demand in offices and lab space.
Disclaimer: I am a researcher in a university lab.
So am I, in a college deeply invested in climate research, and 100% of my salary comes from grant money. If we don't get grants to pay me, I don't get paid. If my PI doesn't get grants to pay him, he doesn't get paid. If my PI told the funding agencies "We have solved the question we were looking at" he doesn't get any more grants to study that question. If we were doing AGW research and said "humans aren't the cause", we wouldn't get any of the grants going to find "the solution". We'd be cutting our own throats. We'd be sitting on the unemployment line reading about all the grants going to the researchers like CRU who fudge the numbers so they look like AGW is real.
About fudging numbers. I've seen what today's grad students are being taught about data processing. If their dataset is supposed to look like a smooth line they will make it look linear, even if that means they throw 90% of it away as "outliers". There is no consideration given to why those points exist, if they don't fit the assumption about what valid data should look like, out they go. There are tools to take a plot that looks ugly and simply point at the data you want to go away, and it does. Magically, their dataset matches the prediction.
I remember very well one of the emails coming from NCAR a few years ago, trumpeting the fact that they'd made a small change to the hockeystick model and the upswing in predicted temperatures got much larger. There was no physical reality to the parameter they changed. It didn't make the hindcast fit better. It just made the scare factor bigger, so the result was BETTER!
Being right has nothing to do with success, being able to create a desire for your particular kind of research does. "We're all going to die unless..." works better at the latter than "we understand the issue and it isn't serious".
Why are people so ready to claim "follow the money" when the money comes from oil companies, and then claim that money has nothing to do with it when it appears in the pockets of the people doing the research?
Re:Politics (Score:4, Interesting)
Well put.
After you reach 100% grant funding for the principal investigator salary, new grants go to fund more students and more research assistants and post-docs. The more students and post-docs a PI has, the more prestige and the bigger his realm. The more overhead he provides to the Uni the more respect and more prestige he's given by the Uni. The more he can demand in offices and lab space.
It's easier than that. Were I to reveal my position, I could also reveal to you a certain "researcher" I know of who has ONE actual research project but over a dozen "project names" (one for each multi-million dollar grant), skims off ~$50-100,000 per year from each associated grant (depending on the grant's PI funding limit), funnels the rest into paying a couple grad students to "oversee" day-to-day operations and a staff of ~10-20 (depending on season) undergrads working for minimum wage handing out surveys and typing in results, and publishes back a paper every so often using the same data, just massaging the conclusion towards what they think the particular grant committee wanted to hear.
The "researcher" is rarely if ever around on campus, they rather spend a lot of time on lush vacations or in bars. With the advent of technology, half of their lectures are prerecorded and just played back on video, the other half are done via videoconference. It's really quite disturbing to hear about.
About fudging numbers. I've seen what today's grad students are being taught about data processing. If their dataset is supposed to look like a smooth line they will make it look linear, even if that means they throw 90% of it away as "outliers". There is no consideration given to why those points exist, if they don't fit the assumption about what valid data should look like, out they go. There are tools to take a plot that looks ugly and simply point at the data you want to go away, and it does. Magically, their dataset matches the prediction.
SPSS, SAS, and Excel are indeed the Devil's Work... heh.
Re:Politics (Score:4, Informative)
The grant source doesn't care what you do with your salary, so OF COURSE you can take some of the grant money -- which pays your SALARY -- and buy a house or take a vacation.
GRANTS PAY SALARIES. No grants, no salary. I don't know why you keep denying this simple fact of research life.
Even if your grant doesn't pay salaries (which would be unusual) it DOES pay for research, which can include a rented vacation home while conducting research at a remote site (three months, with catered dinners five nights of the week -- been there, done that, very nice), and it can pay for conference attendance, which is why many of the conferences take place in Hawaii and other vacation-like places. As a standard practice when I go anywhere unusual for research, I stay a few days extra. That means, in essence, a GRANT has paid for my transportation to and from a vacation. Quite legal. Quite common, too. If the best airfare requires staying the weekend, I've got a paid vacation.
