ClimateGate: British CRU emails

Cris,

I found the bullet-list below (entitled "The Emails....'we report....you decide'") in the discussion page about a (rather pathetic) Washington Post / MSNBC article by Juliet Eilperin on this topic. Wow, talk about a smoking gun!

(Note: that WP/MSNBC article is weak, but it isn't as bad as the AP article that the N&O and the N&R used, and which the N&O published along with this blatant propaganda by the AP's notorious Seth Borenstein.)

The Global Warming Alarmists' big problem (and Al Gore's) is that facts are stubborn things, and the fact is that the earth hasn't been behaving as their models predicted. Ground station measurements, ocean temperature measurements (Argo Buoys), radiosonde measurements, and satellite-based measurements show that the Earth hasn't warmed at all in the last decade. In fact, most measurements indicate that the Earth has been cooling slightly.

The GW alarmists' response has been obfuscation (e.g., by calling it "climate change" instead of "global warming"), manipulation of the data to hide the truth, and heavy-handed suppression of the growing number of scientists who don't buy the Party Line. The alarmists even habitually call those scientists "deniers," in a contemptible attempt to paint them like Holocaust deniers.

Now, it is true that there was measurable warming of the Earth in the last quarter of the 20th century, though not outside of historical norms for climate fluctuation. It is possible that the more recent decade-long halt in warming is due to the current (& surprising to everyone) extended pause in the solar sunspot cycle offsetting man-made warming. If so, then we'll presumably see resumed warming when the solar sunspot cycle finally resumes. But even if that is so, it means that the alarmists' computer models, upon which they rely for their dire predictions, are badly flawed, because their models insist that such solar variations should have very little effect, and should not have caused the Earth's warming to cease.

Of course, the news that the predicted global warming, and the problems which Gore et al predicted would go along with it, like ever worsening hurricane seasons, are not actually happening, is wonderful! It should make any sane, reasonable person happy. (BTW, did you notice how few hurricanes we had this year?)

But Gore and the GW alarmists have bet their careers on their dire predictions, so good news for everybody else is bad news for them. They are in such a panic that they are resorting to scientific fraud to hide the truth from the public, while desperately clinging to the hope that the Earth will soon resume warming before most people notice that it ever stopped, so that they won't look like Chicken Littles, or the Pons & Fleischmanns of climatology.

If you want to download the leaked documents, google for FOI2009.zip, which should be 64,936,854 bytes long, and contains 4662 files. Or let me know, I have a copy, which I can send you. (BTW, I think that "FOI" stands for "Freedom Of Information.")

BTW, have you noticed how the folks who cheered the Watergate "deep throat" leaker, and smirked at the news of Sarah Palin's hacked email account, are not in the least bit amused about this story? It was the Washington Post which published the "Pentagon Papers," but when the shoe is on the other foot, they spin it to make the crooks sound like innocent victims who have been violated by a cruel crime. Sheesh!

-Dave

Katy,

The United States has been taking ground station temperature measurements since 1880. There are substantial problems with those measurements, which have caused many stations to show fake increases in temperature, due to station siting problems, and as urban sprawl has overtaken many measurement sites with "urban heat islands." Nevertheless, the U.S. ground station temperature records are still the best and longest-running such records in the world.

Here is a wonderful web site devoted to examination of the problems with these ground stations:
http://www.surfacestations.org/
Here you can see another good example:
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html

Oddly enough, NASA's climate alarmists are apparently the keepers of this ground station temperature data. They've not done a very good job of it. They keep revising the figures, even for years in the distant past. But they consistently show that the six warmest years on record in the 48 contiguous United States were:
#1: 1934
#2: 1998
#3: 1921
#4: 2006
#5: 1931
#6: 1999
(I chose the "six warmest" (instead of five or ten) because it happens that these six years are the warmest on record in all the versions of the NASA temperature table which I could find, though the order of the six varies according to which version of the table you use.)

Note that, in spite of the ground stations' tendency to overstate warming (due to urbanization of the monitoring sites, etc.), they nevertheless indicate that five of the six warmest years were at least a decade ago, and three of the six warmest years were at least 75 years ago.

