Nov 27 2011
Climategate II More Devastating Than Climategate I
Updates at end
Climategate 1 hit two years ago with the release of damning emails and documentation that exposed really shoddy code and unmaintained data, not to mention the efforts by alarmists to hide their own data that completely destroyed their own claims of man-made, CO2-driven, warming. The most damning of these was the ‘hide the decline’ ‘trick’ that covered up how tree rings diverged from temperatures in the modern era. This realization, that this prime temperature proxy for temperatures before 1880 (when temp records began) was no damn good against the modern record (1950 onward), means all hockey stick graphs are pure fiction. When your measurement stick is broken (as apparently was known for tree rings, thus the need to hide that part of the data) then the results are broken.
End of the math 101 story.
It took many weeks for Climategate 1 to gain traction in the media, and it was then followed by white-wash investigations that avoided the one issues the media now claims it settled. The truth is the science was never investigated and was never confirmed. So people with minimal math skills (just enough to get by public school) now claim the science is settled. Laughable.
This new round of emails is more damning than the first because of the white-wash by the media and pols who have no clue how to interpret the data, algorithms, graphs, nor have a clue how the scientific process works (being published in niche journals by like minded alarmists is not the scientific process). With the fiction that CRU and IPCC were vindicated having been played, the more damning second round of emails puts us in the “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’ state. The alarmists’ credibility is toast given the new revelations, as is their media and political cheer leaders. There is no pretending the science is sound now.
For example, on tree rings there is this great riff from email 3826:
A tree only grows on land. That excludes 70% of the earth covered by water. A tree does no grow on ice. A tree does not grow in a desert. A tree does not grow on grassland-savannahs. A tree does not grow in alpine areas. A tree does not grow in the tundra We are left with perhaps 15% of the planet upon which forests grow/grew. That does not make any studies from tree rings global, or even hemispheric.
The width and density of tree rings is dependent upon the following variables which cannot be reliably separated from each other. sunlight – if the sun varies, the ring will vary. But not at night of course.
cloudiness – more clouds, less sun, less ring.
pests/disease – a caterpillar or locust plague will reduce photosynthesis
access to sunlight – competition within a forest can disadvantage or advantage some trees.
moisture/rainfall – a key variable. Trees do not prosper in a droughteven if there’s a heat wave.
snow packing in spring around the base of the trees retards growth temperature – finally!
The tree ring is a composite of all these variables, not merely of temperature. Therefore on the 15% of the planet covered by trees, their rings do not and cannot accurately record temperature in isolation from the other environmental variables.
If there is a temperature record in tree rings, it has error bars (i.e., precision) on the order of +/- 5-10° C – or worse. Which means there is now way to tell if today’s temperatures really are unique or unprecedented. Other scientific studies show that is clearly not the case ( i.e., there was a warmer period around Roman and Medieval times). Tree rings do not have the fidelity to disprove these other scientifically sound results.
The new emails expose a group of thin-skinned PhDs that are polar opposites to the careful and capable paragons of science past, such as Albert Einstein:
Thanks for the added info. If Mike said that my calibration procedure is “flawed”, I will be extremely pissed off …
In all candor now, I think that Mike is becoming a serious enemy in the way that he bends the ears of people like Tom with words like “flawed” when describing my work and probably your and Keith’s as well. This is in part a vindictive response to the Esper et al. paper. He also went crazy over my recent NZ paper describing evidence for a MWP there because he sees it as another attack on him. Maybe I am over-reacting to this, but I don’t think so.
Emphasis in original post. Mike Mann is the 800 lb buffoon in the whole tragic play. His methods have been proven wanting, he is the architect of hiding the tree ring divergence by using the modern temps to ‘hide the decline’ – or massive cooling indicated by tree rings. He is emotionally volatile and sometimes infantile. I would not hire him do a damn thing on any of our work for NASA. PhDs don’t mean capable – trust me on this.
The worst aspect of Climategate II exposes how the media and politicians literally connived with alarmists to perform white-wash reviews of skeptic concerns. Reviews that would provide cover for all the alarmist mistakes, misinformati0n and lack of minimal professionalism:
This is pretty ugly. In 2007 the NRC was setup to review the state of climate science. The usual players were involved …
We didn’t discuss the email evidence (as you put it) nor Pielke’s dissent. We shouldn’t and we won’t if the NRC people have their way …
The panel is solid. Gerry North should do a good job in chairing this, and the other members are all solid. Chris[t]y is the token skeptic, but there are many others to keep him in check …
More here. One of many damning new details that clearly provide evidence of collusion and misrepresentation. This article is particularly damning to the alarmists and their political allies:
And not only do the emails paint a picture of scientists manipulating data, government employees at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are also implicated.