Re:Politics (Score:4, Informative)
First, it isn't clear how Al Gore would instantly become a billionaire if cap and trade becomes law.
Let me help clarify that for you a little... [reuters.com]
Re:Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Yea, god forbid they take into account European data that was warmer for a certain period of time due to known weather phenomenon by adjusting it out since the rest of the world showed no such warming during that same period. Are you saying that you want climate prediction models solely centered around geographically European data? Seems like a bad idea to me.
Re:Politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
to keep it simple for those who don't get global warming, most people don't understand that icecaps melting/receeding like they have been lately is not at all a normal part of our weather patterns.
On the contrary, this is quite normal. Ice caps expand and recede all the time and have been for centuries. As MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen pointed out in WSJ today [wsj.com], you're discarding a well-established understanding of the history of the planet by making that claim.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well... melting? receeeding? even that is doubtful, remember there's ice caps in the artic but also in the antarctic, those have been pretty big [nsidc.org] this year.
There's a lot of misinformation (most of it, probably caused by this CRU guys) on this subject , one of the problems that leads to confusion is that it's being treated as a single issue, first you have to separate the topics (or the queastions for that matter):
Don't turn AGW into creation "science" (Score:5, Insightful)
Your cause may be correct, but your methods damage all of science as well as your cause.
True science should not hide data or pick data to support predefined conclusions. And dissenting papers with proper methodologies should never be suppressed. This is the only way to do science right.
Re:Don't turn AGW into creation "science" (Score:5, Insightful)
A big problem is that most people have grave misconceptions about what science is. Even those who think they understand it, often fail to remember the truth behind the scientific method. Science is not the search for truth. In fact, it is pretty much the opposite. Science is the search for what isn't true.
The truth is invisible, so we do the next best thing. We look at everything else, and notice what isn't there as possibly being the truth. Einstein's real feat of progress wasn't that he came up with the theory of relativity. What really advanced science was that he pinpointed a weakness in the previously accepted theory of gravity.
The problem is that most people don't like to find out that what they know is wrong. And that is a prerequisite to conducting science. Which is why it is so difficult to conduct. You have to suppress your natural instincts of control and try to let your instincts of curiosity guide you instead.
Feynman put it pretty well (Score:5, Insightful)
In a commencement speech at Caltech he said:
It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now
and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity,
a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of
utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if
you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about
it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and
things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other
experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can
tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be
given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know
anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you
make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then
you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well
as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem.
When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate
theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that
those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea
for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else
come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to
help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the
information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or
another.
Unfortunately, many scientists in many disciplines do not follow this. They seek to prove their theories right, and ignore that which might cast doubt on it.
Yeah unlike Exxon shills who never get a cent (Score:4, Insightful)
After all Exxon is so broke...
Re:Don't turn AGW into creation "science" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Don't turn AGW into creation "science" (Score:4, Insightful)
All your link does it point out that Federal research funding increased from 1.85 billion to 1.99 billion ANNUALLY, (and tries to make it sound like the poor little researchers are struggling to get by).
Okay, now include inflation into your calculation. In the period from 1993 to 2004, US price inflation was 29.8%. So if you adjust the 1993 number for inflation, you will see that in real terms, the funding for climate research actually decreased by more than $400mn (OMG BIG NUMBER)!
Do you even have the slightest hint how much 1.99 billion dollars is?
I do indeed know. It is about one-twentieth of the annual net income of ExxonMobil, which in turn represents a tiny fraction of total profits of oil/coal vested interests. (Less polemically: the salary of about 20,000 people, not even including the equipment they need.)
I really don't think some people understand what the 'B' in billion represents.
Flamebait.
Re:Don't turn AGW into creation "science" (Score:5, Insightful)
GOOFUS has a PhD.