(Note: these are U.S. temperatures; worldwide average temperatures are calculated differently.)

Looking at that data, you'll find that the last 35 years has been a warm period, as were the 1930s, but the 1960s and 1970s were a cool period -- so cool that by the early 1970s environmentalists were warning of an impending catastrophic ice age, which they agreed would be due to air pollution.

-Dave

Marc Sheppard's American Thinker article explains how the infamous “hide the decline” remark was about a huge problem with the AGW alarmists' methodology for teasing temperature information from “proxies,” like tree rings. The problem is that the proxy info indicated that temperatures had been declining during the last 1/5 of the 20th century, when most other data (especially including ground station measurements) showed that temperatures were rising significantly.

That means their methodology for deducing temperatures from proxies DOES NOT WORK. It has been falsified by actual temperature measurements in the 1980s and 1990s.

That is critically important, because that temperature-from-proxy methodology is the ENTIRE basis for the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph. It was the SOLE basis for erasing the Medieval Warm Period from history.

The truth, as revealed by these emails, is that the IPCC's leading climatologists were LYING. They were telling the world that there was no doubt whatsoever that late 20th century warming was unprecedented in history, because of the assured reliability of their proxy-derived temperature reconstructions, and that anyone who disagreed was a “denier,” implicitly akin in disreputableness to Holocaust Deniers. But the truth is that they KNEW full well that their methodology for deducing temperatures from proxies was unreliable, and they struggled mightily to “hide” that inconvenient truth.

This scandal is HUGE. It may eclipse Piltdown Man as the worst scientific scandal in history.

The leading climate research institutions & they key players in the IPCC (Mann, Jones, Hansen, Briffa, Kelly, Schmidt, Overpeck, Santer, Wigley, Osborn, Trenberth, Karl) etc., are ALL up to their eyebrows in this. The field of climate change research is a cesspool of intellectual dishonesty.

Their models don't work. The models have been falsified by the temperature record, yet the so-called “leading” climate researchers doggedly stick by them. Defending the ideology & political agenda to which they are wedded has become more important to them than telling the Truth.

These guys have abandoned the scientific method!

You probably know how the Method is supposed to work:

1. The scientist observes the available data.
2. He formulates hypotheses to explain the observations.
3. He derives testable predictions from the hypotheses.
4. He devises tests or observations to test the testable predictions.
5. He does the tests or makes the observations.
6. If the test results match the predictions, he cries “eureka!” and publishes his theory, along with his data and detailed calculations, so that other scientists can reproduce and verify his work.
7. If the test results fail to match the predictions, the theory is said to be “falsified,” so he discards or revises it and starts over at step 2, with the new observations or test results added to the body of available data.

Instead of discarding or revising their falsified models, these so-called scientists revise the data!!!!

And then they delete the original, raw data, so that nobody else can check their work.

That is the WORST kind of scientific dishonesty.

W/r/t the deleted data, I cite two documents to prove my accusation:

1. The first was email document 1107454306 from Jones to Mann. Jones says that if McIntyre requests the station data under the Freedom Of Information Act, he (Jones) will delete it rather than let McIntyre see it:
http://www.burtonsys.com/FOIA/1107454306.txt
Note that to do that without getting in trouble with the law they would have to lie and claim it had been deleted earlier… a prospect which apparently does not trouble them at all.

2. This Sunday Times (of London) article about the declaration from UAE CRU that they cannot comply with legal demands for the raw temperature data because they have deleted much of it:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
And, whaddya know, they say it was deleted long ago (though they'd previously given a variety of other excuses for refusing FOI requests for the same data).

The bottom line is that these guys have proven themselves to be utterly untrustworthy. You can't believe anything they say. (See Luke 16:10)

They've been claiming, stridently, that the earth is still warming. But if you read the leaked emails, you will see that even they know that isn't so. They may expect the warming to resume, or they may doubt their measurements, but they KNOW that the temperature measurements indicate that the warming has ceased.

