DEVELOPING BREAKING NEWS: Premiere Brit climate AGW research labs hacked… data spreading thru cyberspace about number fudging to hide temp decline

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Anthony Watts over at Watts Up With That has a breaking story about unknown hacker or persons breaking into the East Anglia Climate Research Unit’s database. The over 61 megs of data “appears to be genuinue” considering the herculean task of creating emails and other sundry data of such magnitude.

I’m currently traveling and writing this from an airport, but here is what I know so far:

An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertised an FTP file on a Russian FTP server, here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today:

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.

We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents

The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files.

It contained data, code, and emails from Phil Jones at CRU to and from many people.

I’ve seen the file, it appears to be genuine and from CRU. Others who have seen it concur- it appears genuine. There are so many files it appears unlikely that it is a hoax. The effort would be too great.

Watts has the text of some of the huge file’s emails posted on his website. Saunter over to the first link above to read at his site.

Of special note is CRU’s Prof. Phil Jones’ admission of fudging the numbers to hide the temperature decline.

[Emphasis added by Mata]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) amd 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 or 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.

Another email was from another associate, Jonathan Overpeck, discussing a proposed letter to the Senate to combat the “continued assault on the science of climate change by some on Capitol Hill”. Overpeck is less than thrilled at being part of alterating data to comply with political aims, suggesting that such nefarious deeds were best left to other organizations.

Hi all – I’m not too comfortable with this, and would rather not sign – at least not without some real time to think it through and debate the issue. [Emphasis added by Mata] It is unprecedented and political, and that worries me.

My vote would be that we don’t do this without a careful discussion first.

I think it would be more appropriate for the AGU or some other scientific org to do this – e.g., in reaffirmation of the AGU statement (or whatever it’s called) on global climate change.

Think about the next step – someone sends another letter to the Senators, then we respond, then…

I’m not sure we want to go down this path. It would be much better for the AGU etc to do it.

What are the precedents and outcomes of similar actions? I can imagine a special-interest org or group doing this like all sorts of other political actions, but is it something for scientists to do as individuals?

Just seems strange, and for that reason I’d advise against doing anything with out real thought, and certainly a strong majority of co-authors in support.

Dissention in the CRU ranks over a scientific “concensus” has been growing, noted by Watts in his May 2009 post, where Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (aka CRU), Mike Hulme, shed his closet AGW proponent sheeps clothing, and actively started speaking out against the science behind the UN’s IPCC paper. In an interview with UK’s The Register, he is quoted as saying:

“To hide behind the dubious precision of scientific numbers, and not actually expose one’s own ideologies or beliefs or values and judgements is undermining both politics and science”

Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit – currently overloaded with cyber traffic – posted that CRU cancelled all existing passwords… saying “actions speak loudly”. McIntyre – a veteran in the mineral exploration business – focuses on analyzing “peer reviewed publications” that purport the AGW theory.

Stay tuned… Anthony and crew are atop this story.

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I am keeping my fingers crossed that this is NOT a massive attempt to make us skeptics look the fool.

And if it proves out, I hope to see algore in jail before the end of the year.

Did you see what Sen. Imhofe said to Babs Boxer on Global Warming: “We won, you lost, get a life”

It might be a bit premature but I LOVE IT!

If you want to see how desperate the Warmers have become, check this out:

http://www.gmanews.tv/story/177346/climate-change-pushes-poor-women-to-prostitution-dangerous-work

Global warming now causing an increase in prostitution and Aids….

Early response from the scientific community:

The CRU hack

– LW/HB

@openid.aol.com/runnswim: Speaking of the resident Fear Monger…. I wondered how long it would be before WARMER LARRY checked in!

I’m glad to hear Larry pass along a link describing how it is “illegal” to hack someone’s email. What a shame we didn’t see Larry and his buds express similar outrage when Sarah Palin’s email was hacked during the campaign!

@Mike: The main thrust of the realclimate.org response was not about the illegality of email hacking, it was about the the fact that, scientifically speaking, it’s much ado about absolutely nothing. In fact, as the blogpost points out, this was a comprehensive body of correspondence from people who thought they were talking among themselves, and there isn’t the slightest hint of fraud, global conspiracy among liberals, or even off handed remarks about the need to keep the research money gravy train flowing.

For the record, I didn’t — if memory serves — get involved in any aspect of the hacked Palin emails. I didn’t take the time to express outrage of the Palin hacking (it was done by a kid) and I’m not going to express any outrage about this hacking, either. Neither, in fact, do the realclimate.org editors. They simply say that such things are inevitable and that people should keep this in mind when they decide what type of language to use in their private emails, which is very good advice, which we have all heard from other sources.

– Larry W/HB

@openid.aol.com/runnswim: Climate Depot takes a slightly different view from the SPIN you are offering:

http://climatedepot.com/

Year by year evidence showing the dishonesty among climate “scientists” continues to mount.

