Phil Jones hid data because it was "standard practice"

2 March, 2010 by

In the hot seat

And, more importantly, it also shows the peer-review process is meaningless in alarmist climate science. That’s the ludicrous quote from Jones’ appearance before a Parliamentary committee. From The Daily Mail, via WUWT:

The scientist at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ row over global warming hid data ‘because it was standard practice’, it emerged today.

Professor Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia’s prestigious climatic research unit, today admitted to MPs that the centre withheld raw station data about global temperatures from around the world.

The world-renowned research unit has been under fire since private emails, which sceptics claimed showed evidence of scientists manipulating climate data, were hacked from the university’s server and posted online.

Now, an independent probe is examining allegations stemming from the emails that scientists hid, manipulated or deleted data to exaggerate the case for man-made global warming.

Prof Jones today said it was not ‘standard practice’ in climate science to release data and methodology for scientific findings so that other scientists could check and challenge the research.

He also said the scientific journals which had published his papers had never asked to see it.

The journals never asked to see it? Well of course, they wouldn’t would they? The peer-review process for alarmist climate science is non-existent. As long as a paper supports the consensus, it will be waived through without any scrutiny – and now we have the evidence to prove it: journals never asked to see the original data.

So the next time anyone says the peer-review process ensures that only decent research gets published, you know how to respond.

Read it here.

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Phil Jones to face UK Parliamentary enquiry today

1 March, 2010 by

Tricky questions ahead

AP (via the SMH) reports that Phil Jones and the Met Office head are due to testify at a UK Parliamentary enquiry:

The scientist at the center of the controversy over e-mails stolen from a British climate research center is due to be questioned by lawmakers.

Climatologist Phil Jones is among the experts due to testify before Parliament’s Science and Technology committee.

Jones figured prominently in more than 1,000 e-mails hacked [leaked – Ed] from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit last year.

The e-mails appeared to show [did show – Ed] Jones and colleagues denigrating skeptics of man-made global warming and discussing ways to dodge Freedom of Information requests.

Critics said the e-mails were evidence of a conspiracy to exaggerate the threat of climate change.

Also testifying Monday are other top researchers, including the British weather office’s chief scientist. (source)

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UK scientist "hid flaws in Chinese weather data"

3 February, 2010 by

In the poo again

This report comes from the Sydney Morning Herald, amazingly, but it includes its standard disclaimer on this kind of story:

“The allegations do not undermine the large body of evidence for human-made global warming.”

No, of course they don’t. Nothing ever does in Fairfax-land, does it? But still, the story is another nail in the IPCC’s credibility:

A BRITISH climate scientist at the centre of the hacked emails controversy has been accused of trying to hide flaws in Chinese weather data used in a scientific paper on the effect of cities on global warming.

The 1990 paper, which also included temperature records from Australia, was cited in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as evidence that urbanisation only made a small contribution to rising temperatures.

The Guardian investigated more than 2000 emails hacked [leaked – Ed] last year from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, many of them sent by Professor Jones, its director.

It reported that Professor Jones had withheld information about the 50 years of Chinese data when faced with freedom-of-information requests by climate sceptics.

They wanted to know the location of 84 Chinese weather stations used by Professor Jones and his colleague, Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University of Albany, to argue that rising temperatures in China were due to climate change, not expanding cities. When Professor Jones released the information, no location was given for the stations that were supposed to be in the countryside.

An investigation by Professor Wang’s university cleared him of any wrongdoing, but the emails reveal Professor Jones’s colleagues in the unit were concerned by his reliance on the Chinese data.

The controversy could lead to a review of the influential paper, published in Nature, which had four other authors, including Dr Michael Coughlan, head of the National Climate Centre at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

You have to ask, if the case for global warming is so strong and the science is so settled, why is such conduct necessary? It’s a simple question.

Read it here.

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Shock: SMH publishes sceptical climate article

27 January, 2010 by

Turning sceptical?

