Climategate?

Akrasia wrote: »

You're joking right?
Governments have the power of taxation over their citizens, why do governments need to invent global warming to impose a tax? Why do they care if it's a carbon tax? they could just increase income tax, vat, excise on smoking or drinking

It Makes absolutely No sense that there would need to create such a vast vast conspiracy to ackomplish something they could do by just passing a new law.


So which governments have been on board pushing global warming from the start? Most of the G8 are probably ruled out. We do know that the government of GW Bush was violently opposed to global warming. Why didn't they bribe the scientists to produce anti global warming evidence (seeing as scientists are all bought and paid for, just offer them more money and hey presto, Bush could have ended the AGW debate there and then)

Do you see how ridiculous your position is yet?

Toiletroll wrote: »

You COMPLETELY miss the point. The carbon tax will be universal through all countries. All will also be at the mercy of cap and trade.

The board in control of this draconian carbon tax will be unelected and in possession of control of everything essentially.

Deleted User wrote: »

And there you have it! a whole new way of creating more wealth for those who are already wealthy at the detriment of everyone else!

djpbarry wrote: »

That's quite a conclusion to reach, considering he readily admits to not knowing why the adjustments were made as they were. Statements such as...

...suggest that the author feels it's all been done in the name of aesthetics.

There are more than 2,000 pages and millions of words in the Climategate emails, and I am two of those words on one of the pages. This cameo walk-on role doesn't amount to anything in the great 13-year epic chronology of science warfare found in the email cache, but it is still satisfying to be there -- even more satisfying because my bit part appears in a small chain of emails that leads right up to one of the top dogs in Climategate, Phil Jones.

I got the Climategate part by virtue of a column last Oct. 1 about the looming meltdown in the official global warming science and policy machine. Among other things, I said:

"The official United Nation's global warming agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a four-legged stool that is fast losing its legs. To carry the message of man-made global warming theory to the world, the IPCC has depended on 1) computer models, 2) data collection, 3) long-range temperature forecasting and 4) communication. None of these efforts are sitting on firm ground."

That column, along with another by Ross McKitrick, of Guelph University, on an emerging science scandal, was picked up by CCNet, a service that propels climate commentary to all corners of the scientific world. The CCNet headline that day was: "A Scientific Scandal Unfolds."

Mr. McKitrick had written on FP Comment about the news that there were problems with certain tree ring data used in 1999 by University of East Anglia climate scientist Keith Briffa. The tree rings were used to construct famous hockey stick graph plotting 1,000 years of global temperatures. "Over the next nine years, at least one paper per year appeared in prominent journals using Briffa's Yamal composite to support a Hockey stick-like result. The IPCC relied on these studies to defend the Hockey Stick view, and since it had appointed Briffa himself to be the IPCC Lead Author for this topic, there was no chance it would question the Yamal data. Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top Journals like Nature and Science, none of the journal reviewers or editors ever required Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre's repeated requests for them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were ignored."

My column and Mr. McKitrick's words eventually found their way to Eugene I. Gordon, a legendary former Bell Labs scientist and a well-connected American global warming science observer. On Oct. 4, Mr. Gordon forwarded some comments -- and my column -- out to an email list, including to David Schnare, a lawyer and scientist with the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy.

Mr. Gordon begins by wondering about the motivations of the official climate scientists:

I don't think they are scientifically inadequate or stupid. I think they are dishonest and members of a club that has much to gain by practicing and perpetuating global warming scare tactics. That is not to say that global warming is not occurring to some extent since it would be even without CO2 emissions. The CO2 emissions only accelerate the warming and there are other factors controlling climate. As a result, the entire process may be going slower than the powers that be would like. Hence, (I postulate) the global warming contingent has substantial motivation to be dishonest or seriously biased, and to be loyal to their equally dishonest club members. Among the motivations are increased and continued grant funding, university advancement, job advancement, profits and payoffs from carbon control advocates such as Gore, being in the limelight, and other motivating factors I am too inexperienced to identify.

The same day, David Schnare responds:

Gene:
I've been following this issue closely and this is what I take away from it:

1) Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions are fraught with so much uncertainty, they have no value whatever. It is impossible to tease out the relative contributions of rainfall, nutrients, temperature and access to sunlight. Indeed a single tree can, and apparently has, skewed the entire 20th century temperature reconstruction.