WARMERS dishonesty seems to correlate perfectly with the drop in temperatures.

Go figure!

Yes of course Larry…..nothing to see…nothing to hear…move on, move on. Did he, or did he not discuss how they could counteract data that actually showed cooling? THAT was the question…which they clearly did not answer. And secondly, would you consider such behavior “normal” (as they suggest) in the realm of scientists who were “studying” or investigating or researching anything? ??? It may very well be normal course of business for “global warming” research…but it sure doesn’t sound like there is any “science” in it at all to me. More like agenda driven advertising.

[Emphasis added by Mata]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) amd 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 or 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.

@DC: Here’s what they say about your quote, above:

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that

“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.”

The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA

The leaked correspondence does not call into question the science behind global warming–but it certainly casts into doubt the ‘revisionist warmism’ this team has pushed so strongly since the IPCC’s last report, including at the weblog Real Climate, where many are contributors and which is subject to the same strict message discipline as they tried to establish and enforce elsewhere.

Many of the emails regard adopting a unified communications strategy to exploit recent data–but also to perform damage control when the data didn’t support their political positions. This exchange is illustrative:

Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2008 09:02:00 +1300

“Yeah, it wasn’t so much 1998 and all that that I was concerned about, used to dealing with that, but the possibility that we might be going through a longer – 10 year – period of relatively stable temperatures beyond what you might expect from La Nina etc.

Speculation, but if I see this as a possibility then others might also. Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.

Enjoy Iceland and pass on my best wishes to *****.”

Another email clearly advocates the destruction of correspondence to avoid complying with Freedom of Infomation requirements:

“Can you delete any emails you may have had with ***** re AR4? &&&&& will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email $$$$$ and get him to do the same? I don’t
have his new email address. We will be getting %%%%% to do likewise.”

Another email shows a discussion on how to frustrate the spirit of Freedom of Information, while complying with the letter of the act:

“Options appear to be:
1.Send them the data
2.Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that **** can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.
3.Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.”

Reason points out that the CRU had earlier denied repeated accusations of falsification, and even destruction, of data deemed less than favorable to the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) scenario. That denial ran in The New York Times about five weeks ago. The Times at first cited “scientists familiar with the data,” but later specifically named Phil Jones of the CRU.

The site RealClimate.org left this defense of the CRU and their condemnation of the initial hack late this afternoon (UTC/GMT):

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

A cursory examination of multiple examples of the e-mails reveals that the above characterization is true–as far as it goes. However, that characterization ignores the actual tone of those e-mails: of a group of scientists desperately wishing their theory to be true, figuratively wringing their hands when the data suggest otherwise, and certain unscientific behavior that no one can defend. This demonstrably includes manipulation of data and a conspiracy to conceal unfavorable data from other scientists who express skepticism of their theories. Furthermore, Jones’ use of the phrase “to hide the decline” does indeed suggest falsification of data.

More to the point, whatever mind-set the e-mails did or did not reveal, the presence in the archive of a five-page PDF file titled The Rules of the Game that radical activist Saul Alinsky could have written begs explanation.

@MataHarley: Can we split the royalties and combine my “WARMERS” thing with your “EUNUCHS?”

How about WARMER EUNUCHS?

Let’s ask Larry how he feels about that. Maybe he wants to use it on his holiday cards….

http://tinyurl.com/yzw447a

Need popcorn …

Larry,yes…I guess I’ve just never been around when scientists referred to analysis of their data as using “tricks”. Who would have thought that would be a common scientific term?? And for my next trick…..shorten up my sleeve……presto….global cooling is now global warming. (sigh)

Yo larry! Explain to us why they felt it neccesary to REMOVE the 1940s warming trend, eh?

Real scientsts follow scientific methods which include Publishing You Data And Methods. Why don’t the warmists do that? They refuse to release data or methods. That alone reduces the entire thing to a ‘faith based belief’. Real scientists don’t hide anything. A real scientist dares anyone to take their data and methods and disprove his theory. A real scientsts is eager to see if anyone else can see it in a new way. But not Hansen, Mann, or the Goracle. They refuse to debate Inhofe. They refuse requests for data. They make excuses saying they ‘lost’ the data. They refuse to discuss their methods. And as the veil is slowly forcfully stripped away we discover one liar after another. These warmists are not scientists. We are actually in a cooling phase and the planet has been cooling for the last eleven years.

I’ve downloaded the entire file (160mb), It is truly damning. They even express joy at one of their own scientists dieing, who was beginning to express doubts about their “science”. My daughter is helping me turn the e-mails from Notepad docs into Word format so that it’s easier to read.

As I have been saying for 10 years: This is the largest fraud ever perpetrated on this planet. Hundreds of billions of dollars up in smoke, billions of tonnes of foodstuffs burned in our motors.