GALLANT has a PhD in a field unrelated to his research.
GOOFUS gets little respect as a scientist outside the scientific community.
GALLANT gets little respect as a scientist inside the scientific community.
GOOFUS drives a beat-up old car.
GALLANT drives a BMW unless his chauffeur is driving.
GOOFUS wears street clothes to work, maybe a lab suit on occasion.
GALLANT wears three piece suits at all times.
GOOFUS is employed by a "university", a "hospital", or a "laboratory".
GALLANT is employed by a "Coalition", an "Institute", an "Association", a "Foundation", a "Council", or a "White House".
GOOFUS earns $30000 per year unless they cut his funding.
GALLANT earns $200000 per year but makes his real money from speaking fees.
GOOFUS lives anywhere in the country.
GALLANT lives in a wealthy area near Washington DC, but may have additional homes elsewhere.
GOOFUS may sometimes be filmed standing in front of big melting icebergs.
GALLANT may be filmed sitting in front of a bookcase or standing behind a podium at a $2000 per plate fundraiser, although there may be ice melting in his drink.
GOOFUS is a dues-paying member of several scientific grassroots organizations.
GALLANT is on the payroll of several scientific astroturf organizations.
GOOFUS gets summoned for jury duty but is never picked as a juror.
GALLANT claims "the jury is still out" on evolution or global warming, since he considers himself to be on the jury.
GOOFUS maintains the world is five billion years old.
GALLANT isn't really saying, but creationists distribute his pamphlets all the time.
GOOFUS claims the world is warming as a direct result of human activity.
GALLANT either claims that climate change doesn't exist, or if it does, that humans have nothing to do with it.
GOOFUS and his graduate students do the dirty work of collecting raw data and looking for conclusions to be drawn from it.
GALLANT does the dirty work of discrediting GOOFUS by manipulating his data in Excel with statistically invalid techniques.
GOOFUS writes scientific papers and grant proposals.
GALLANT writes the nation's environmental legislation and a column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
GOOFUS draws scientific conclusions from the data he collects that usually come out in agreement with the scientific consensus.
GALLANT paints the scientific consensus as being entirely political in nature and enjoys comparing himself to Galileo.
GOOFUS is heavily trained to be a skeptic and to treat information from all sources with a skeptical mind.
GALLANT is heavily marketed as a skeptic but reserves his skepticism for GOOFUS.
GOOFUS isn't paid much attention by the press since his opinions are commonplace among scientists.
GALLANT holds maverick opinions for a scientist which keeps him busy running from one balanced talk show to the next.
GOOFUS has no PR skills.
GALLANT leverages his PR experience all the time, although he has access to paid PR staff.
GOOFUS claims the sky is falling and we have to take painful steps to reduce CO2 emissions now.
GALLANT claims the free market will take care of it and recommends solving the problem by conning Zimbabwe out of their pollution credits.
GOOFUS advises his kids not to go into science.
GALLANT advises the president.
Hockey guy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Prof. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist is also under inquiry by Penn State University
Mann? Is he the same guy who said global temperature will go up exponentially like a hockey stick unless we cap and trade right now?
Re:Hockey guy? (Score:5, Informative)
Right. Same guy. Random number input into his program produced a hockey stick. I downloaded the 61MB zip file and have read most of the emails. Those are damaging in terms of exposing several issues:
1. They manipulated the peer-review process and controlled it to the point of changing what peer-review meant, freezing out contrary authors, reviewing each others' work, getting editors fired, etc. There's a lot of that kind of manipulation revealed.
2. They colluded to avoid the FOIA and deleted emails and threatened to delete data before they would release it under FOIA. This is illegal.
3. They admitted to manipulating data to 'hide the decline' or 'get rid of the Medieval Warming Period.' I don't have a problem with 'trick' being used. No big deal, but 'hide the decline'? Not good.
