My new favourite song:
Watch for the scene with Al Gore in gaol:
‘I hope you do a lot of time, cuz what you did was such a crime.’
Darn tootin.
Tag: global warming (Page 2 of 2)
It is looking more like the email and document files taken from the Hadley Cimate research Centre, and now confirmed as genuine, were leaked by an insider rather than hacked.
This link will download the complete zipped file of Hadley documents – FOI2009.zip. It is a 61MB file, so if you are on dial-up, don’t bother!
If you don’t want all the files, but want to have a look through, An Elegant Chaos has entered the emails (not the other documents) into a searchable database.
Interesting that the BBCs story about the leak of the Hadley CRU emails and documents is about how naughty those darned hackers are, and how unfair it all is.
This story from the Telegraphs’ James Delingpole asked what the leaked documents mean for the global warming crusaders:
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
“In an odd way this is cheering news.”
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:
Manipulation of evidence:
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.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing:
How best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.
“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 !”
Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.
The leaked documents show a high level of contempt by Hadley researchers for anyone who disagrees with them, and a willingness to ‘enhance’ their reporting of temperature data to make it agree with their throries about what should be happening.
Anthropogenic global warming is zombie science. Even though it is dead it will contiunue to thrash around annoyingly for a few more years. But it is dead.
Time to start looking for a new catastrophic, world-ending, terrifying scare that will sell papers and generate grant money.
I visit leftist blogs and news sites fairly regularly.
I can’t remember who it was who said ‘If you only read one paper, read the opposition’s,’ but it was good advice. If we only read the opinions of people who agree with us, we run the risk of arguing with what we imagine our opponents’ arguments are, instead of what they really are.
But visits to leftist blogs are trying, because they are so often simply nasty.
Tim Lambert’s recent treatment of Ian Plimer is a perfect example.
Ian Plimer is Australia’s most respected earth scientist. His book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science
Lambert is almost bursting with glee as he announces that Professor Plimer has plagiarised Ferdinand Engelbeen’s work on CO2 levels. And furthermore that Plimer deliberately misrepresented the evidence, and did not cite Engelbeen because if he had done so he would have been forced to admit that Engelbeen’s work undermines his (Plimer’s) view of changes in atmospheric CO2.
Engelbeen does not believe in catastrophic global warming, but he does believe human activity has lead to measurable increases in atmospheric CO2.
It is true that some of the figures in a paragraph in Plimer’s book are identical to figures used by Engelbeen, that Engelbeen appears to have published these figures first, and that there is no attribution to Engelbeen. There are numerous possible reasons for this. Possibly Plimer and Engelbeen discussed these figures informally. Possibly they both sourced them from somewhere else. Or perhaps Dr Plimer forgot a footnote.
One footnote out of 2,000 forgotten! And not only is this enough to cause a gloating leap to call Professor Plimer a plagiarist who should be sacked, but Lambert tells us he has worked out the real reason the footnote is missing, and it is because Plimer is dishonest. I’m surprised Professor Plimer hasn’t sued for defamation.
Then, of course, and tediously, Plimer’s integrity is called into question because he has (shock, horror) done some consulting work for mining companies.
Never mind that whatever income Professor Plimer may have received from mining companies is entirely unrelated to, and unaffected by, his research and opinions on climate change, whereas the IPCC bureaucrats’ employment, and the lecture income of Al Gore and Tim Flannery depends completely on maintaining the global warming scare.
Lambert’s isn’t the only offensive misrepresentation of Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science
Michael Ashley’s review in the Australian is extraordinarily vindictive.
There are more off the cuff charges of unattributed use of data.
Accusations of plagiarism can destroy someone’s career. Claims like this are serious. They should not be made lightly, and especially not in public by another academic, who understands what their consequences can be. Doing so is a sign of malice, or irresponsibility, or both.
Ashley then picks two very minor points, neither of which impacts on the main argument of the book, and claims that because Plimer has those wrong, there is no science in his book, and the whole thing can be disregarded.
The two points are about minor local changes in CO2 concentration, and the composition of the sun. Ashley’s comments about the first seem to me to misrepresent the point Professor Plimer was making. I am not in a position to judge the second. But really, even if Ashley is right in both cases, it seems to me to be verging on the desperate to dismiss the whole of a substantial and tightly argued book bceause you have found two minor errors.
Finally, Ashley claims that all the points in Plimer’s book have been answered by the IPCC (they haven’t) and says that if Plimer had anything worthwhile to say, he would have published it in a peer reviewed journal, because that is the way science advances. Since he wote a book instead, he obviously has nothing real to offer.
Professor Plimer has a substantial list of peer reviewed articles. He is clearly not shy about subjecting his research to the critical judgement of his academic peers, or of the public.
The IPCC’s work, by contrast, is not properly peer reviewed.
But Ashley (again) misses the point completely. Heaven and Earth is not about presenting new research for the first time. It is a comprehensive and accessible summary of the massive body of peer reviewed research relating to climate change, which has so far not been easily available to the general public.
Plimer’s work is not always easy to read. He is clearly a scientist rather than a writer. But he and his book deserve better than the carping and vindictive treatment they have received at the hands of leftist academics and journalists.
The key points of the book are that there is no discernible human impact on global climate, that changes over the last century are well within the normal range of natural change, and that they are almost certainly due entirely to natural cyclic changes which we are only now beginning to understand.
There has been no challenge to Professor Plimer on these points.
Qohel Blog Author Peter Wales