If one of you Mods want the file, drop me an e-mail, and I’ll zip it back up to send you. The servers that have it are very overloaded right now.

I have been on top of this crap for many years, and the Warmist’s have nothing based on any facts or evidence whatsoever. It’s become religious in-nature…witness the defense of the Mann Hockey stick than has been debunked for 4 years now from our own commenter’s.. Mann refused to release his methodology (thus HIDING IT), until his math-modeling was inadvertently released in an obscure document later, and McEntyre got a hold of it. NASA itself re-did their math, and determined that the ’30’s were the hottest decade, NOT THE 90’s, but no one in the piss-stream media bothered reporting it.

The defenders of the Church of the Holy Goreacle will now bend every rule of logic to defend their Prophet, even those who portend to have scientific backgrounds. They can do an objective study of the affectation of a particular chemical-interaction with cancer cells, but refuse to accept that water vapor is responsible for 99% of the global-warming effect, nor accept that CO2 increases follow, not leads temperature increases, or that water absorbs IR in the same bandwidth as CO2, (other than one small spike in the band that reflects, not aborbs heat.)

@Mata.
I’m not sure if your analogy implies your up-load speed is fast or not. 😉

Steve M is probably going to release the best stuff faster than I can, but my crack-staff of 4 teenage girls are combing through it as we speak…or type, what ever the case may be. 🙂 (16-port home networks are handy for this sort of thing.)

They are going after this like crackheads needing a fix, and as long as I can supply munchies, music, and Monster they won’t quit. I will post as we find stuff.

(Update)
My brother and his UC-Berkeley daughter is on the way over with 3 friends to hook in with laptops to further the quest and arrange the e-mail threads.

(Update2)
They sure talk a lot about money…usually how to get it, then hide it. Here’s a segment of the very first e-mail re-coded:

(From Tatiana M. Dedkova” )

Of course, we are in need of additional money, especially for
collecting wood samples at high latitudes and in remote regions.
The cost of field works in these areas is increased many times
during the last some years. That is why it is important for us
to get money from additional sources, in particular from the ADVANCE
and INTAS ones. Also, it is important for us if you can transfer
the ADVANCE money on the personal accounts which we gave you earlier
and the sum for one occasion transfer (for example, during one day)
will not be more than 10,000 USD. Only in this case we can avoid
big taxes and use money for our work as much as possible.

Please,
inform us what kind of documents and financial reports we must
represent you and your administration for these money.

@Patvann: Sounds like you have quite a war room going over there. I’m not sure what MONSTER is, but be sure to keep it up and keep the girls motivated.

@Mike

“Monster” is the energy drink that keeps the young American awake.

My GAWD I’m having fun with this!!!! Surrounded by pretty girls, cranking the tunes, collectively smashing my nemesi, with a brother, and my hero-son by my side. Last night, we all spent the evening at the Marine Corps JROTC ball.

You can kill me now. I’d die a happy man, for all is well in my world. 🙂

TURN UP THE ALLMAN BROTHERS!!!

I am begining to have a better hold on what we have here. In a word, Incredable. While the youngins are tasked with coalating 1072 e-mails, my brother and I have been going over the “documents” file. Lots of Word-docs, PDF’s, and such.

The common thread to all of this, is the focus on the deception. It became a science unto itself. Here is a sample on how they handle an internal data-difference within a report they are putting together: (I will bold the phrases that denote this process) This was an intro/pre-review of an internal report from 2004, typos left on purpose, because I hate them all, and wish to further point out their idiocy. This is from one of the lead-reviewers of the reports being readied for public release:

General Comments
A recurrent criticism by the “Global Warming Naysayers” is that satelliteand radiosonde temperature observations of the troposphere show little orno warming in the last two decades in contrast to the surface temperaturedata showing a clear warming trend. (The latter are also challenged withthe “heat island” argument.) Though some helpful corrections have beenmade to the data sets (since the SAR) from the MSU and radiosondes, thesetwo independent data sets still show remarkable agreement while stillsignificantly differing from the best available surface temperature data.This is striking in figure 2.12. It is also disturbing in that the modelresults are not convincingly consistent with this data.

The issue is mentioned in the Summary for Policymakers, the TechnicalSummary, and in Chapter 2. The text addresses this difference byreference. Recent corrections to both the radiosonde data and the MSU datasets have helped narrow the previous gap somewhat but the possibleexplanation for attribution of the remaining differences (volcaniceruptions, spatial coverage differences and ozone) however, is weak anddoes not directly address the troubling fact that the corrected radiosondeand satellite data are still remarkably well correlated, yet independentdata sets that differ from the surface observations and the model results.It would be better to say more up front about the weakness of theexplanation (or give a better one) than to give the critics the invitationto draw attention to this point to discredit the report. It may be thatthere should be a difference and the models haven’t got it right yet.
Arthur G. Alexiou, IOC/UNESCO, France, (Exp)

This may take a while, as every freaking report seems to have this sort of “newspeak” and tactical diversion within it, and many reports and internal updates are quite long. These “corrections” are in-fact added constants to the models they bash us with. In this report, they are actually looking to find a way to NOT have the models be so exact, as to lend credence to their “scientificness”.