4. They would manipulate the data by simply not adding it, closing a run on an increase, when the subsequent data showed a decline. They seem dismayed that the last ten years shows an overall redction in temperature, at one point calling it a travesty and suggesting the data must be wrong.
5. Because there were no thermometers 2000 years ago, they use 'proxies' such as tree rings, ice core samples, etc. However, tree ring growth can be caused by wetness and other issues, not just temperature. In ine case they 'proved; warming based on 12 trees in Siberia. When hey went back and measured many more trees, the increase disappeared.
But the more damning evidence is in the programs themselves, including REM statements where 'hide the decline' is found numerous times, data is manually manipulated, and the programs would throw an error and keep on running.
The code, written primarily in FORTAN and IDL, is a mess--not professional. The datasets are often missing or in poor shape. There's one 'Harry Read me' text file where poor Harry is trying to make sense of the code, over several years, and points out many of the flaws.
So what we've got here is email and program code evidence of manipulation, very poor data, and very poor programming.
The thing is, there are only 4 datasets in the world, two terrestrial and two satellite. There are serious problms with both terrestrial data sets. NOAA's, for example, has manually 'adjusted' data over the years as much as 500%! In other words, the observed degree difference was .1 degree C and the 'adjustment' was +.5 degrees C. You'd think the satellite data asets would be more accurate, however, they were 'calibrated' on the 'adjusted' terrestrial data sets.
Remember Gore's CO2 graph? Probably a 95% correlation between CO2 and temperature, which he presented as proof that CO2 CAUSES global warming. Except that the CO2 increased 800 years AFTER the warming trend. In other words, warming CAUSED CO2 increases, the opposite of what he implied.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
3. They admitted to manipulating data to 'hide the decline' or 'get rid of the Medieval Warming Period.' I don't have a problem with 'trick' being used. No big deal, but 'hide the decline'? Not good.
Look closer. They actually *replaced* the inconveniently truthful proxy data with instrument measurements to get the fitting they wanted. That's not a 'trick'. That's plain fraud.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We've dumped a metric assload of carbon into the atmosphere and we can measure it (we have actually boosted greenhouse gases about 40
Re:Hockey guy? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. They manipulated the peer-review process and controlled it to the point of changing what peer-review meant, freezing out contrary authors, reviewing each others' work, getting editors fired, etc. There's a lot of that kind of manipulation revealed.
The "changing what peer review meant" was a joke - as demonstrated by the fact they did reference the two papers in the IGCC report that they were talking about what "changing what peer review meant" in order to exclude.
2. They colluded to avoid the FOIA and deleted emails and threatened to delete data before they would release it under FOIA. This is illegal.
As far as I can tell, they weren't serious about that, though most of the scientists do seem to be seriously fed up with dubious FOIA requests for data they can't release by people who'll just end up misinterpreting it anyway...
3. They admitted to manipulating data to 'hide the decline' or 'get rid of the Medieval Warming Period.' I don't have a problem with 'trick' being used. No big deal, but 'hide the decline'? Not good.
Firstly, not one e-mail talked about getting rid of the Medieval Warm Period. There were e-mails talking about a bogus statement attributed to one scientist in which he said that, but that's it. (Oh, and e-mails about containing the Medieval Warm Period - as in, obtaining temperature data far back enough to cover it in its entirety...)
Secondly, they did a really good job of "hiding the decline". Publishing about it in the very high-profile journal Nature a decade ago proved a very effective way of keeping it secret. Not. (The "decline" in question is a decline in indirect temperature measurements obtained from the density of tree cores in the high-latitude Northern hemisphere. It's a headache for reasearchers because they know based on other measurements that temperatures haven't actually declined - real cooling would be a different matter entirely...)
4. They would manipulate the data by simply not adding it, closing a run on an increase, when the subsequent data showed a decline.
Nope. The issue is not that the subsequent data shows a decline, but that it doesn't match up with other measurements.
They seem dismayed that the last ten years shows an overall redction in temperature, at one point calling it a travesty and suggesting the data must be wrong.