One message appeared to show a member of Defra staff telling colleagues working on climate science to give the government a ‘strong message’.
The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.
[H/T reader Frogg1]
What is important to remember here is that alarmists want to stop humanity’s evolution and industrial progress. The long for a Luddite-like world where humanity has no modern conveniences (conveniences which protect nature from our consumption, trash and biowaste). Alarmists want to pick the pockets of the world to fund their naive fictions.
Skeptics actually promote a balanced and sane approach to continuing the industrial evolution in a manner that support humanity but protects nature. And they do not do it for $$$. Most of us skeptics do this on our own and without compensation or promise of compensation. So if the average person wants to decide who is truly on their side, remember skeptics don’t want to stop modernizing food production, waste treatment, medicine, housing, transportation, standard of living, etc. It is the alarmists’ who want to limit, stop or undo these things.
Update: More damning of the Mann:
The new emails show that Bradley thought that this series was, to use the technical term preferred by climate scientists, “crap” and should not be used in multiproxy studies – an issue raised by Bradley in connection with Mann et al (EOS 2003) – their attack on Soon and Baliunas 2003.
Needless to say, Bradley did not publish a comment criticizing the use of this series. It has subsequently been used over and over again in IPCC multiproxy studies, commencing with Mann and Jones 2003. In my post a few years ago, I observed that it was, in fact, “the most heavily-weighted contributor to Mann and Jones [2003] … The Yang composite and the North American PC1 (bristlecones) dominate the Mann and Jones [2003] reconstruction, making other series essentially irrelevant.”
Crap in, crap out.
Update: BBC and CRU censored skeptics so the Green Message could not be discovered to be based on shoddy science, shoddy code, lost data, lousy statistics, hyped results (0.8° C warming in a century, when each day we experience 10-20 times that from morning to noon):, etc:
The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade.
They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output.
Like I said, after the white washes, this is even more damning because clearly all those investigations FAILED!
Update: About that crappy code and unmaintained data the purports to detect warming, we have this gem:
Here’s my problem with all of this, Dr. Jones. You tried out a variety of claimed reasons for not responding to a request for your data. None of them were even remotely true. They were all intended to hide the fact that you didn’t know where the data was. Dave clearly spelled out the problem: “we don’t know which data belongs to which stations, right?”
You claimed that the data was out there on the web somewhere. You claimed you couldn’t send any of it because of restrictions on a few datasets. You claimed it came from GHCN, then you said from NCAR, but you couldn’t say exactly where.
You gave lots and lots of explanations to me, everything except the truth—that your records were in such disarray that you could not fulfill my request. It is clear now from the Climategate emails that some records were there, some were missing, the lists were not up to date, there was orphan data, some stations had multiple sets of data, some data was only identified by folder not by filename, you didn’t know which data might have been covered by confidentiality agreements, and the provenance of some datasets could not be established.
The alamrists’ theory about the end of civilization as we know is based on this lost data? Really?
All you have to do is read Agenda 21 to know where they are going.
The science they tout is made to fit.
Note Gordon Jacoby’s letter to Briffa in 1469.txt in 1997 (yeah, this is an oldie).
Basically saying that the North American forest. In a different email (1438.txt) Briffa makes this remark:
He is speaking about Jacoby and “Fritz” as “you two”.
He does go on to say in that email that maybe they are placing too much emphasis in interpreting their dendrochronological series to be related to climate warming when there could be other things at play.
[…] The alarmists’ credibility is toast Posted on 27/11/2011 by thegentile Anúncio OnlineHotel document.getElementById("oh_ads_957").style.display = "none"; More on Climategate II via The Strata-Sphere: […]
Good post with a lot of good information. Just one quick thing to comment on, while reading about the tree rings, I thought of a good example very near where I live. Two land owners contracted at the same time, about 8 years ago to have several acres planted in pine trees, by the same contractor. Same trees, same time. about a year later, one of the owners had his trees fertilized, the other didn’t. as of this year, the fertilized trees are almost twice as big as the unfertilized ones. Same temp, climate, but what a difference. This is just one example of all the unknowns about tree rings thousands of years ago.
