statism watch

The Wired coverage of this amazing expose is here reposted since it also contains the rebuttals from CRU scientists to the ‘blogsphere’, which has heated up in recent days with accusations of fudged data and collusion at this top institution to drum dissenting scientists from the fold. The rebuttals are amazing short masterpieces of doublethink, which you will find highlighted, and mocked, in the text below. And as you read through the excerpts from the hacked EMails of professional climatologists, think of who stands to gain – from research grants, from carbon trading credits, from a global carbon tax? The Copenhagen meeting, which could very well introduce a global carbon tax payable to a new UN fund, is in December. In light of the derision and manipulation clearly exposed in these documents, the time to push back is now.

Update (2009/11/22): Comments on code for data analysis routines found in hacked files also suggest efforts at massaging data to obtain desired results. It’s amazing how often ‘corrections’ have to be introduced into graphs when it comes to climate data.
Update (2009/11/23): The British climate establishment is in full spin and damage control mode now, with the Guardian smearing skeptics as ‘deniers’ and calls for reviews of the email theft. As might be expected, very little in the way of self reflection has emerged as the establishment circles its wagons. In a joint statement from the Met Office, Royal Society and the Natural Environment Research Council said: “The scientific evidence which underpins calls for action at Copenhagen is very strong. Without co-ordinated international action on greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts on climate and civilisation could be severe.”

Flashback: Leaked G20 Documents Shed Light on Global Carbon Tax | Everyone in Britain could be given a personal ‘carbon allowance’ | Friends of the Earth attacks carbon trading as banker scam | Oil Companies Support Global Warming Alarmists, Not Skeptics | Copenhagen, carbon, and the global corporate agenda | Climate Cops To Fine “Wasteful” Homeowners & Businesses | The great carbon credit con: Why are we paying the Third World to poison its environment? | Ontario unveils cap-and-trade legislation | NRTEE Carbon Market Panel is ‘Round Table on Socialist Planning’ | Climate panel presses for federal cap-and-trade system | U.N. ‘Climate Change’ Plan Would Likely Shift Trillions to Form New World Economy | U.N. Environment Head Wants Global Warming Tax | Time to emulate Roosevelt’s New Deal and create green jobs | Mobile phones to track carbon footprint using GPS | Ontario joins continental WCI cap-and-trade scheme | B.C. carbon tax kicks in on Canada Day | They call it cap and trade, but it’s just another fuel tax | Quebec, Ontario sign historic climate pact | Every adult in Britain should be forced to carry ‘carbon ration cards’, say MPs | CEOs call for ‘aggressive’ action on climate change

Kim Zetter, Wired.com
November 20, 2009

An online debate over global warming science has broken out after an unknown hacker broke into the e-mail server at a prominent, British climate-research center, stole more than a thousand e-mails about global warming research and posted them online.

Global warming skeptics are seizing on portions of the messages as evidence that scientists are colluding and warping data to fit the theory of global warming, but researchers say the e-mails are being taken out of context and just show scientists engaged in frank discussion.

The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is one of the United Kingdom’s leading climate research centers and has been a strong proponent of the position that global warming is real and has human causes. The center confirmed the hack occurred in an e-mail statement to Threat Level.

“We are aware that information from a server in one area of the university has been made available on public websites,” the statement read. “We are extremely concerned that personal information about individuals may have been compromised. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm what proportion of this material is genuine.”

The stolen cache includes more than 1,000 e-mails and more than 3,000 documents, some containing code. They were posted anonymously to an FTP server in Russia. The hacker then posted a link to the 61-MB file of data on the blog Air Vent.

The hacker’s message that accompanied the link read: “We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents.”

The e-mails, which cover a decade of correspondence, are getting a lot of attention among bloggers who point to statements in them that they say suggest the scientists colluded and manipulated data to support their global warming viewpoints. The bloggers highlight a statement in one 1999 e-mail from Phil Jones, director of the research center:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

The comment refers to Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. Mann told Threat Level the “Nature trick” refers to a solution for displaying data that he and others used in a paper they published to get around a problem in the way that temperature data is traditionally displayed. The solution allows for better viewing and understanding of the data, Mann said, and pointed to a post on the RealClimate blog that his colleagues have made to explain the reference. That post also indicates that the hacker first tried to post the trove of stolen data to the RealClimate blog on Tuesday. [Ed. Note: On Realclimate, CRU says they have to manipulate the data " just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear". Along with reconstruction. The point is that what they expect to see in the data is an article of faith that requires various adjustments to be performed on the data in order to bring it in line with the expected outcomes of climate models. It's reading chicken bones. It's astrology. It's as bad as any other model that attempts to describe a complex natural system with an inadequate set of variables.]

