Posted by
Average Voter on Saturday, November 21, 2009 11:17:54 AM
In a stunning, albeit, illegal revelation, some prominent climate scientists were
exposed through some email exchanges that were hacked from the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Unit. It already has a name: Climategate.
The website
Wattsupwiththat has some great coverage on the scandal. Here are some examples of those emails:
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
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
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Here is another email that is surprising:
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”
Translation: We can no longer tolerate these skeptics and will no longer accept them in the peer review process.
Then we have the currentl cooling trend:
In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discussed whether a string of recent years of relatively stable temperatures undermined scientific models that predict long-term warming.
"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't," Trenberth wrote.
Other scientists went on to rebut him, saying that the fluctuations were not inconsistent with a continuing warming trend.
There must be some doubt if he is bringing up the fact that the cooling trend is troubling.
I do not believe what Patrick J. Micheals was qouted in the NY Times as a
"Mushroom cloud" of detrimental information, but I do think it puts a few things into perspective.
First off, it is clear, without a doubt, that their climate models are not working and they have to fill in the gaps to get the outcome they desire. What does this mean? It means that their climate models are based on false information. Sometimes to get a theory to work, a scientist has to fill in the gaps to help in the search of what is needed to come to that conclusion. The obvious problem here is that we have been told that the debate is over regading climate change. But now we see that it isn't. When a theory starts to break down, a clear headed scientist will admit the error and rework his model. These "scientists" have obviously lost that ability, instead using "tricks" to make their theory work. And what does that mean? It means these climate scientist have lost their credibility.
Secondly, we have a clear indication that the recent cooling effect has stumped them. They simple do not understand why the climate is suddenly cooling and they admit as much.
And finally, because of their complicity in all of this, they must push out the skeptics in the peer review process. Add all of this up and we begin to see problems with the current science being force-feed to us. But we have also seen something much deeper; a science that has lost it's credibilty. Global warming has taken on a live of its own. It is now more important for these scientists to uphold the status quo of "rising temperatures" than to understand the Earth's climate. They have to keep the politics of climate change alive. Too much time and money has been invested in this to just give up.
And it has already started.
At Grist, they are already explaining away the emails.
I’ll save you from the science wonkery and allusions here (check out RealClimate for a more detailed explanation), but noisy climate skeptics are jumping on two parts of that sentence. Guess which ones? Yup, “trick” and “hide the decline.” The legitimate climate scientists over at RealClimate have an indepth response to the allegations being made against the CRU folks, which include some of their own contributors. They translate the science slang at work here: “Scientists often use the term ‘trick’ to refer to ‘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 “hiding” part, they admit it is a poor choice of words. But in this case, it is an “appropriate” use of a certain kind of data that is actually “‘hidden’ in plain sight.”
This story has been published in britian
via the Telegraph. But as far as the U.S. is concerned, few outside the blogsphere have mentioned it. Time will tell whether or not this will gain any traction. With the media bought and sold on climate change, I don't see alot of coverage happening anytime soon.
Who knows; these emails may end up being the demise of this blog. We will see. But as far as I am concerned, all of my statements in this blog over the years have been vindicated. My complant was never that global warming was a hoax, but that it was being hyped, exagerated. Today, we got a glimpse of that truth.