More data CRU-cifixion: only warmest Russian stations chosen

17 December, 2009 by

Man-made warming in Russia?

Man-made warming in Russia?

From Watts Up With That:

It’s true, and it’s huge. Today another example of CRU having their foot on the scale, Russian papers are reporting that the Russian surface station data was sorted by CRU to use the highest warming stations only.

…

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.

…

They specifically state that lack of measurement is not the cause. If they claim the full set of Russian data does NOT support global warming, imagine how different the bright red dot over Russia would look. Again the accusation is completely believable, yet is completely unverifiable because CRU has refused to release the data. This data and code release is the subject of illegal blocking of FOIA’s is one of the keys in the Climategate emails. We need to know the list of stations used and we must have copies of the raw data.

This is a very powerful accusation, which if true could change much about the climate science debate. Many papers are based on this dataset which has the highest trend of the major ground datasets.

Read it here.

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The Daily Bayonet – Climategate Round-ups

15 December, 2009 by

Skewering the clueless

Skewering the clueless

Another instalment, with links to all the previous ones:

Don’t know how you do it, Paul!

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Robyn Williams defends Climategate scientists

14 December, 2009 by

Nothing to see here

Nothing to see here

Robyn Williams is the ABC’s science correspondent and a fully paid-up alarmist. And guess what, despite not having read the Climategate emails himself, decides, based on comments from alarmist journals, that they have no effect whatsoever on the alarmist cause. There’s a surprise:

So what do the emails reveal? I hesitate to pronounce. I haven’t read them. Instead, I called those who have, such as Fred Pearce from New Scientist. He said, in an NS editorial, that any suggestion the informal emails formally compromise the science is ‘ludicrous’. (I broadcast Pearce on The Science Show last week). The Economist, always rigorous in its analysis of major issues, said much the same.

The journal Nature, with its immense and authoritative record surveying the science scene over hundreds of years said this about any ‘fraud’,:

“This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real – or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.” [The kind of language used in this paragraph demonstrates perfectly that Nature is no longer a science journal that can ever be taken seriously – Ed]

This last point is exactly the one with which I led in that discussion following Swindle on ABC TV. The evidence resembles that of a murder case. The detective finds 20 separate leads all pointing to the same villain.

I suggest you read the emails. And then think again about whether the alteration of data, hiding of inconvenient facts, threatening journals that publish inconvenient papers and deleting emails in response to FOI requests is what transparent science is all about.

With journalists like Williams on the case, no wonder the Australian public doesn’t hear anything about climategate from the ABC.

Read it here.

P.S. And if you want more evidence of alarmist journalists playing down Climategate, see AP’s Seth Borenstein being hauled over the coals here.

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UK Daily Mail: Special Investigation into Climategate

13 December, 2009 by

At least the UK gets the story

At least the UK gets the story

This is what we should be reading in Australia. But the ABC and Fairfax won’t touch it (because it rains on their global socialism warming parade), and The Australian is broadly in favour of tackling climate change. So read it here instead:

There could be no simpler or more dramatic representation of global warming, and if the origin of worldwide concern over climate change could be traced to a single image, it would be the hockey stick.

Drawing a diagram such as this is far from straightforward.

Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use ‘proxy data’ – measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings and growing season dates.

However, different proxies give very different results.

For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.

Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD – yet the Earth still warmed.

Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America – who is now also the subject of an official investigation –was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.

Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple – I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

Another British scientist – Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre – wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.

Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] – I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’

Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem.

According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed – but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ – as simple as it was deceptive.

All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase.

On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated – but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

‘They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’

Read it here. (h/t Climate Depot)

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Climategate in the UK House of Lords

11 December, 2009 by

Palace of Westminster

Palace of Westminster

H/t: Watts Up With That. From a speech in the House of Lords by the rather ironically named Lord Turnbull – notable because it questions the science. Many politicians believe that public opinion dictates that the science be left alone, and arguments made purely on economic grounds. ACM believes this is wrong, and that the whole scientific basis of AGW should be thoroughly reviewed.

There is the issue of the science, which I had previously taken as given; but many people’s faith is being tested. We are often told that the science is settled. I suppose that is what the Inquisition said to Galileo. If so, why are we spending millions of pounds on research? The science is far from settled. There are major controversies not just about the contribution of CO2, on which most of the debate is focused, but about the influence of other factors such as water vapour, or clouds-the most powerful greenhouse gas-ocean currents and the sun, together with feedback effects which can be negative as well as positive.

Worse still, there are even controversies about the basic data on temperature. The series going back one, 10 or 100,000 years are, in the genuine sense of the word, synthetic. They are not direct observations but are melded together from proxies such as ice cores, ocean sediments and tree rings.

Given the extent to which the outcome is affected by the statistical techniques and the weightings applied by individual researchers, it is essential that the work is done as transparently as possible, with the greatest scope for challenge. That is why the disclosure of documents and e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit is so disturbing. Instead of an open debate, a picture is emerging of selective use of data, efforts to silence critics, and particularly a refusal to share data and methodologies.

It is essential that these allegations are independently and rigorously investigated. Naturally, I welcome the appointment of my old colleague, Sir Muir Russell, to lead this investigation; a civil servant with a physics degree is a rare beast indeed. He needs to establish what the documents really mean and recommend changes in governance and transparency which will restore confidence in the integrity of the data. This is not just an academic feud in the English department from a Malcolm Bradbury novel. The CRU is a major contributor to the IPCC process. The Government should not see this as a purely university matter. They are the funders of much of this research and their climate change policies are based on it.

We need to purge the debate of the unpleasant religiosity that surrounds it, of scientists acting like NGO activists, of propaganda based on fear, for example, the quite disgraceful government advertisement which tried to frighten young children – the final image being the family dog being drowned-and of claims about having “10 days to save the world”. Crude insults from the Prime Minister do not help.