2) The IPCC peer review process is fundamentally flawed if a lead author is able to both disregard and ignore criticisms of his own work, where that work is the critical core of the chapter. It not only destroys the credibility of the core assumptions and data, it destroys the credibility of the larger work -- in this case, the IPCC summary report and the underlying technical reports. It also destroys the utility and credibility of the modeling efforts that use assumptions on the relationship of CO2 to temperature that are based on Britta's work, which is, of course, the majority of such analyses.

As Corcoran points out, "the IPCC has depended on 1) computer models, 2) data collection, 3) long-range temperature forecasting and 4) communication. None of these efforts are sitting on firm ground."

Nonetheless, and even if the UNEP thinks it appropriate to rely on Wikipedia as their scientific source of choice, greenhouse gases may (at an ever diminishing probability) cause a significant increase in global temperature. Thus, research, including field trials, on the leading geoengineering techniques are appropriate as a backstop in case our children find out that the current alarmism is justified.

David Schnare

Later the same day, Tom Wigley, previously director of the CRU and now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, Colorado, weighed in with his views:

Dear all,
I think it would be wise to let Briffa respond to these accusations before compounding them with unwarranted extrapolations.
With regard to the Hockey Stick, it is highly unlikely that a single site can be very important. M&M have made similar accusations in the past and they have been shown, in the peer-reviewed literature, to be ill-founded.
Tom

David Schnare wrote:

Tom:
Briffa has already made a preliminary response and he failed to explain his selection procedure. Further, he refused to give up the data for several years, and was forced to do so only when he submitted to a journal that demanded data archiving and actually enforced the practice.

More significantly, Briffa's analysis is irrelevant. Dendrochonology [the science of using tree rings to date past events] is a bankrupt approach. They admit that they cannot distinguish causal elements contributing to tree ring size. Further, they rely on recent temperature data by which to select recent tree data (excluding other data) and then turn around and claim that the tree ring data explains the recent temperature data. If you can give a principled and reasoned defense of Briffa (see the discussion on Watt's website) then go for it. I'd be fascinated, as would a rather large number of others.

None of this, of course, detracts for the need to do research on geoengineering.

David Schnare

The next day, Oct. 5, Tom Wigley comes to the defense of Keith Briffa.

David,

This is entirely off the record, and I do not want this shared with anyone. I hope you will respect this. This issue is not my problem, and I await further developments.

However, Keith Briffa is in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and I was Director of CRU for many years so I am quite familiar with Keith and with his work. I have also done a lots of hands on tree ring work, both in the field and in developing and applying computer programs for climate reconstruction from tree rings. On the other hand, I have not been involved in any of this work since I left CRU in 1993 to move to NCAR. But I do think I can speak with some modicum of authority.

You say, re dendoclimatologists, "they rely on recent temperature data by which to *select* recent tree data" (my emphasis). I don't know where you get this idea, but I can assure you that it is entirely wrong.

Further, I do not know the basis for your claim that "Dendrochonology is a bankrupt approach". It is one of the few proxy data areas where rigorous multivariate statistical tools are used and where reconstructions are carefully tested on independent data.

Finally, the fact that scientists (in any field) do not willingly share their hard-earned primary data implies that they have something to hide has no logical basis.

Tom

The final email in the chain, responding to Tom Wigley, comes from Phil Jones, the current head of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.

Tom,

Thanks for trying to clear the air with a few people. Keith is still working on a response. Having to contact the Russians to get some more site details takes time.

Several things in all this are ludicrous as you point out. Yamal is one site and isn't in most of the millennial reconstructions. It isn't in MBH, Crowley, Moberg etc. Also picking trees for a temperature response is not done either.

The other odd thing is that they seem to think that you can reconstruct the last millennium from a few proxies, yet you can't do this from a few instrumental series for the last 150 years! Instrumental data are perfect proxies, after all.

Cheers
Phil

Little did Mr. Jones know then, on Oct. 5, that a few weeks later, he would become famous around the science world for having written, in an email in 1999 saying that "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1891 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

So that's my cameo role in Climategate. Nothing to write home about, really. But I couldn't resist.