Posts Tagged ‘Climategate’

Climategate Redux: A Look at the State of Play

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Between finishing my taxes and the House District 52 race, I’ve had precious little time to post updates on other issues, but despite my personal lacunae interesting developments in Climategate have been bubbling right along.

This piece in the Telegraph does a good job of covering some of the further revelations. One of the more interesting points:

“The first report centred directly on the IPCC itself. When several of the more alarmist claims in its most recent 2007 report were revealed to be wrong and without any scientific foundation, the official response, not least from the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was to claim that everything in its report was ‘peer-reviewed’, having been confirmed by independent experts.

“But a new study put this claim to the test. A team of 40 researchers from 12 countries, led by a Canadian analyst Donna Laframboise, checked out every one of the 18,531 scientific sources cited in the mammoth 2007 report. Astonishingly, they found that nearly a third of them – 5,587 – were not peer-reviewed at all, but came from newspaper articles, student theses, even propaganda leaflets and press releases put out by green activists and lobby groups.”

And who would you get to provide an objective, disinterested analysis of IPCC claims? Why, obviously “chair of Falck Renewables, a firm that has wind farms across Europe, and chair of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, ‘a lobby group which argues that carbon capture could become a $1 trillion industry by 2050.’” Who else? That’s like asking G. Gordon Liddy to perform a dispassionate, objective analysis of Watergate.

You would think that Climategate, the failure of the last “cap and trade” bill, the deep unpopularity of ObamaCare, and the continued poor jobs situation would conspire to prevent Democrats from pushing a huge, job-killing, tax-and-spend global warming bill. You would be wrong. Under the bipartisan fig-leaf of the ever more RINO-ish Lindsey Graham, Harry Reid and company are getting ready to unveil Cap-and-Trade Junior. And they plan to do it in secret, without all those messy public committee meetings. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how low congressional Democrats are willing to drive their poll numbers in order to get the government’s fingers into as many economic pies as possible before the reckoning comes in November.

The battle over cap-and-trade, and Climategate, is far from over. If you know anyone in South Carolina, they should be ringing Graham’s phone off the hook to oppose this. Speaking of which, here’s the contact information for Graham’s offices off his official website:

Washington Office
290 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Main: (202) 224-5972

Upstate Regional Office
130 South Main St.
7th Floor
Greenville, SC 29601
Main: (864) 250-1417

Midlands Regional Office
508 Hampton Street
Suite 202
Columbia, SC 29201
Main: (803) 933-0112

Pee Dee Regional Office
McMillan Federal Building
401 West Evans Street, Suite 226B
Florence, SC 29501
Main: (843) 669-1505

Lowcountry Regional Office
530 Johnnie Dodds Boulevard, Suite 202
Mt. Pleasant, SC 29464
Main: (843) 849-3887

Piedmont Regional Office
140 East Main Street, Suite 110
Rock Hill, SC 29730
Main: (803) 366-2828

Golden Corner Regional Office
124 Exchange Street
Pendleton, SC 29678
Main: (864) 646-4090

Here’s the email form: http://lgraham.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.EmailSenatorGraham.

Former National Hurricane Center Director Neil Frank on Climategate

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Interesting piece on Climategate by former National Hurricane Center Director (and former KHOU meteorologist) Neil Frank.

Some have asked why people like myself pay attention to critics of Anthropogenic Global Warming, rather than the “(insert random percentage between 75 and 99 here) of scientists that agree with it.” To which it is important to provide a few points of perspective:

  • We don’t know what percentage of the relevant scientific community actually supports the AGW consensus, and to what degree, because the pro-AGW crowd is the only one that’s been doing the counting.