-But I fear them not, as it only girds my loins.

Here is how they fake (or “corrected”) sea-level data from actual-measured (From an internal e-mail to the “boss”)

Take notice how they are shaping the data to fit the model.

(Begin quote from e-mail)
Mike, these are the extra sea level parameters which are set in the Magmod.cfg file. The variable names are as in the bold letters above the table ie T1990 etc.

Table 11.16: Parameters used in sea-level projections to simulate AOGCM results:

T1990 gl990 dBglT dBGT dBAT dTGT
AOGCM T1990(˚C) g1990(m) ∂Bg/∂Tg(mm/yr/˚C) dBG/dTg(mm/yr/˚C) dBA/dTg (mm/yr/˚C) DTG/DTg
CSIRO Mk2 0.593 0.022 0.733 0.157 -0.373 2.042
CSM 1.3 0.567 0.021 0.608 0.146 -0.305 3.147
ECHAM4/OPYC3 0.780 0.027 0.637 0.029 -0.478 1.153
GFDL_R15_a 0.635 0.015 0.576 0.121 -0.177 1.879
HadCM2 0.603 0.027 0.613 0.096 -0.214 1.441
HadCM3 0.562 0.021 0.622 0.085 -0.354 1.443
DOE PCM 0.510 0.017 0.587 0.136 -0.484 2.165

(It’s in Excel in the report, so it won’t format pretty-like here.)

One of my posts is stuck…Please release me, let me go.

[Mike’s mischief:]

From: Phil Jones
To: c.harpham@uea.ac.uk
Subject: FW: Helpdesk query 1489: Hourly data have discontinuities at day joins
Date: Tue Nov 10 16:35:20 2009

Colin,
I thought that this didn’t happen.
Cheers
Phil

From: Lyndsey Middleton [[4]mailto:lyndsey.middleton@ukcip.org.uk]
Sent: 10 November 2009 2:43 PM
To: C G Kilsby
Subject: Helpdesk query 1489: Hourly data have discontinuities at day joins

Hi Chris,

Another Weather Generator query for you. It was raised by Richard Watkins of Manchester
University (and COPSE project) following a visit from Roger yesterday.

Can you let me know your response please?

Cheers,
Lyndsey

Long Description=The hourly data from the Weather

Generator have discontinuities at each

midnight join. The e.g. temperature

jumps, may be as high as 9C. The

hourly data seem to have been generated

independently for each day, rather than

fitting a curve from the maximum of one

day to the minimum of the next. The

minimum to maximum curve, i.e. within

each day, is fine.

Could the Weather Generator be altered

to produce more realistic hourly data

by fitting from Tmax to Tmin the

following day, please? This would be

helpful particularly for any use of the

data for building simulation with planted

controls.

Thanks,

Richard Watkins

Lyndsey Middleton
Enquiries Officer

UK Climate Impacts Programme
School of Geography and Environment
OUCE
South Parks Road
Oxford OX1 3QY

Patvann:
They are discussing how to manipulate input data within the “model” to more closely match reality. The e-mail following this one, includes the C++ code to do what they recommend, so as not to look so blatantly biased. The code included was verified by my Father who helped invent H-Assembler while at IBM in the 70’s. He speaks programming like Shakespeare speaks English.

“Weather Generator” is their name for the code.

My brain was starting to hurt, so I brought in a big gun…Now my Daddy is here, so we have 3 generations of overtly sceptical and curious people here, along with quick-clicking computer-savvy youngsters.

Consider this an official request for a “reader post”, Patvann!

Good Lord, Patvann!

You and yours are doing God’s work for sure!

My hat is off to you all.

I echo Mata’s reader’s post request.

Maggie

Thanks, Mags!
We have yet to begin…All I’ve posted is the stuff that comes along without any prioritation.

A Reader-post is in the works, but there is more to disseminate first.

The hard part is getting all this inner-workings communication (done within a community that already knows waz-up with each other) into a single-form in which everyone reading outside that circle can capture the nuance within it.

But it can and will be done. I’m a giver. 🙂

@Mike.
LOL!!! That’s great!
Somehow I had a feeling one of you would take my plea to it’s logical place!

PV, I salute you and your crew of patriots. Outstanding!

@Patvann:

And then came dad! So happy for you, your outstanding kids will always remember this. the night they took on the world wide global warmers, scientists yet! Three generations slapping down a fraud that is about to do great harm, proving Algore and his slimey peers to be the greedy culprits they are, total fakes.

