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.
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.
I’m not an expert, but if the information presented here is accurate, it makes a pretty compelling case that the warming trend we experienced in the 20th century was quite normal within the overall geological time-frame.
A few bits on the ever-expanding, always boiling Climategate scandal.
First, here’s a link to, of all things, a single post in a Slashdot thread that concisely articulates a very important point: The lamentable tendency of many Global Warming boosters to label anyone who questions any part of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) narrative as “deniers.” There are varying degrees of skepticism, ranging all the way from “Global warming is all completely bunk and nothing you ever say will change my mind” to “Hey, I believe it’s every bit as bad as the AGW proponents claim, but maybe Kyoto and Copenhagen aren’t the best way to address it.” I myself am in the “Global warming may be real, but we don’t know how bad it is, don’t know how much of it is natural and how much (if any) is man-made, and in any case we should do a lot more study and measurement before ceding control of vast stretches of our economy to unelected transnational bureaucrats” camp.
However, the response of Global Warming proponents to just about any criticism of the consensus AGW narrative seems to be “The science is already settled, and anyone questioning it is as bad as a Flat Earther, a Creationist, or a Holocaust denier. Now sit down, shut up, and hand over all your money and power to us.” (And here’s the LA Times attempting a textbook “scientists are smart, Americans are stupid, questioning global warming is as bad as Creationism, so shut the hell up” approach.) As long as they keep trying to pull this “Nothing to see here, now move along” crap about Climategate, more and more people are going to question what they say. And rightly so. Especially since the overwhelming majority of people pushing AGW are the very same people who push bigger government and higher taxes as the solution to just about every problem. A lot of the people questioning the consensus narrative aren’t just random bloggers, they’re people with PhDs in related fields who are saying the science just doesn’t add up.
Here’s the reply of Watts Up With That author Willis Eschenbach to the Economist article (which can be found as the source link for the aforementioned Slashdot thread), rebutting their analysis (or lack thereof) of his original article (which I linked to here). (For extra credit, diagram that previous sentence.)
Here’s the actual IPCC reports, which some who have read them all the way through (Disclaimer: I haven’t managed to do that myself yet. Mea culpa.) say don’t make anywhere near the ironclad case for AGW that many proponents claim.
Is Google trying to suppress Climategate? My own quick search would tend to suggest no, they aren’t. I see a few AGW-critical sources (American Thinker (hey, is that the same J. R. Dunn that writes science fiction?), Washington Times) near the top of my date-sorted list. Clearly Google leans fairly heavily to the left, and I’m nowhere near the “Google can do no wrong” camp, but sometimes it just takes time for their server caches to be updated. At least once before (antedating this blog by several years) I jumped the gun on accusing Google of hiding something, only to have it show up a day or two later. (Mmmm, egg. It’s what’s on my face.) If they are trying to suppress the story, they’re doing a pretty piss poor job of it.
Finally, here’s Ralph Peters in the New York Post: “A thriving economy can do more to protect the environment than a desperate one. And let’s not forget the ‘human ecology’ of families struggling to put food on the table. Extreme environmentalism is a rich man’s sport that rides hell-for-leather through the poor man’s fields.”
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.)
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).
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.
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.”
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:
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.
Among the big news making the rounds is that hackers (or crackers, as certain Slashdot pedants insist we differentiate them) have broken into the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, where all sorts of <gratuitous UK slang>boffins</gratuitous UK slang> have been pushing anthropocentric global warming, and the necessity of massive government intervention to combat same, for some time now.
Some who are (like myself) skeptical of AGW are crowing that it’s the smoking gun proving it’s all a fraud:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air also thinks they spell fraud.
My take, given that I’ve only read a small number of excerpts for a small number of documents (see below): Embarrassing and suggestive, but far short of a “smoking gun” proving it’s all fraud.
The CRU information doesn’t appear to be up at Wikileaks yet, so here’s a link to a torrent at the Pirate Bay. (Warning: Downloading hacked/leaked/stolen information from the Pirate Bay may not be legal in your jurisdiction. Or moral given your frame of ethics. Plus some off the ads veer toward the NSFW. Be sure to consult with a qualified ethicist, HR Director, or minister before downloading. Or, failing that, The Magic Eight Ball.) I haven’t downloaded it yet, less out of moral qualms than simply because my Torrent-fu is weak…
Updated: An easier download link from the folks at Slashdot.