  • Some scientists previously counted on as holding the AGW consensus have changed their mind, complaining that the process has become politicized and that their research has been distorted.
  • The number of scientists dissenting against the AGW consensus continues to grow. Here, for example, are some 700 scientists that disagree with the AGW consensus.
  • Many scientists have been questioning the AGW consensus almost from the beginning.
  • It’s a lot easier to forge consensus when questioning AGW, or producing results that refute it, can kill your career.
  • Ever since ClimateGate information started leaking out, it’s become more apparent that a significant percentage of that consensus was maintained via data manipulation, suppression of dissent, and outright fraud.
  • Even if a majority of climate scientists support AGW, that would not ipso facto prove the AGW case; science relies on empirical data, not popular votes.
  • That also raises the question: Who do you call a “climate scientist”? Meteorologist? Oceanographers? How about experts in Botany to talk about tree rings, one of the central issues of the Climategate scandal?
  • Finally, climate studies are in their relative infancy. To make far-reaching changes to economies and society, in essence giving up on economic growth in order to hand over vast tax and regulation powers to unelected bureaucratic elites, based on computer climate models that, in some cases, date back to 1981 (or earlier) is sheer folly.

In light of that, Frank’s commentary points out that there are many more AGW-skeptics than the media wants to report on:

But who are the skeptics? A few examples reveal that they are numerous and well-qualified. Several years ago two scientists at the University of Oregon became so concerned about the overemphasis on man-made global warming that they put a statement on their Web site and asked for people’s endorsement; 32,000 have signed the petition, including more than 9,000 Ph.Ds. More than 700 scientists have endorsed a 231-page Senate minority report that questions man-made global warming. The Heartland Institute has recently sponsored three international meetings for skeptics. More than 800 scientists heard 80 presentations in March. They endorsed an 881-page document, created by 40 authors with outstanding academic credentials, that challenges the most recent publication by the IPCC. The IPCC panel’s report strongly concludes that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide.

In short: many critics of Anthropogenic Global Warming aren’t just a few Internet cranks, they’re thousands of well-trained scientists with expertise in areas related to climate change, and whose only point of agreement is that there are too many questions about it to throw trillions of dollars at the problem without determining whether it’s real or not. Calling them all “deniers” is pure argumentum ad hominem.

ClimateGate Supression of Dissent: A Case Study

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Here are the authors of a study critical of the consensus AGW narrative which the leaked CRU letters talk about how to suppress. The letters discuss how to stack peer reviewers in favor of AGW and against dissenters, and how to bypass the normal peer review cycle to cram a response in immediately after the critical paper.

Hint: this is not the way disinterested science is supposed to work.

Russians now saying their climate data was distorted, cherry-picked

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

According to this report CRU “probably tampered with Russian-climate data.”

It goes on:

“Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

“The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.”

The deeper people look into the data, the more data manipulation they find. Insert your own “tip of the iceberg” joke here.

Frank Tipler Offers a Mathematical Proof of the Existence of God

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Or more accurately, notes toward such a proof.

Interesting stuff, though as an agnostic, I don’t technically have a god in this fight…

More Climategate Data Manipulation

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Today’s example of CRU cherry=picking and flat-out changing data that didn’t show man-made global warming comes from Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That?. It turns out that what some climate scientists call “homogenizing” data, the rest of us would call “lying.”

One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

So once again, I’m left with an unsolved mystery. How and why did the GHCN “adjust” Darwin’s historical temperature to show radical warming? Why did they adjust it stepwise? Do Phil Jones and the CRU folks use the “adjusted” or the raw GHCN dataset? My guess is the adjusted one since it shows warming, but of course we still don’t know … because despite all of this, the CRU still hasn’t released the list of data that they actually use, just the station list.

Another odd fact, the GHCN adjusted Station 1 to match Darwin Zero’s strange adjustment, but they left Station 2 (which covers much of the same period, and as per Fig. 5 is in excellent agreement with Station Zero and Station 1) totally untouched. They only homogenized two of the three. Then they averaged them.

That way, you get an average that looks kinda real, I guess, it “hides the decline”.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, care to know the way that GISS deals with this problem? Well, they only use the Darwin data after 1963, a fine way of neatly avoiding the question … and also a fine way to throw away all of the inconveniently colder data prior to 1941. It’s likely a better choice than the GHCN monstrosity, but it’s a hard one to justify.

Now, I want to be clear here. The blatantly bogus GHCN adjustment for this one station does NOT mean that the earth is not warming. It also does NOT mean that the three records (CRU, GISS, and GHCN) are generally wrong either. This may be an isolated incident, we don’t know. But every time the data gets revised and homogenized, the trends keep increasing. Now GISS does their own adjustments. However, as they keep telling us, they get the same answer as GHCN gets … which makes their numbers suspicious as well.