Look at who you have right under your roof, outstanding! We have to get you all some hero tights and capes!

Missy, I like the cape idea, but tights? Maybe for the girls but not PV and the guys!

@DC (#8 and following):

About the “trick” thing. Here’s an explantation from the realclimate.org website (where the number of comments, many very scholarly and informative, is now up to over 800 !):

Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”

Could you give a few examples?

You could start with the generic phrase, “tricks of the trade”, which is known to just about any native english speaker, I should think.

Never heard of it? Not sure I believe you …

Group: “Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all.”

Well, since this happens “often”, it would be good to see a couple of examples of the word’s usage from other fields to understand why it is not problematic. Thank you.

Gavin mentions its use in mathematics, software engineering uses “trick” in this way, too, (as do carpenters, navigators, seamstresses, etc etc as the commonality of the phrase “tricks of the trade” should make clear).

If you doubt me, here’s a piece entitled Tips and tricks for software engineering in bioinformatics, for instance.

More from software engineering:

Jon Bentley1

(1) AT&T Bell Laboratories, 07974 Murray Hill, NJ

Abstract

There are many tricks of the software trade; this paper has sampled just a few. The science and management techniques underlying software are essential to any career in software engineering, but these tricks are sometimes useful. Careful use of the tricks has catapulted more than one competent young programmer into software superstardom.
I don’t think that these tricks should be given a one-hour lecture in a software engineering course. Some might deserve a ten-minute lecture here or a five-minute story there. But for the most part, tricks are learned through osmosis: your students will learn them as you apply them in lectures and as your teaching assistants apply them in software laboratories. And if they do learn these tricks, both your students and their employers will be grateful to you.

I could post all day in this vein. Frankly, I don’t belive those who claim to not understand this meaning of the word “trick”.

Comment by dhogaza — 20 November 2009 @ 5:04 PM

This is just one example. Other commenters provided additional examples from math and science. All of the issues are being discussed there. It’s balanced, critics make sharp points and the editors respond, and I’d recommend it:

Frontpage

With regard to Patvann’s ongoing labors:

Quite a coup for FA to have this “scoop” on your blog.

I’m thinking of the criticism which has been raised, concerning the replacement of the MSM (with their former legions of investigative reporters) by the blogosphere (where most of the effort goes into editorializing and relatively little goes into digging out and reporting the news, in a form where it is accessible for blogoshere editorializing). There have been exceptions: great example being the bogus GW Bush National Guard performance evaluation. This effort by Patvann may be another example.

From what I’ve read to date, I am nowhere near as outraged as many of you guys seem to be. I’ve seen this again and again and again, in the world of biomedicine. It began in the mid 1950s, with the first studies indicating a potential health risk to smoking. The risks turned out to be real, but it took a long time to convince the public (decades), in part because there was much contradictory data. When clinical trials researchers write papers, there are frequently controversies regarding inclusionary criteria for data and exclusionary criteria for data. Then, one step beyond this, there are similar controversies concerning which studies should be included in what are called meta-analyses of published data, to arrive at conclusions strong enough to change medical practice. This was seen in the recent past regarding the issue of the harmfulness of second hand smoke (where there has been a lot of controversy concerning inclusions/exclusions/one-sided versus two-sided statistical tests of significance, etc.). Most recently of all are the controversies concerning mammography screening and prostate cancer screening. I’m sure if there were similar email hacks of the investigators involved in all these examples, there would be language of a similar nature, which could be easily perceived as data manipulation to support a favored hypothesis. But this is entirely different from fraud or fabrication of data, and even isolated instances of overt bias (people being people, there will always be this sort of thing going on) do not necessarily invalidate underlying truths.

Regarding two of Patvann’s prior points:

1. Water vapor being stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. True, but there is an equilibrium. There is no net addition of water to the earth’s surface and atmosphere, but there is an ongoing net addition of new CO2.

2. CO2 spikes followed temperature spikes, rather than preceding them. True, but this is because what’s happening today never happened before. It’s unprecedented. In the past, something else (sunspots, orbital eccentricity, whatever) would initiate a little warming. As the oceans warm, they give up CO2 (like heating a soda) and atmospheric CO2 rises. This in turn, increases and perpetuates warming. But past was past and present is present. What’s happening now is that CO2 is being released in vast amounts from previously-sequestered carbon. Thus, CO2 is driving temperature increase. In THIS case, the rise in CO2 clearly preceded the rise in temperature.