These people are con men. Them, and all those who profited from this fraud.
Prosecute, convict, and imprison. And confiscate their ill-gotten gains to the penny.
The media’s complicity in the AGW scam and the election of a pseudo-intellectual Marxist hack to the presidency are the scandals of the century, the mother of all betrayals of trust. No one should ever take a word they say seriously again.
The United Nations is a tool. I think that should be of grave concern.
Seriously AJ, how can you continue to list Little Green Footballs under your blog roll when Charles Johnson posts just complete hogwash concerning this topic. He has posted at least 3 posts denying these emails do any damage at all let alone discredit the work. He continues to attack the “deniers” as anti-science. Nothing baffles me more when someone resorts to outright refusal to hear or accept any opposing viewpoints or data and claims to be “science minded”. Science is about increasing knowledge not picking a side and standing by it no matter what…
AJ:
Good to see you back on line, although I had to re-register to post – so I guess you banned me.
In the future I’ll stick to commenting on technology. In the meanwhile, I’d like to tell you a little story.
In December of 2008 Chris Matthews made his famous “thrill running up my leg” comment about Obama. This was so over the top it was the last straw. I’ haven’t listened to a thing he’s said since. I do my opposition research elsewhere. To show him my disgust with his comments I went out and purchased a pair of wrestling knee pads and printed “I Heart Obama” on them and hand delivered them to MSNBC studiios in NY. Their purpose was not “homoerotic commentary” but rather a metaphor for his totally irrational over-the-top idol worship.
AJ: I commented several times on my perception that you have an irrational adoration of Hermann Cain while at the same time being extremely negative and dismissive towards Mitt Romney. My comments were clearly designed to be provocative – but I thought you’s be astute enough to pick up on their meaning. Instead you took things literally and went with the crass homo comments and high school insults. I expect better of you.
Layman – you went to the gutter son, not me. You went to the homophobe comments (a sign of an issue you have) not me. You may pretend to try for the high road, but you sunk so low it is a pathetic joke – ask any other reader here.
I require a modicum of maturity when it comes to this site. You failed.
You can post, but this is your last and only warning. You are in my house and you will be respectful. If this is beyond you, just don’t come by.
JImC,
Your arguments then lead me to conclude I should keep an open mind and pray Johnson wakes up from his left wing fever …
chuckie boy is harmless now – no one posts at that site anymore except his own sock puppets and a handful of KosKids. (he’s famous for creating a long list of sockpuppets which he uses to praise himself) For a while it was kind of fascinating to keep track of the descent into full frontal madness, but even that is old hat now.
Layman, just for the record, you were out of line. It’s possible to not like or to like someone without it being a homo episode. AJ did the correct thing… you said: “Instead you took things literally and went with the crass homo comments and high school insults. ”
All the homo references were by you, not AJ. maybe you should go back an re-read what you said so you don’t appear uninformed on what you said.
I think you’ll find that most people that write blogs (and I’m not an expert on blogs) have favorites that they write about. I think if you were reading AJ back then, he liked Sarah very much (as did lot’s of us) There’s nothing wrong with liking Herman Cain (I think he is ok, but he’s essentially dead as a presidential candidate now) but now that Cain is clearly not going to be the candidate, I think you’ll find that AJ will begin to write about someone else favorably. I personally don’t see how anyone could support obama, but clearly some people do (tho I’m suspecting that it’s getting less every day)
One thing I sure don’t understand is why you (or anyone) was watching Chris Mathews in ’08. you must have been the one I heard had been tuned to the show, (he probably averages about one a night (other than the lame stream media)
Redteam:
This is my last comment on the subject. As I stated above, I’m going to stick to commenting on technology and science and I’ll only go to the political when the two intersect (such as AGW).
I know exactly what I said. I concluded my post with one simple sentence: “Time to break out the… kn……s.” It was intended to point out what was in my opinion irrational, adorative, over the top commentary . All the comments about being a “jerk”, “projecting”, “lacking maturity”, and “homo erotic fantasies” came from AJ and other readers… not from me.
That said, this is AJ’s house and I obviously offended him, so I am sorry for that and I apologize. I think his instincts and insights on S&T and their politicization are usually spot on. This particular post on Climate Gate II is the perfect example. As I read through various articles and websites I was trying to distill my thoughts on the matter. I came back here to see if AJ had commented and found he had consolidated the subject into a clear, concise, and thoughtful post. I look forward to more of these in the future and will contribute my expertise where appropriate. Otherwise I’ll do as my mother taught me and keep my mouth shut.