And CRU? Who knows what they use? We’re still waiting on that one, no data yet …

What this does show is that there is at least one temperature station where the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling. In addition, the average raw data for Northern Australia is quite different from the adjusted, so there must be a number of … mmm … let me say “interesting” adjustments in Northern Australia other than just Darwin.

And with the Latin saying “Falsus in unum, falsus in omis” (false in one, false in all) as our guide, until all of the station “adjustments” are examined, adjustments of CRU, GHCN, and GISS alike, we can’t trust anyone using homogenized numbers.

(Hat tip: The Volokh Conspiracy.)

Another Climategate Update

Monday, December 7th, 2009

This story in the Telegraph shows what astonishing lengths the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia went to in order to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period from climate records. In particular, Global Warming proponents have thrown out a vast host of other proxy measurements, and now want to us put vast swathes of our economy under government control based on evidence from a single tree from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. (As an added irony, they’ve had to ignore all the other trees from that region, because they all show the Medieval Warm Period being much hotter than today.)

Read the whole thing. (Hat tip to Roger Simon).

Climategate Update

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

Lots and lots of people have been going through the CRU material mentioned before.

Here’s a rather extensive analysis by Marc Sheppard over at American Thinker as to why the “nothing to see here” line on the various hacks and tricks mentioned therein don’t hold water. if I’m reading it correctly, and the analysis is correct, then at least half of the 20th century warming trend (and all after about 1998) are the results not of solid science, but of various hacks to skew the data.

By all means, let’s get better data on the climate. But we’d be insane to cripple our economy through meaningless treaties like Kyoto and Copenhagen based on blatantly manipulated data pushed by people with a post-national agenda of higher taxes, bigger government, and control of vast swatches of the world economy by unelected international bureaucratic elites.

Iowahawk Geographic: The Secret Life of Climate Researchers

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Once again, Iowahawk proves he’s the web’s reigning satire master.

“The Alpha Grantwriter in our hive has been very successful indeed. He has earned three publications, a keynote address, and attracts the attention of a suitor from the symbiotic grant-giving predator genus Lucra Ecologica Hysterica. The suitor’s grant bags are bulging with carbon credits and tax revenues harvested using the hive’s last graphs, and the pair once again engage in their annual cross-pollination ritual. They relax with a cigarette, and return to their respective hives: the Grantwriter with fresh money, the Grantgiver to Washington or Brussels with new carbon tax proposals. The circle of life is completed.”

Climate Research Center Hacking Update

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Bishop Hill has dug into the hacked and leaked documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit mentioned yesterday. The indefatigable John Hindraker at Powerline has also waded into the document morass.

Before the analysis, some caveats:

  • Hacking other people’s computers is bad, mmmkay?

  • Downloading hacked files is of dubious legal/ethical standing.
  • What has been released is purportedly only a small sample of a much larger stash of documents. What has been released has certainly been cherry-picked, and there’s no guarantee that it’s actually representative, hasn’t been altered, etc.
  • Anytime you see the inner workings of any organization, there’s going to be distasteful aspects of seeing how the sausage get made, discussion of how to play up strengths, hide or ignore weaknesses, etc. It’s naive to think that science, however lofty tried and true its means or lofty its goals, is going to be immune.

All that said, what is here is more damaging (and damning) than previously suggested. There’s still no smoking gun (i.e. “We all know global warming is fake, so stop crunching those number and join us at the big taxpayer-funded hooker and blow party tonight at Gordon Brown’s flat!”), but there are dozens, if not hundreds, of guns that are at least a little warm.

What these emails show is sustained, coordinated attempts to massage, cherry-pick, and skew data to support a consensus of anthropocentric global warming, and to downplay or ignore any evidence of global cooling over the last decade or, failing that, the significance of same.

In the meantime, they complete institutional investment of certain groups of climate scientists (and their non-scientific followers) in presenting AGW as Sacred Truth immune to criticism is a good reason for continued skepticism, and for all their data to be released. It’s also another good argument (of many) to hold off on expensive, big government boondoggles like the Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” bill until the science can be verified by dispassionate observers (or, better yet, hostile critics).

I’m sure there are a lot more revelations to come.