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are to the global warming religion what L Ron Hubbard is to scientology, so to see even a few shards of agnosticism creeping in is fairly surprising, and encouraging:

The claims made about the science have been rash, asserting dogmatic certainty about human-induced warming when the reality is that the overall picture is quite unclear. This has now backfired, with the IPCC admitting mistakes in its 2007 report, and the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, which the IPCC has drawn heavily upon, shown to have been, at the least, devious in the results it has made public.

There may be some link between the rashness of the global warming campaign and the haplessness of the politics that has followed. The best current bet is that, after Copenhagen, emission controls is dead as a serious international issue. And further, only some environmental disaster that can be convincingly linked to climate change will rekindle it. The ”sceptics” have won the politics.

The clumsy politics is international and local. An emissions trading scheme, as proposed by the Australian Government, is very bad policy. It is a form of taxation on carbon under another name. To tax carbon will lead to thousands of pages of regulation – a godsend to bureaucracy, but paralysing for initiative and industry.

Read it here.

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UK Parliament in investigate Climategate

24 January, 2010 by

CRU investigation

The terms of reference are certainly wide:

The Science and Technology Committee today announces an inquiry into the unauthorised publication of data, emails and documents relating to the work of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA). The Committee has agreed to examine and invite written submissions on three questions:

—What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

—Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?

—How independent are the other two international data sets?

The Committee intends to hold an oral evidence session in March 2010.

There are some very encouraging words there: “integrity of scientific research” stands out, plus a look at the other temperature sets! Let’s see if the UK Parliament can live up to our expectations.

Read the press release here. (h/t WUWT)

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US: Michael Mann received $500k economic stimulus funds

21 January, 2010 by

Given up counting tree rings - now counting dollars instead

<sarc> Gee, giving money to a discredited climate alarmist. That’s really going to help the US economy. </sarc> But that’s what happened, and the mainstream media resolutely ignored it (except for the ever-reliable WSJ):

According to the conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research, Mann received $541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.

With this in mind, NCPPR issued a press release Thursday asking for these funds to be returned:

In the face of rising unemployment and record-breaking deficits, policy experts at the National Center for Public Policy Research are criticizing the Obama Administration for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State Professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.

“It’s outrageous that economic stimulus money is being used to support research conducted by Michael Mann at the very time he’s under investigation by Penn State and is one of the key figures in the international Climategate scandal. Penn State should immediately return these funds to the U.S. Treasury,” said Tom Borelli, Ph.D., director of the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project.

Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State University because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science. Emails and documents mysteriously released from the previously-prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom revealed discussions of manipulation and destruction of research data, as well as efforts to interfere with the peer review process to stifle opposing views. The motivation underlying these efforts appears to be a coordinated strategy to support the belief that mankind’s activities are causing global warming. […]

The $541,184 grant is for three years and was initiated in June 2009.

And Mann’s university, Penn State was only last week granted a whopping $1.9 million in stimulus funds. As the NCPPR’s Deneen Borelli says:

It’s no wonder that Obama’s stimulus plan is failing to produce jobs. Taxpayer dollars aren’t being used in the ways most likely to spur job creation. The stimulus was not sold to the public as a way to reward a loyalist in the climate change debate. Nor was the stimulus sold as a way to promote the Obama Administration’s position on the global warming theory…As is often the case, political considerations corrupt the distribution of government funds.

Read it here. (h/t Tom S)

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Quote of the Day

19 January, 2010 by

Quote of the Day

From the opinion pages of The Australian, and referring to the newly christened “Icegate” story from yesterday, where the IPCC has been discovered taking “facts” about glaciers shrinking from the back of a matchbox (see here and here):

This “icegate” scandal is potentially far more damaging to climate change science than the recent discovery of embarrassing emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. Those emails reveal a robust advocacy of global warming on the part of scientists but no evidence that this compromised their scientific work.

Strange that fiddling data (“hide the decline”), deleting correspondence in response to FOI requests and intimidating journals that dare publish alternative views doesn’t count as compromising their scientific work. Someone at The Australian should actually read those emails, perhaps?