Another e-mail from Jones dated last year with the subject line “IPCC and FOI” is a request to Michael Mann, asking him to delete certain e-mails. Bloggers allege that Jones was trying to destroy data that had been requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

Jones wasn’t available for comment. Mann told Threat Level that he never deleted any e-mails and doesn’t know the context under which Jones made the request.

Bloggers allege that an e-mail from Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, suggests that reality contradicts scientific claims about global warming:

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low….

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.

But Trenberth, who acknowledged the e-mail is genuine, says bloggers are missing the point he’s making in the e-mail by not reading the article cited in it. That article – An Imperative for Climate Change Planning (.pdf) — actually says that global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise.

“It says we don’t have an observing system adequate to track it, but there are all other kinds of signs aside from global mean temperatures — including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot of other indicators — that global warming is continuing,” he says. [Ed. Note: Here's the doublethink example: Handwaving about melting sea ice, which has also been debunked, when clearly the guy's saying that the data and the observations just don't line up like they should. Then citing an article that dismisses a long recent period of cooling as a 'random temperature variation'.

Gavin Schmidt, a research scientist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says the e-mails offer no damning indictment of climate researchers, and that bloggers are reading information in them out of context.

“There’s nothing in the e-mails that shows that global warming is a hoax,” he told Threat Level. “There’s no funding by nefarious groups. There’s no politics in any of these things; nobody from the [United Nations] telling people what to do. There’s nothing hidden, no manipulation.

“It’s just scientists talking about science, and they’re talking relatively openly as people in private e-mails generally are freer with their thoughts than they would be in a public forum. The few quotes that are being pulled out [are out] of context. People are using language used in science and interpreting it in a completely different way.”

[Ed. Note: Judge for yourself? Hard to, since the links to the source material have gone down here (comment 10, the original source) and Wikileaks is itself down at this writing. Will keep looking.]

Trenberth agrees.

“If you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists,” he says. “The unfortunate thing about this is that people can cherry pick and take things out of context.”

Source | See also under Environment: Copenhagen climate talks: No deal, we’re out of time, Obama warns | Leaked G20 Documents Shed Light on Global Carbon Tax | Plant experts unveil DNA barcode | UK University student fined £80 for dropping matchstick on Oxford pavement | Everyone in Britain could be given a personal ‘carbon allowance’ | Big Oil makes case for carbon-capture subsidies | Canada commits to continental wilderness deal | UK: Two-year-olds at risk from ‘gender-bending’ chemicals, report says | Czech President: Copenhagen to be ‘Largest tax increase in world history’ | Friends of the Earth attacks carbon trading as banker scam | Court upholds aboriginal fishing rights on Vancouver Island | Can we manipulate the weather? | Oil Companies Support Global Warming Alarmists, Not Skeptics | US puts climate debate on hold for five weeks despite plea by Merkel | Al Gore Set To Become First “Carbon Billionaire” | Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth sequel stresses spiritual argument on climate, downgrades CO2 threat | Chinese media claims Beijing snow ‘artificially induced’ | Final round for UN climate talks open in Barcelona | EU agrees to pay developing countries ‘climate aid’ to pass Copenhagen | Exaggerated claims undermine drive to cut emissions, scientists warn | Canada sets aside its boreal forest as giant carbon vault | Copenhagen’s Plans for a New ‘Government’ are Scary | Canada’s flax crop mysteriously contaminated by GM seeds | Protesters disrupting question period detained and bloodied by hill security | Copenhagen, carbon, and the global corporate agenda | UK: A bedtime story about drowning kittens and puppies… Labour’s £6m campaign to highlight the dangers of climate change | Pass climate bill before UN summit, Layton says | Britain will starve without GM crops, says major report | Lord Nicholas Stern: The world’s future is being decided this weekend | IPCC Crushes Scientific Objectivity, 91-0 | Thatcher science adviser: Copenhagen goal is world government | It is too late to shut the door on GM foods | Water demand puts Canadian rivers at risk | What happened to global warming? | IPCC case for global warming melts on multiple fronts | More defects, exclusions in key climate warming data are uncovered | UK: Garbage spies alarm neighbourhood | Ont. gives green energy price guarantee | Climate change complacency `global suicide pact,’ UN told | UN plans ’shock therapy’ for world leaders at Copenhagen summit | Washington Post Meteorologist: A Skeptical Take on Global Warming | Sarkozy launches carbon tax to help ’save the human race’ | UN chief warns of climate-related disaster | German Scientists Call for ‘World Climate Bank’ | Baby emissions fuel global warming | Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites | Aging Shanghai pushes for more babies | Warming oceans mean less cloud cover | Global Warming or Global Cooling? 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