I’ve written before that my biggest concerns are the biomedical aspects of living with (still rapidly increasing) levels of CO2 that have never existed in the history of homo sapiens. Gore only got into climate change secondarily. His hero is the Harvard professor who was the first to document the rise in CO2, which is indisputable. So his initial interest was just the CO2, per se. This was during the “global cooling” era of the early 1970s. It was only much later that scientists got the idea that CO2 might be a greenhouse gas which might cause climate change. So Gore latched onto that. There is very little data on the effects of chronic higher levels of CO2 exposure. Most of the human research is simply on the effects of short term exposure, most importantly on nuclear submarines. I previously discussed the bioenergetic, mechanistic reasons for concern, as will as providing an overview of the fragmentary research which further supports the view that rising CO2 levels are a plausible biomedical concern.

This will be my last post on this topic on this blog.

Once again, hat’s off to Patvann for his valuable work in making the information in the “hacked” files much more accessible for scrutiny.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA

@Skookum:

Probably so, if his father, brother and son are as tall as Pat, we would have to find a factory willing to retool their production line to make tights big enough to fit them. That could get expensive.

Interesting article written by James Delingpole:

Climategate: how the MSM reported the greatest scandal in modern science

they are also having a hot discussion in the comment section. Is captainsherlock a conspiacist? wonder if any of it is true. Lot’s of fascinating information in the debate.

captainsherlock @ 4:08

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017451/climategate-how-the-msm-reported-the-greatest-scandal-in-modern-science/

Missy, I think bright red would be a great color. PV could rent a porta potty for the back yard and the men can make desperate dashes to the out house to drain the mineral water they are drinking with the capes flowing out behind them. The neighbors will surely report the strange behavior and the local news channel will come out to film this news event. It could make the national news. Our band of heroes need capes for sure!

Tights and capes? You people need help. 🙂

The ability of CO2 to hold heat in our atmosphere is most pronounced with only the first 20ppm. Because that ability is reverse-logarithmic, doubling the CO2 does not double the heat-holding ability. If 20ppm holds X, the next 20 holds half as much. The next 40 holds half of that. As you can see if plotted on a trend-line, the 380ppm we have now is doing next to nothing in regards to effect.

The primary reason all of the UN (and realclimate, which is their advertising department) models are wrong, is that they assume that CO2 is permanent. NO OTHER STUDY MAKES THIS ASSUMPTION, because Carbon and Oxygen bonds easily break apart and become parts of other molecules, or are cycled independently through other means. CO2 in the othe 60 or so studies has around a 25 year lifetime.

Some say CO2 has been causing the rise in temps. Sure. Let’s do the math to see exactly HOW much we’ve “caused”:

CO2 is .038% of the atmosphere.
(Source:NASA)

Humans are responsible for 3.225% of the CO2 in the atmosphere.
(Source:NASA/UN)

Human’s CO2 is therefore .00122% of the atmosphere.
(Source: 4th grade math and a calculator.)

Total CO2 is responsible for 3.618% of the Greenhouse Effect Warming. (Source:NASA/UN)

Human CO2 contribution is responsible for .117% of the Greenhouse Effect Warming.
(Source:NASA/UN)

From 1900 to 2000 the temp went up .60degC.
(If we use 1909 to 2009, it went up .18degC)
(If we use 1890 to 1990, it went up .32degC)
(Source:NASA/UN)

Therefore, human-added CO2 was responsible for .000702degC of the warming between 1900 and 2000.
(Source: 4th grade math and a calculator.)

So let’s spend a trillion dollars to “fix” this, and the “best” way to fix this is to return to living as we did in 1912. Riiiight.

There is very little science being done within these documents. One of my favorite math formula that they use several times is the following:

Y = F (x) + E

Where:
Y: is the real climate, (as they define it, not actual-observed)
F: Model output of best choice of parameter values x
E: Discrepancy

In other words, Making shit up, but making it look good.

PS Mt Pinatubo put out more CO2 in one week than all of human contribution in the previous 100 years…I guess it’s only human CO2 that “bad”, not nature’s.

PPS. My editor is on my butt to get a Reader Post going, so I better, or she’ll run me over with her Hog. (Hi Mata!)

@openid.aol.com/runnswim: If CO2 were such a problem then why do you support Cap and Tax plans which only TAX and not CAP manmade release of the gas?

Does anyone seriously suggest that if we adopted ALL of Al Gore’s agenda that manmade CO2 release would be capped or decline?

Come on!

When are you going to figure out that CO2 isn’t the major driver of climate change Larry? And that the SUN actually is. What a surprise hunh?

The bottom line is that much more HONEST research needs to be done on the subject of climate change and I would focus first on the role of solar variability since that seems to be the obvious answer.

I know that doesn’t go over well with the WARMERS, many of whom depend on the scaremongering of manmade global warming to earn a living!


Click to get your own widget

P.S. Which one of these WARMERS had the bright idea to measure CO2 by putting a gauge next to a VOLCANO? How does that reflect man’s impact on CO2 levels? How many other examples have we seen of measuring stations being placed in areas that are more likely to give erroneous results?

:

You state:

PS Mt Pinatubo put out more CO2 in one week than all of human contribution in the previous 10,000 years…I guess it’s only human CO2 that “bad”, not nature’s.