The earth ceased warming at least a decade ago.

Of all the actual temperature records (as opposed to so-called “proxies,” which are far less reliable), the records which showed the MOST warming were the surface station measurements, the most complete record of which are from the USA, where we've been making such measurements since 1880.

Argo buoys (deep ocean temperature measurements), radiosonde (atmospheric temperature measurements), sea surface temperature measurements, and satellite-based measurements ALL failed to show much if any warming (or at least they failed to show warming until the people discredited by this scandal “corrected” the data). But, we were told, the surface station measurements nevertheless proved the warming.

But now we know of widespread problems with the surface stations, which cause them to significantly overstate warming (see http://www.surfacestations.org). And then McIntyre discovered a major blunder by NASA, which had caused them to misreport 21st century surface station temperatures as warmer than they actually were. (And he found it despite the inexcusable fact that NASA/Hansen wouldn't allow him access to the raw data!!!)

When NASA corrected that error 2.5 years ago, it made 1934 the warmest year on record.

That's right. Not 2008. Not 2007. Not even 1998. 1934!

Still-unexplained “corrections” subsequently made by NASA/Hansen on the U.S. surface station data have bumped 1934 back down to 3rd-warmest. The surface station data for the USA keeps getting revised in suspicious ways by Hansen & Co. at NASA. Yet, even if their latest numbers are correct (which is doubtful), it still shows that 5 of the 6 warmest (we used to say “mildest”) years on record since 1880 were more than a decade ago, and 3 of the 6 warmest were 75+ years ago!!!

Facts like that kind of make the current warming hysteria seem silly, don't they?

For the rest of the world, the surface station data was in the tender care of Phil Jones & the UEA CRU — where they have conveniently “lost” much of the raw data:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

The bottom line is that the overwhelming weight of the evidence indicates that:
1) The leading climate change alarmists are utterly untrustworthy. And,
2) In the last quarter of the 20th century the earth was, indeed, warming, though not as much as the alarmists would have you believe. However,
3) Temperatures peaked in the late 1990s, plateaued, and then began declining.
4) The “settled science” nonsense predicting accelerating warming is totally discredited.

Those are the FACTS.

(Facts #3 & #4 should be cause for rejoicing, BTW, if you care more about the welfare of mankind and her planet than you do about being right!)

Now, there are many possible explanations for fact #3 (the end of warming at least a decade ago). NONE of them change the fact that the IPCC/alarmist models have been falsified. But there are still plausible scenarios for resumed warming, and continued concern.

One possibility is that the models greatly underestimated the effects of the sun, and the current unexpectedly long lull in the solar cycle has caused a cooling effect that is masking an underlying warming trend. If that is the case, then the warming should resume when the solar cycle resumes. If that happens, then we'll need to grapple with the warming issue once again.

Another possibility for which there is evidence is that the models grossly underestimated the effects of CFCs. CFC levels are now declining, which could be the cause of the temperature decline. If that is the case, then warming will not resume when the solar cycle resumes.

Or it could be a combination of both of those causes, and/or some others.

But, regardless of what happens, the Kyoto/Copenhagen/Cap-and-tax schemes can't possibly be a solution. Even if additional CO2 is actually causing warming (which is doubtful), there is NO possibility that these schemes could do more than slightly delay the effects.

Even Hansen realizes that. He's a true believer in CO2 as the main AGW villain (I think he's dead wrong), but he recognizes that the slight CO2 reductions achievable by these schemes can't solve the problem. He says the Copenhagen approach is “fundamentally wrong,” and hopes the talks collapse.

Like a stopped clock, even James Hansen is accidentally right once in a while.

#205 - Sun Nov 22, 2009 10:34 AM EST

The Emails...."we report....you decide"

--
"Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll back of the industrial age."
-Dr. Richard Lindzen (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT)

ClimateGate!

U. East Anglia's Climate Research Unit emails & data leaked: politics trumps science among climate change researchers

Smoking gun: Leading "climate-change experts" caught manipulating & withholding data, hiding evidence, and blackballing skeptics, to promote anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory