nvm

[Mise]

Its the classic intelligentsia and state cooperation. The former are the opinion leaders, the latter gets its justification to work from the former and rewards the latter with jobs and money in return..

Rothbard put it well:

As I said, they would get far, far more money, power and influence if they supported large oil companies, car makers, mining companies and heavy industry... I mean, Jesus Christ, how many billions and billions of dollars do oil companies have at their disposal?? Compare that with a university researcher's salary Some "reward"...

 

[Bei1052]

Fox now has wind of this lol

 

[ainwood]

I honestly fail to see what kind of agenda they're pushing and why on Earth "they" (I assume the governments that fund climate research?) would want to push it. It would be far more politically expedient -- not to mention financially rewarding -- for all concerned to push the exact opposite agenda, to cosy up with oil companies, car makers, mining conglomerates and other big industry players, and produce reams and reams of scientific papers "disproving" the hypothesis.

Motives? I would think that pride would be up there. Maybe its a case of simply believing that global warming is an urgent problem, and trying to prove it (rather than analyse to see if its real). Money? If people are up in arms that Exxon gave $20 Million to fund sceptics, then is it also significant that Jones got GBP13 Million?

Actually, the most interesting thing about the emails was what wasn't written. There simply wasn't any evidence of conspiracy, nor any suggestion that evidence was falsified...

There are some things that require explaining, I think. COntext is everything, and these e-mails do lack a lot of context. I wouldn't go as far as to say falsified, but I think 'spun' is a reasonable interpretation.


Some examples:

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

Not much use without context, but this some commentators are suggesting this has roots in Mann's original hockeystick having a decline at the end. see here

Options appear to be:

Send them the data

Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.

Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

Here is the head of the unit discussing how to be as difficult as possible with FOIA requests. Maybe not a 'conspiracy', but absolutely unethical.

The other paper by MM is just garbage – as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well – frequently as I see it. I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

Well, this is starting to look like a conspiracy. How to keep dissenting views out of the IPCC report?

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Well - don't just keep them out of the IPCC, keep them out of peer-reviewed literature as well.

Honest question - do you seriously believe that they kept sceptics out of peer reviewed literature?

I am extremely sceptical of the peer review process. I think it is manipulated and inadequate.

 

[Earthling]

Also, Darwin's son was a human, so evolution is false.

Much better answer. And also, yeah, It's not like East Anglia isn't a bunch of nobodies anyway, probably no one outside of England cares, they're certainly not an important institution...

I also notice this thread is devoid of the usual suspects of the "can't read or do math agenda," MobBoss, as I recall you were talking about in another thread...

 

[ainwood]

As I said, they would get far, far more money, power and influence if they supported large oil companies, car makers, mining companies and heavy industry... I mean, Jesus Christ, how many billions and billions of dollars do oil companies have at their disposal? Compare that with a university researcher's salary

As these records showed, GBP 13 Million to Jones in grants over 10 years.

Oil companies may have billions, but you may have noticed that have essentially taken the position that global warming is real and must be combatted. They are trying to create a perception that they are out-greening each other. I don't see them pumping billions (or even millions) into sceptics anymore (and it was only really Exxon that ever tried that).

Much better answer. And also, yeah, It's not like East Anglia isn't a bunch of nobodies anyway, probably no one outside of England cares, they're certainly not an important institution...

Correspondence includes Michael Mann, of the original hockey-stick fame. HadCrut is one of the four main data sources for the IPCC reports, and Keith Briffa is a lead author of the climate reconstruction (I think) section.

 

[Bei1052]

In an exclusive interview in Investigate magazine's TGIF Edition, Phil Jones, the head of the Hadley CRU, confirmed that the leaked data is real.

"It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago," he told the magazine, noting that the center has yet to contact the police about the data breach.

TGIF Edition asked Jones about the controversial "hide the decline" comment from an e-mail he wrote in 1999. He told the magazine that there was no intention to mislead, but he had "no idea" what he meant by those words.

Words cannot begin to describe my amusement.

 

[Mise]

@ainwood: Like I said, take all the emails I've sent over the past year and you'd have pretty good reason to think I was involved in some crazy illuminati conspiracy. Until you realise that people say these things in personal emails to close colleagues and friends all the time...

If it were just Jones & Mann that were providing all the masses of evidence for AGW, you might have a point about pride (or even salaries). But there are thousands of researchers in hundreds of universities all over the world producing paper after paper showing time and time again that AGW is happening.

This talk about conspiracy is, frankly, laughable. It's clutching at straws. At least other anti-AGW threads had at least some science to them... This is just nonsense.

 

[Bei1052]

If it were just Jones & Mann that were providing all the masses of evidence for AGW, you might have a point about pride (or even salaries). But there are thousands of researchers in hundreds of universities all over the world producing paper after paper showing time and time again that AGW is happening.

This isn't quite true.

Most scientists will tell you that global warming happens. Whether or not it occurs because of humans is the contentious issue, however. Far too often, people seem to conflate denying that humans are the cause of global warming with denying that global warming happens at all and lump those believe who argue that humans aren't contributing to a rise in global temperatures in with "global warming skeptics".

 

[Mise]

No, that isn't true at all, because the overwhelming majority of scientists believe that GW is caused by humans! There is worldwide academic consensus on the issue...

 

[Orange Seeds]

These twits will get what unethical practices grant you: ostracism. This whole pathetic faculty of academe needs to sharpen up and be more philosophical. They have just discredited their names, journals, articles and institution.

That said, this incident is going to be spun far out of its context and relevance.
It would be unethical for me to read ill-gotten evidence. I hope the hacker is charged.