This doesn’t seem credible to me, given the following:

http://www.mongabay.com/images/2006/graphs/co2_mauna_loa.jpg

Where’s the 1991 spike?

Do you have a reference for the above quoted claim?

The following seem to track much better with the observed accumulation of atmospheric CO2 to current levels, which are, again the highest levels to which homo sapiens have ever been exposed.

http://forums.accuweather.com/uploads/post-1182-1223841254.gif

http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/images/Historical-Emissions.preview.JPG

http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/images/ocp2007/gallery-large/thumbnails/OCP07-Fig-28.jpg

@Mike: I’ve never written that I support cap and trade. I’ve supported simple carbon taxes, dating all the way back to John Anderson’s independent run for President, in 1980, when he proposed a 50 cent per gallon gasoline tax for reasons which had nothing at all to do with climate change theory, which, at the time, was nowhere on the radar. I think that discouraging carbon consumption is very good for the long term economic and and environmental viability of the USA. I also, being a good environmental liberal, take a “stewardship” view, regarding natural resources. I would like to preserve oil, so that my descendants can have some of their own petrochemicals, for example. I don’t view the earth’s non-renewable resources as something which any generation has the moral right to plunder, to feed its own prosperity, without regard to what we leave behind to pass along.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA

Larry.

I changed it to 100 years less than a minute after I initially posted it. I should have noted the change within the body of the post immediately after I did it, but I wrongly assumed that because I made the change within 30 seconds, that it wouldn’t matter to anyone.

-That was not the right thing for me to do, as all changes should be noted. (Unlike the changes I am unearthing in my research into this debacle.)

When an agency or entity recieves a FOIA request, how would you (or anyone with a moral-sense) respond internally? If one feels secure in the methodology, one would not need to hesitate.

-Too bad our friends (Mr. Jones) have no moral sense, nor do they feel secure in thier methodology. To wit:

RE: FOIA consideration

Options appear to be:

1.Send them the data

2.Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.

3.Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

Doin’t worry Larry. When my Post is written, I will have no fear whatsoever is supplying links, data, and whatever else is needed to keep my integrity, and the integrity of my helpers intact….Unlike Mr. Jones.

Great work Patvann!
My intution is that the Russian server has not changed the data. Today the media(propaganda machine) has come out with a statement that seals it for me. That climate change is even worse than the “scientists” originally expected! Ha!…the liberals…denied, denied and attack, attack…

Warming’s impacts sped up, worsened since Kyoto

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – Sun Nov 22, 2:54 pm ET
WASHINGTON – Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated — beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it’s not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen:

_The world’s oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.

_Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.

Yes Larry….like the the cigarette/cancer issue in the 70s. But, you’ve got it backwards. The emails here..are very much like the ones that busted out the cigarette companies then..where it became undeniable that they knew of the cancer risk, etc…and fudged their data to hide it.

(#42):

I have been looking, but I have been unable to find a credible reference which supports the contention that the Mt. Pinatubo’s CO2 emissions dwarfed the CO2 emissions of humans for even one year, much less 100 years, much less 10,000 years. I am not angling for a gotcha or anything like that; I’d simply like to know. If your statement was correct, then I would immediately change my stand on the carbon emissions issue. However, I find it not only implausible, but wildly implausible. If you look at my links in #41, you’ll see that there isn’t the slightest hint of a CO2 anomaly in 1991, which I would think would be the case with such a massive emission, given that there is no credible explanation for the relentless rise in atmospheric CO2 since the industrial revolution — accelerating after WW2 — than human activity. I can find apocryphal references to Mt. Pinatubo emitting more CO2 than humans on political blogs, but no hard data from any scientific source. Perhaps I need to go into the deeper pages of my Google retrievals, but I just can’t find anything credible to support your statement concerning Mt. Pinatubo and CO2.

I did find the following, which suggests that volcanic CO2 is negligible compared to human CO2:

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php

Comparison of CO2 emissions from volcanoes vs. human activities.

Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1991). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 27 billion tonnes per year (30 billion tons) [ ( Marland, et al., 2006) – The reference gives the amount of released carbon (C), rather than CO2, through 2003.]. Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes–the equivalent of more than 8,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 3.3 million tonnes/year)! (Gerlach et. al., 2002)

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA

reply to #42 (concerning human vs volcanic CO2) went to spam.

– LW/HB

@Mata (#38):

I read your linked Watts/Lansner article and I am very unimpressed. Firstly, to be fair to both sides, here’s how they addressed the Watts/Lansner article at realclimate.org:

Irreversible Does Not Mean Unstoppable

Comment 50: Jonas says:

2 February 2009 at 3:06 AM

Interesting Article…

But, I’m a bit confused about reading this article on CO2 and it’s
warming effect noted in Antartic ice core samples.