Read it here.

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Climategate in the US

17 January, 2010 by

More on the fudging of data at NOAA and NASA by James Delingpole in the UK Telegraph:

For those who haven’t seen it, here’s a link to US weatherman John Coleman’s magisterial demolition of the Great AGW Scam. I particularly recommend part 4 because that’s the one with all the meat. It shows how temperature readings have been manipulated at the two key climate data centres in the United States – the NASA Goddard Science and Space Institute at Columbia University in New York and the NOAA National Climate Data Center in Ashville, North Carolina. (Hat tip: Platosays)

Here is the video of Part 4 that James refers to:

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width=”400″
height=”330″
description=”John Coleman – Part 4″
player=”4″
autoload=”false” autoplay=”false”
loop=”false” autorewind=”true”
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And he continues:

This is a scandal to rank with Climategate.

What it shows is that, just like in Britain at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) temperature data records have been grotesquely distorted by activist scientists in order to exaggerate the appearance of late 20th century global warming. They achieved this – with an insouciant disregard for scientific integrity which quite beggars belief – through the simple expedient of ignoring most of those weather station sited in higher, colder places and using mainly ones in warmer spots. Then, they averaged out the temperature readings given by the warmer stations to give a global average. Et voila: exactly the scary “climate change” they needed to persuade bodies like the IPCC that AGW was a clear and present danger requiring urgent pan-governmental action.

The man who spotted all this is a computer programmer called EM Smith – aka the Chiefio. You can read the full report at his excellent blog. In the 70s, the Chiefio discovered, GISS and NOAA took their temperature data from 6,000 weather stations around the world. By 1990, though, this figure had mysteriously dropped to 1500. Even more mysteriously this 75 per cent reduction in the number of stations used had a clear bias against those at higher latitudes and elevations.

Read it here.

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Dodgy data at NASA and NOAA as well?

15 January, 2010 by

Yet more fudge?

If you thought the CRU-files were an isolated incident, and that apart from that blip, the world of climate science is whiter than white, think again. It appears that much the same has been going on at other leading climate centres, as Watts Up With That reports:

Climate researchers have discovered that NASA researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2005 as “The Warmest Year on Record.” KUSI-TV meteorologist, Weather Channel founder, and iconic weatherman John Coleman will present these findings in a one-hour special airing on KUSI-TV on Jan.14 at 9 p.m. A related report will be made available on the Internet at 6 p.m. EST on January 14th at www.kusi.com.

In a new report, computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo discovered extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the U.S. Government’s two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Ashville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. Smith and D’Aleo accuse these centers of manipulating temperature data to give the appearance of warmer temperatures than actually occurred by trimming the number and location of weather observation stations. The report is available online here.

The report reveals that there were no actual temperatures left in the computer database when NASA/NCDC proclaimed 2005 as “THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” The NCDC deleted actual temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the world as it changed to a system of global grid points, each of which is determined by averaging the temperatures of two or more adjacent weather observation stations. So the NCDC grid map contains only averaged, not real temperatures, giving rise to significant doubt that the result is a valid representation of Earth temperatures.

The number of actual weather observation points used as a starting point for world average temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,000 now. “That leaves much of the world unaccounted for,” says D’Aleo.

Read it here.

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Climategate: 30 years in the making

24 December, 2009 by

Amazing work

From Jo Nova:

You have to see this to believe it. Look up close and admire the detail while you despair at how long science has been going off the rails. To better appreciate the past and what was exposed by the CRU emails, the time-line chart consolidates and chronologically organizes the information uncovered and published about the CRU emails by many researchers along with some related contextual events. That the chart exists at all is yet another example of how skilled experts are flocking in to the skeptics position and dedicating hours of time pro bono because they are passionately motivated to fight against those who try to deceive us.

There is a dedicated page on Jo’s site where you can download various different versions for viewing on screen and printing:

Climategate Timeline Home Page

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