Well said indeed.

Read the whole speech here.

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UK Met Office: worthless petition to prop up CRU

11 December, 2009 by

Pointless petition

Pointless petition

The Met Office is clearly rattled by the CRU revelations, and is running around like a headless chicken trying to drum up support for a petition claiming that climate science is as pure as the driven snow. It seems that anyone can sign, and pressure is being applied to those who don’t:

More than 1700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the “integrity and honesty” of global-warming research.

The initiative is a sign of how worried the Met Office is that emails stolen from the University of East Anglia are fuelling scepticism about man-made global warming at a critical moment in talks on carbon emissions. One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.

Met Office chief executive John Hirst and chief scientist Julia Slingo (pictured) wrote to 70 colleagues last Sunday asking them to sign “to defend our profession against this unprecedented attack to discredit us and the science of climate change”.

…

One scientist said he felt under pressure to sign. “The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said.

So if you don’t sign, you’ll be out on your ear. As Anthony Watts says, the next time anyone criticises the 31,000-odd signatures in The Petition Project, you can point them to this pile of nonsense.

Read it here.

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Must see video: "It's a Climategate Christmas"

10 December, 2009 by

From Minnesotans for Global Warming, the team that brought you “Hide the Decline” (see here), comes a medley of Christmas favourites:

Check out the M4GW site here. (h/t: I love CO2)

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UN sweeps Climategate under the carpet

10 December, 2009 by

La la la - I can't hear you!

La la la - I can't hear you!

After initial reports that the UN would investigate the Climategate emails, it appears they have now backed down, and believe the only issue worth looking at is who was responsible for the leak/hack:

Speaking to an overflowing audience of scientists and media at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri said the main issue was to find out who was behind the theft. ”One can only surmise that those who carried this out have obviously done it with very clear intention to influence the process in Copenhagen,’‘ he said.

Dr Pachauri, flanked by the senior members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, defended the integrity of the scientific findings on climate change, backed the scientists under attack at East Anglia and warned the IPCC’s next report was likely to show grimmer news. [Oh please, tell me something I don’t know – Ed]

Last week he told the BBC the UN’s science body would ”look into” the matter of the stolen emails.

But he told reporters in Copenhagen he had meant the IPCC would examine the affair to see whether the organisation needed to learn any lessons from it.

He insisted the only formal investigations into the emails were being done by the university and the British police. (source)

The IPCC and Pachauri don’t even want to hear. Fingers in ears. Move along. Nothing to see here. But aren’t we just about to spend trillions of dollars based on their recommendations? Ludicrous.

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Alarmist scientist "receives death threats"

9 December, 2009 by

Not much sympathy here

Not much sympathy here

Hypocrisy Alert: Whilst it is deplorable that any scientist should receive death threats as a result of his or her views, it is interesting that the media have picked up so eagerly on this story. The sceptic scientists have been on the receiving end of all kinds of abuse, hatemail and worse for years, and yet no one in the media bats an eyelid, probably thinking secretly “they get what they deserve”. As soon as the boot’s on the other foot, it’s fawning sympathy and acres of copy:

An Australian born scientist at the centre of the East Anglia University email affair says he has received a number of death threats.

Dr Tom Wigley, a former director of the university’s Climatic Research Unit, has had several of his emails hacked and used by climate change sceptics to suggest that he and his colleagues have been distorting data about the evidence of global warming.

He is unable to reveal the details of the threats, as they are now being investigated by the FBI and UK police.

Dr Wigley told Eleanor Hall on The World Today that, while the threats are genuinely frightening, he is not surprised.

“This sort of thing has been going on at a much lower level for almost 20 years and there have been other outbursts of this sort of behaviour – criticism and abusive emails and things like that in the past,” he said.

“So this is a worse manifestation but it’s happened before so it’s not that surprising.“

And it all provides the perfect platform to wheel out the “move along, nothing to see here” line on the CRU emails:

He rejects suggestions that scientists have been exaggerating about the effects of climate change and says the emails were simply scientific questioning.

“We don’t base policy by what is said in personal emails from people who are just developing some sort of scientific story,” he said.

And unfortunately, this kind of story helps the scientists under scrutiny to take on the role of victim, and victim status is very useful in the propaganda battle to deflect the media away from the real story.

Read it here.

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Wong and Brown: the Deniers

9 December, 2009 by

My denial is this big

My denial is this big

Tony Abbott has stated a very simple fact that many others do not have the guts to state: the world has not warmed significantly since 2001, and may have even cooled. There seems nothing particularly controversial about that statement. The temperature data shows it clearly (if you look at the satellite record and ignore the surface record with its convenient manual “adjustments” that always seem to be upwards, that is). Even the Climategate emails acknowledge it – remember the quote “we can’t account for the lack of warming”?

But Penny Wong, the person most intimately acquainted with the ETS and climate change policy in Australia, just cannot deal with facts. Neither can enviro-loony Bob Brown, and both resort to spin and obfuscation in response. First off, here’s the Wong-bot:

“He is out there publicly talking about the world cooling when we have so many world leaders … going to Copenhagen because they are concerned about climate change,” she said.

“We see Mr Abbott talking about the globe cooling as the rest of the world is trying to work its way to tackling climate change.”

A gobsmacked [“gobsmacked”? Fine journalism there from Fairfax- Ed] Greens Leader Bob Brown said Mr Abbott’s comments would alienate conservatives.

“In a world where both big and small business understand the science of climate change and the need for appropriate action,” Senator Brown said.

Wong and Brown can’t handle the truth that the planet hasn’t warmed for a decade – in other words, they’re in denial.

Read it here. (h/t Andrew Bolt)

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