Hmmmm? The only thing I've seen called a travesty was the current scientific level of understanding of certain large-scale weather systems. One of the scientists was complaining that it was the coldest year on record where he was and they didn't know why.
5. Because there were no thermometers 2000 years ago, they use 'proxies' such as tree rings, ice core samples, etc. However, tree ring growth can be caused by wetness and other issues, not just temperature. In ine case they 'proved; warming based on 12 trees in Siberia. When hey went back and measured many more trees, the increase disappeared.
Yeah, that's a pain for researchers
But the more damning evidence is in the programs themselves, including REM statements where 'hide the decline' is found numerous times
All related to Briffa's work on the problem with certain tree rings as temperature measurements since 1960, from what I can tell. Yes, all of them, really. Take a look at the file names.
data is manually manipulated, and the programs would throw an error and keep on running.
Sounds about right for scientific code.
There's one 'Harry Read me' text file where poor Harry is trying to make sense of the code, over several years, and points out many of the flaws.
Yep. Some ancient legacy code base for an generating an obscure and equally legacy temperature dataset, apparently. (One that's underfunded, I suspect - it's not
Re:Hockey guy? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hockey guy? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, it's run by scientists who know more than any of us, which is why it is useful to link to them.
There are also scientists who know more than any of us that oppose global warming, but there are much fewer of them. Therefore, it seems clear that we should believe the majority, since we ourselves are not experts. Linking to some of those experts is the correct thing to do here.
Re:Hockey guy? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a huge amount of data that supports the claim that the planet is warming. The data is unequivocal. The cause of this warming, and whether is is anthropogenic or not, has been a major research focus for more than 40 years. Your claim that there's this cabal of scientists conspiring to brainwash the general public into believing in a theory of anthropogenic warming is ludicrous. Do you know how many people you're talking about?
Re:Hockey guy? (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't RealClimate.org pretty much the creation of Mr. Jones, et al?
this is pretty much like Wikipedia citing Wikipedia.
Linking to Realclimate is not the best idea (Score:5, Informative)
One thing you notice about the site is that the members include Micheal Mann, one of the scientists under fire here. Well, it is no surprise that he believes that he's right and says so. Ok but that doesn't prove anything. So if someone publishes a paper, someone else points out serious problems with said paper, well then I am not going to turn the person who wrote the first paper as one to refute the person who's criticizing him. Of COURSE he'll refute it, however that doesn't mean anything.
So to see a site that is run by Mann and others he agrees with supporting him, well that doesn't really say much, does it?
Re:Hockey guy? (Score:4, Informative)
Political Action Committee - Funded [wikipedia.org].
Not nitpicking, I promise, but seriously? You may want to consider using a different source than 'Mann's friends and defenders posting on a left-leaning PAC funded website' if you're going to use the word "Lie" in such a definitive manner.
Science (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Science (Score:5, Insightful)
You act as if the deniers have nothing to gain from ignoring the science. No matter what the science says, everyone that has a stake in industries that produce large amounts of CO2 will tend to fight tooth and nail against anyone claiming that CO2 does any harm. Simple selfish interest.
Re:Science (Score:4, Interesting)
You act as if the deniers have nothing to gain from ignoring the science. No matter what the science says, everyone that has a stake in industries that produce large amounts of CO2 will tend to fight tooth and nail against anyone claiming that CO2 does any harm. Simple selfish interest.
It's the energy companies fighting for cap and trade. Demand goes up while they aren't allowed to supply more, which makes prices rise without them having to add any more supply.
Jones, who is stepping down had received over $22.6 million in grants since 1990.
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands is the top shareholder of Dutch Shell Oil (how much so is a state secret) and is also the founder of the WWF. She is also an honorary member of the Club of Rome, which has pushed global warming as a way to scare people into world governance, funded by carbon taxes (see: First global revolution).