CO2, Temperatures, and Ice Ages

Can someone please explain …?

[Response: What’s to explain? The climate affects the carbon cycle – over ice age timescales it seems to be mainly through ocean processes (solubility, production, stratification) which takes time to work through. CO2 is still a greenhouse gas, and so the combination is an amplification of the cycles which are driven by orbital wobbles. None of this is controversial. – gavin]

Comment # 104 Jim Eager says:

2 February 2009 at 6:45 PM

Re Jonas @50, who is confused about CO2 and it’s warming effect noted in Antartic ice core samples.

Jonas, to dispel the confusion that Lansner & Watts deliberately seek to sow in that link, all you need to do is understand that CO2 can be either an amplifying feedback or a direct forcing, depending on the circumstances.

What the ice cores show is that at the end of a glaciation CO2 does not drive the initial warming. That would be the increase in solar insolation due to changes in the wobble of Earth’s axis and the shape of its orbit. (Look up Milankovic Cycles) As a result of that initial forcing, the warming ocean and thawing permafrost emit CO2 into the atmosphere, where, as a greenhouse gas it then amplifies the initial warming. This not news.

If, however, you change the circumstance by skipping the initial increase in solar insolation and just add more CO2 directly to the atmosphere, the greenhouse warming that it will induce will be a direct forcing, as opposed to a follow-on feedback.

Which is exactly what we are presently doing by burning fossil-carbon fuels and injecting huge amounts of CO2 directly into the atmosphere.

Fortunately, CO2 and other greenhouse gases do not often act as a direct climate forcing naturally, but it has happened in Earth’s history. Look up the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), or the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, and you will see that it has not been a good thing when it has.

Now I have a question for you, Jonas:
Why would anyone trust someone who deliberately tries to sow confusion about this relatively simple concept?

Now, you (Mata) put a lot of emphasis on the following statement from Watts/Lansner:

When examining the graph fig 1, I have not found a single situation where a significant raise of CO2 is accompanied by significant temperature rise- WHEN NOT PRECEDED BY TEMPERATURE RISE. If the CO2 had any effect, it should certainly also work without a preceding temperature rise?! (To check out the graph on fig 1. it is very helpful to magnify)

Well, I went to the (magnified) version of the graph fig 1, and I can’t find anything at all in those ice core records to compare with what is currently happening (and which is, indeed, unprecedented). Previously, there are only tiny little blips of spontaneous CO2 increases, no doubt whatever effect these had were overshadowed by other factors (sunspots, orbital eccentricities, whatever). But look at the HUGE, GIGANTIC, ENORMOUS CO2 spike which is happening right now (extreme right end of the graph). It’s truly unprecedented, and the explantations from realclimate.org make complete sense, and there is nothing at all in the Watts/Lansner article to contradict these explanations.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA

@ Larry

*pant,pant,pant* Runnin my butt off here…

First of all, within the document section of the “hack-release”, they discuss the very thing you posted from realclimate to Mata in #48 (their admitted media-wing), yet within their own internal discussions, they are not so positive about it, and even discuss whether or not to be so “forceful” about it. (You’ll see this soon.) That “feedback” is hotly discussed, because of the unclear amount of the (small-heat-absorbing) IR bandwidth of the CO2 that makes it up high enough to make the hypothesized forcing that isn’t already covered up by the water-vapour absorption. (I hope that made sense.)

Second of all, regarding the volcanic CO2 volumes, I hereby masticate and digest Corvus corone cornix.

In thinking about it, I let it take hold without question since Pinatubo blew it’s stack, and some talking head on the local news that week said it. I should know better, and now I do.

In looking into it further, not even the super-volcanoes led to much of a “blip”. Extinctions and decadial winters, yes, but no substantial increases in CO2. In some ways it says something about how freakin big the organism we call earth actually is. Some papers hint that because of the cold-weather after-effects, the subsequent drop in temps helped mask the increases by absorbing it, and our present instrumentation has yet to detect that small drop within the signal.

But I consider that a stretch, as do most reviewers.

Others talk about the amount of methane and such, but again, the evidence is inferred, not observed.

Ug. I’m tired. I haven’t done this much reading and brainwork in 20 years, and tomorrow morning I can look forward to pooping black feathers.
BACK TO THE DOCS!!!

OK, guys.

I’ve gotten a little back-logged on keeping up with the comments updates in my email so if this link is a repeat of one previously dropped in here a 1000 pardons. It was just kicked to me over at my site. It helps filter through the emails by using word search:

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/index.php

So, have at it and git `er dun!

Maggie

@Mags

🙂

I tried to use it Sunday, but it won’t go as deep as I want because It’s the individual sentences I want to read through. Yes, I am being that anal about it.. (Although this is handy to have)

The big grin is for knowing you’re still diggin in da dirt. 🙂