AJ,
what exactly is a “climate denier”?? Even people (like us) who disagree with some of the theories about what exactly is warming the earth….do not deny we have “climate”…nor that it changes (even daily).
Global warming? We’ve been “warming” since most of the earth was covered in ice! But, then…that’s not on their charts…is it? Wonder how many cars they had back then?? Maybe it was giant lizard farts.
As far as Green Onion/Charles is concerned….Nothing wrong with a change of heart…but frankly…his about face has been rather weird (to me). I have no doubt he’s just doing what he believes/in. I think the part that confuses me most is his total loss of any independence or balance in his thought that used to be there (imho). I recall him arguing with his own thoughts sometime….he was liberal on some issues…more conservative (or independent for lack of better word) on others. Now..hes just prince of irony blogging with the same religious zeal that he supposedly despises in others.
As far as current republican candidates ….I’m not crazy about any of them. Cain is fine…but I think now is going to the 911 plan (ie., dial emergency). Maybe the next woman will have pics….baby daddy.
Romney is plastic man….he’s like a salesman. Ok..that might work…at least to get Obama out of whitehouse.
Gingrich has a LOAD of shit that could bury him. He has a long history and as smart as he is…he comes off “arrogant” to most people and turns them off.
Perry is a deer in headlights. (they just love that in Texas don’t you know).
Ron Paul…I don’t even know what to say. I don’t think he should be a “republican” at all. He should be on the Libertarian ticket.
??
AJ — you have to see this thread at Anthony Watt’s site:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/30/the-genesis-of-realclimate-org-appears-in-the-climategate-emails-and-surprise-the-bbcs-roger-harrabin-seems-connected/
Apparently “Real Climate”, the site used by Gavin and the rest of “The Cause” is actually owned by Fenton Communications. It is a the same “progressive” PR agency behind several other groups such as “Veterans for Peace” and was even the PR agency for Cindy Sheehan and Code Pink.
There is absolutely NO WAY that the pro-AGW “scientists” can now claim that their agenda isn’t politically driven because EVERYTHING that Fenton does is politically driven and Fenton owns Real Climate.
date: Mon Jun 17 16:39:14 2002
from: Keith Briffa
subject: Re: Esper et al. and Mike Mann
to: Ed Cook
I have just read this lettter – and I think it is crap. I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative ) tropical series. He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other “target” series , such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbage he has produced over the last few years , and … (better say no more)
Keith
At 11:16 AM 6/17/02 -0400, you wrote:
Hi Tim,
There was indeed a letter from Mike and Malcolm (the Prat; in Medieval times, that would have been his surname instead of Hughes) published in Science, with a reply from me. See below. In all honesty, I haven’t even read what was published. I am tired of the whole thing. At every meeting I go to where Mike gives a talk, he always presents more on why his series is correct. Honestly, most people I talk to think that he is being way too defensive (as we all know too well). In any case, he is coming out with a new NH reconstruction. It will be interesting to see what it looks like. One problem is that he will be using the RegEM method, which provides no better diagnostics (e.g. betas) than his original method. So we will still not know where his estimates are coming from.
Cheers,
Ed
Cook E.R. and J. Esper. Tree-ring chronologies and climate variability – Response;
Science, vol. 296, no. 5569, pp. 848-849, May 3, 2002.
Hi Ed,
Keith and I were talking last week and realised that neither of us had noticed the appearance of a letter in Science from Mike Mann, nor a response from you. Have we missed it?
Hope all’s well with you.
Tim
Dr Timothy J Osborn | phone: +44 1603 592089
Senior Research Associate | fax: +44 1603 507784
Climatic Research Unit | e-mail: t.osborn@uea.ac.uk
School of Environmental Sciences | web-site:
University of East Anglia __________| [1]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/
Norwich NR4 7TJ | sunclock:
UK | [2]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm
—
==================================
Dr. Edward R. Cook
Doherty Senior Scholar
Tree-Ring Laboratory
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Palisades, New York 10964 USA
Email: drdendro@ldeo.columbia.edu
Phone: 845-365-8618
Fax: 845-365-8152
==================================
—
Professor Keith Briffa,
Climatic Research Unit
University of East Anglia
Norwich, NR4 7TJ, U.K.
Phone: +44-1603-593909
Fax: +44-1603-507784
[3]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa[4]/