 

[El_Machinae]

Keep in mind that the people who're now denying that AGW is occurring are the same people who were recently actively denying that there was even warming. They were so far out of the loop back then, that it took them ten years longer to figure out something. They didn't notice the warming then, and they don't have a mechanism for the warming now.

And to agree with Mise, I only rarely see Mann's name associated with AGW consensus in the primary literature. I'd notice his name, since I know the skepticism associated with him.

There's broad consensus amongst the major scientific publications. These publications are competing against each other. We're saying that rivals & experts cannot detect & expose bad science as well as regular joes can.

There are multiple datasets regarding warming.

 

[Earthling]

It's mostly the fact that among scientists in general that camp is rather small, and among the public the "total skeptics" are the overwhelming majority of all "dissenters". Plus, any political or related advocacy and issues must either fall to one side or another - even if humans weren't having much of an effect we'd still want to find out and prevent what's causing rapid changes in temperature, so opposing such efforts is effectively the same as denying all warming.

 

[bestrfcplayer]

This is great!

 

[Miles Teg]

In other news, I want to sleep with Nate Silver. Can someone arrange that for me?

There you have it! The smoking gun! Irrefutable proof of the Anthropogenic Global Warming Super-Duper Major-Mega International Socialist Conspiracy!

If you see Al Gore parking his Ford Fusion hybrid near any major bridges, make sure to call the police!

Actually, what you have is a scientist, Dr. Jones, talking candidly about sexing up a graph to make his conclusions more persuasive. This is not a good thing thing to do -- I'd go so far as to call it unethical -- and Jones deserves some of the loss of face that he will suffer. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that happens all the time in both academia and the private sector -- have you ever looked at the graphs in the annual report of a company which had a bad year? And it seems to happen all too often on both sides of the global warming debate (I'd include some of the graphics from An Inconvenient Truth in this category, FWIW.)

But let's be clear: Jones is talking to his colleagues about making a prettier picture out of his data, and not about manipulating the data itself. Again, I'm not trying to excuse what he did -- we make a lot of charts here and 538 and make every effort to ensure that they fairly and accurately reflect the underlying data (in addition to being aesthetically appealing.) I wish everybody would abide by that standard.

Still: I don't know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that's literally what some of these bloggers are saying!

Incidentally, 2009 is shaping up to be the 5th warmist year on record, according to the conspiracists at NASA.

 

[ainwood]

@ainwood: Like I said, take all the emails I've sent over the past year and you'd have pretty good reason to think I was involved in some crazy illuminati conspiracy. Until you realise that people say these things in personal emails to close colleagues and friends all the time...

Well, you wouldn't find anything like that in the e-mails that I've sent or received, and that's about 10,000 a year. Does this invalidate your point?

If it were just Jones & Mann that were providing all the masses of evidence for AGW, you might have a point about pride (or even salaries). But there are thousands of researchers in hundreds of universities all over the world producing paper after paper showing time and time again that AGW is happening.

My point is not actually about whether global warming is real or not. I have posted here many times about my concerns with the process. There are not nobodys or faceless researchers at hundreds of universities. These are lead authors of the IPCC reports. They are the guys whose work features in Al Gore's work. These guys influence how the science is perceived. WHether the science is affected is one thing, but this is as much politics as it is science now, and I think that this incident damages the politics of all of this, and will therefore reflect on the science.

This talk about conspiracy is, frankly, laughable. It's clutching at straws. At least other anti-AGW threads had at least some science to them... This is just nonsense.

As I said, its only partly about the science.

 

[Mise]

If you've never criticised your colleagues in an email, then, well, you have very nice colleagues

 

[Earthling]

Does this invalidate your point?

Obviously not, for instance, consider the thousands of, say, racist posts alone by people on CFC and all over the Internet, you wouldn't think (mostly, some actually have circles of friends who all agree with their views I guess) they'd want this information to be public. In short, it's not surprising to find somebody being angry or heated about something in email or online writings or whatever, even if they shouldn't.

Also, I too would point out that the one email cited in the blog (I can't find any source with full info and won't go looking, so we just have like 3 reprinted excerpts of "alleged" stuff to work with) is in fact entirely misunderstood. Saying "here's a trick to analyze the data" doesn't mean a "sinister trick." That phrase is used all the time, like someone would say "here's a trick to do that integral" or something, and apparently several bloggers have seized on that phrasing as proof of a conspiracy, so that's really stupid at best.

Edit: I'd also like to point out it's really annoying and misleading to here people say things about "refuting the hockey stick graph" since it's really not - the rises in recent temperature are well documented, and the "controversy" is over finding enough data from more than 400 years ago for warm periods in the medieval ages, and this was already disputed or discussed in the scientists' research almost from the start. Most who seem to say certain things like that tend to conflate it with entirely disproving global warming, much like Bei was mentioning earlier...

 

[ainwood]

If you've never criticised your colleagues in an email, then, well, you have very nice colleagues

Either that or I'm a professional. If I have to criticise my colleagues, that I do it to their face, and in a constructive manner. You will also not find any e-mails of me slagging off other people (third parties) either, even the ones who criticise my decisions.

 

[Mise]

Don't be offended if I don't believe you. I have never, ever met anyone who has nothing bad to say about someone they work with.

 

[ainwood]

Don't be offended if I don't believe you. I have never, ever met anyone who has nothing bad to say about someone they work with.

This is getting a lot off-topic, but it is the truth. Maybe its that I'm not stupid enough to slag off people in e-mails. Once you publish something in an e-mail, you lose control over it.

As an analogy, I've never had a warning at CFC, either, which is probably evidence of consistent behaviour (even with 5000+ posts before I was a mod).