All of the top beaurocrats pushing global warming (al gore, maurice strong, etc...) are heavily invested in carbon trading exchanges.
I have yet to see the "deniers" be as heavily involved in money making schemes as the "alarmists."
Climategate? Bah!!! (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer the term Warmaquiddick.
What's worse than the appearance of impropriety? (Score:3, Funny)
Great, just great (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great, just great (Score:5, Insightful)
See, nobody disputes that instrumental records for past 30 years are more accurate than data obtained by proxy. Anyway, if there is such a divergence of proxy data and instrumental record (proxy data pointing downwards), it casts serious doubts about validity of proxy data of the past.
Also, it means that to show the hockey stick, you in fact do not need care about proxy data too much. Instrumental record will make the right shape even if you feed anything before with noise.
I guess that the most important issue in Mann's and Briffa reconstruction is that MWP was downplayed and current warming thus became "unprecedented". Which is exactly what you get if you choose noisy unreliable proxy data, and 'stick' real temperature records where it fits...
If you see any flaws in this analysis of "trick to hide the decline", I would be glad to hear your objections.
Re:Great, just great (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great, just great (Score:5, Informative)
The source code which was leaked clearly shows the data was manipulated with garbage data and arbitrarily created fudge factors.
I notice you don't mention which data had arbitrary fudge factors applied to it - probably because it sounds more ominous that way. Data from tree cores taken in the Nothern hemisphere post-1960 had arbitrary fudge factors applied to it, and as far as anyone can tell the results were thrown away. It appears the code was part of an attempt to determine why and how the temperatures claculated from the tree cores diverged from the actual temperature. In the end, the researchers didn't find an answer and just advised not using that data.
Even the comments in the code state that this was exactly the purpose.
That didn't ring any alarm bells for you? After all, if you're secretly fudging results, the last thing you want is clear comments stating as much. Perhaps that's because, you know, the code's author didn't want the fudged results to be used...
Someone on another website ran all 0's through the algorithm and the resulting data was the same 'hockey stick' pattern. Even running random data through the algorithm produced the same 'hockey stick' pattern.
Yeah, it would do. The trouble with the conspiracy theories is that the algorithm in question wasn't the one that produced the hockey stick graph. You've got it backwards - the fudge factors make the tree data roughly agree with actual temperatures, which are of course hockey-stick shaped.
So, there's no fraud? Yeah, there is.
No there isn't.
Finally (Score:4, Interesting)
Glad to see the cat finally coming out of the bag.
The reason this is under "Politics" is because, like it or not, this has become a political debate.
The science was thrown out long ago, as the emails prove.
The Earth undergoes cycles of climate change. We(humans) have a minimal affect on it.
We were not around for any of the previous hot or cold times, and they will continue to happen long after we're gone. To deny this is to deny historical fact.
The debate is indeed over. The proof is written in the stone, or the ice, as it were. ;-)
Re:Finally (Score:4, Insightful)
Our industrial processes are massive. Pretending that this has no effect on the environment or that we shouldn't care about the environment is willfully short sighted.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Call me when you can either (a) prevent or (b) cause an iceberg melting.
The energies involved are trivial compared to the energies stored in the oceans that affect the climate. It is possible, but not proven, that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is increasing the energy stored in the ocean system.
What is certain is that slowing the rate of addition of CO2 will do nothing. Except cause a major shift in political and economic power. You want real change? How about doing something real that would actually red
TEMPORARILY (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the WSJ article they linked to included the key word "temporarily". They relegated it to the subtitle, but it was there. (The WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch, also owner of Fox News, can be assumed to to take the climate-denialist position on everything.)
Temporarily stepping down is very different from an admission of guilt. It can be a way of allowing work to go on while investigations are under way, when a controversial figure attracts so much attention as to detract from the real work.
Maybe there are some real failures here, for which the guy does deserve to be removed from his job, but so much of what I've read about the hacked emails is hyped and deliberately misinterpreted that I'm unimpressed by this incident.
Re: (Score:3)
I guess you never watch the Simpsons, Family Guy or any of the other shows on Murdoch's other "channel" (also called Fox) which routinely make fun of everything right of center, including Fox News.
Yeah, what I thought. Rupert Murdoch is evil, because of Fox News, but Rupert Murdoch is cool because of Fox.
Let me know when your head starts to explode.
Re:TEMPORARILY (Score:5, Insightful)
The WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch, also owner of Fox News, can be assumed to to take the climate-denialist position on everything.
See, this is the attitude I can't stand. Why do you feel the need to divide everything into believers and denialists? It isn't 'us' against 'them.' That's not scientific in any way.
What I've seen from the Wall Street Journal seems to be more of a skeptical viewpoint.....they want to see the evidence before they choose one side or the other. As a financial periodical, the WSJ lives and dies by the quality of the information it provides, information that is often immediately testable (if I read that there is an oil embargo in some country, and based on that information invest in oil, only to find out later the information was wrong, I'm not going to be very happy). Is it really unreasonable to demand from scientists that their results also be testable and verifiable? That is how science should be done.
Remember Ike's Warning? (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember Ike's warning about the Military-Industrial Complex? In that same speech, he also said:
(http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html)
Think about that the next time someone tries to discredit research because it was funded by an oil company.
Ike's warning has been borne out. Public policy has become the captive of a scientific-technological elite, who, unsurprisingly, are a bunch of dishonest frauds.
What is the motivation to fabricate AGW? (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously there is plenty of monetary motivation to deny AGW, but what is the motivation to fabricate it? I just don't see it. At best you could say that these scientists were duped into believing that AGW was real and, now that they know the "truth," are trying to hide that they were wrong, but this is far from compelling considering the sheer number of scientists involved all trying to dupe each other.
What am I missing?
Re:What is the motivation to fabricate AGW? (Score:4, Interesting)
You're missing the simple human motivation of power.
Why did Rachel Carson blame DDT when ALL the subsequent testing showed that it wasn't DDT that caused eggshell thinning, etc.?
Why have enviromental alarmists previously cried that we're all going to die from:
- too much cold
- too much heat
- running out of food
- running out of oil
- running out of clean water
- all the wild animals going extinct
- running out of landfill space
- PCBs
- mercury
- lead
- acid rain
- nuclear power
- coal power
- overpopulation
?
CONTROL.
Of course, Gore himself WAS likely just in it for the money, he's well on the way to being the world's top magnate with his fingers in every carbon-trading scheme.
This whole thing is awful. (Score:4, Insightful)
AGW isn't science, but neither is the competing movement of skeptics. This is all just politics, and the whole thing is awful, and everyone parading around with glee over this controversy is just as guilty of politicizing matters as the people they're lambasting. It's impossible to do proper science when both sides of the argument have become moralistic crusades, and the tainting influence of politics has basically made the entire subject a mish-mash of lies and nonsense on both sides of the equation.
Neither pride nor gloating have any place in science. Global warming needs to be evaluated solely on the evidence. Skepticism should be applauded wherever it's found, but the entire global warming debate has devolved into nothing but gross factionalism.
Re:Ha! That'll show them hippies! (Score:5, Insightful)
I know there are lots of whackjobs who are conviced that GW is a worthless topic, or that the scientists are all on someone's payroll, or that GW science is some kind of master plan to give a certain political party power (and that power will just evaporate if they lose the next election? I've never understood those kinds of consiracy theories). That being said, the issue that I have is more along the lines of scientists trying to "do what's right" to protect the planet (meaning it's not about science anymore for some of them, it's about protecting the planet).
At best, that attitude leads to behaviors like celebrating the death of someone who disagrees with you; at worst it leads to falsifying data to ensure that world sees things the same way you do. We know, for a fact, that the former has happened; the question to me is, how far towards the latter end of the spectrum is their behaviour? Release the raw data and let everyone take a look at it, until then I'll always have my doubts as to what is really going on.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"or that the scientists are all on someone's payroll"
Umm, yes. They are.
Re:Ha! That'll show them hippies! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, they don't have the raw data [timesonline.co.uk]. They threw it away. Worse, they probably have threw it away much more recently than they originally stated [strata-sphere.com].
We'll never see it because they've deliberately destroyed it.
Based on my reading of the e-mails, which are available on Wikileaks for your own inspection, combined with this more recent information about the destruction of the raw data, I'd have to say they are very far towards that latter end of the spectrum.
Re:Ha! That'll show them hippies! (Score:5, Informative)
Too fucking right! Those big money scientists are faking the whole global warming thing so they can rake in the big bucks.
Phil Jones, the man who just stepped down has received $22.6 million in grants since 1990. [iceagenow.com]
Research has shown [azocleantech.com] that when the Sahara was grassland it was due to a warmer global climate (including more CO2 in the atmosphere).
You're reaction is hilarious because you refuse to look at any facts or allegations. These e-mails show that only a few scientists were corrupt, but they happened to be the ones most influencing policy at the IPCC. The rest of the scientists just flock to grant money and worry about peer pressure.
This in itself has become a major scandal, [telegraph.co.uk] not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There is a lot of big money floating around this thing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html [nature.com]
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/cru-hack-more-context/ [realclimate.org]
Re:Fraud (Score:5, Informative)
With regards to the content of your post, the data was most certainly manipulated. Have you not taken the time to discover the coding travesty documented in the HARRY_READ_ME file that was leaked along with the emails? Here [di2.nu] are a couple good links [di2.nu] to start with.
Re:Fraud (Score:5, Interesting)
In response to the readme file. Yes, the coding is bad. They aren't fudging the data though.
Re:Fraud (Score:4, Informative)
Thank you for the links, best article I've read all day.
A couple of quotes from the Nature editorial for the TL;DR crowd:
(Emphasis mine).
There is far, far too much politics in science. I don't know why Dr. Jones decided to step down, but I'm inclined to believe (after reading the Nature editorial) that the reasons were almost entirely political.
Re:Fraud (Score:4, Informative)
For everyone's information: data was not manipulated
Oh, for crying out loud. Not only was it manipulated, they threw out both the raw data and any audit trail.
"SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based ... Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible. "
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece [timesonline.co.uk]
I hope you're at least getting a paycheque for throwing out nonsense so easily proved wrong.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So we should believe the same publications who published the fraudulent analysis from the same people who are implicated in this scandal? Yeah, right.
By the way, why don't they show us the data they've been hiding and trying so hard to block FOI requests for? Oh, that's right, they "lost" it.
The e-mails clearly show that they fudged the analysis of the data, not the data itself. The e-mails show they conspired with government officials to block FOI requests, which is a criminal offense. They also discussed
Re:Fraud (Score:5, Informative)
fyi realclimate.org should be viewed very skeptically. In the leaked emails the fact that realclimate.org is essentially run by these very scientists is discussed in detail
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=622&filename=1139521913.txt [eastangliaemails.com]
I wanted you guys to know that you're free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through.... 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.
[T]hink of RC as a resource that is at your disposal.... We'll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics don't get to use the RC comments as a megaphone.
The denialists are out in force today (Score:3, Insightful)
Madoff? The guy who stole billions of dollar? Versus a guy who might, at worst, have infringed on a Freedom of Information act? What else is fraud? The "Nature trick" thing? That's such bullshit it's ridiculous.
Re:Google Censoring Climategate (Score:4, Interesting)
Bing did have 'climategate' as the top suggestion until today. In fact, just typing 'cli' would have netted you climategate as the top suggestion on Bing until today. Yes, it's disappeared completely today. See here [wattsupwiththat.com] and here [wattsupwiththat.com] for more details.
Do no evil, huh? At least MS isn't making any pretences...