nvm

[Erik Mesoy]

Would this "don't even talk about illegal things" moderation policy also apply to discussion of whether we've downloaded/read these files, and firsthand discussion of their content?

 

[El_Machinae]

The mods will discuss that question. In the mean-time, please do not link to illegally-gained materials. Linking to blogs discussing the materials is fine.

University in climate flap details inquiry reach

The British university at the center of what climate skeptics are calling "Climategate" on Thursday named an outside reviewer and detailed what would be investigated.

The University of East Anglia said Sir Muir Russell, until recently vice-chancellor at the University of Glasgow, will investigate whether scientists at its prestigious Climate Research Unit fudged data on global warming.

This is going to take quite a bit of time. The authorities are going to have to assemble people who're capable of understanding the data, and then walk through the data, before they decide whether something wrong was done. Some of it is going to be waved away as unimportant, even if the full details of each scandalous email isn't explained to the public.

On the upside

A group of scientists who run the RealClimate Web site — including Gavin Schmidt at the NASA space agency and Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University — have now begun posting links to their data sources online in the stated interest of making the science "as open and transparent as possible."

 

[innonimatu]

I very much doubt that this material can be called "illegal" any longer. And I absolutely do not believe the leak to have been the work of an hacker. Whomever collected those files knew what he/she was doing and had to get it from multiple places. It looks like the work of a whistleblower.

 

[Mise]

I very much doubt that this material can be called "illegal" any longer. And I absolutely do not believe the leak to have been the work of an hacker. Whomever collected those files knew what he/she was doing and had to get it from multiple places. It looks like the work of a whistleblower.

I love how you say this as if you're a detective or something. You must be some kind of expert on blowing whistles.

 

[innonimatu]

I love how you say this as if you're a detective or something. You must be some kind of expert on blowing whistles.

I guess that you are too pure and innocent to look it over. If you had you'd have noticed that the vast collection of differently formatted emails are not mere dumps from some hacked server.

 

[Berzerker]

However, no one is giving a general mechanism for the warming, outside of the AGW people.

the same mechanisms that caused damn near every other warming trend since the ice age ended. Just a couple, solar radiation has increased (Maunder Minimum 'peaked' during the little ice age ~350 years ago, another is volcanic activity - during the little ice age the Earth averaged a major eruption every 20 years, major eruptions have been rare since. Here's another, the Earth's tilt is 23.44 degrees, about 1 degree less than the maximum obliquity we hit during the early holocene warming. Putting that in terms of our annual climate change, we're still in late August.

people who're denying AGW don't have a mechanism by which CO2 doesn't sequester heat.

And dont call me a whore

it aint that CO2 doesn't or shouldn't warm us up a bit, its that the AGW crowd exaggerates the effect and thinks CO2 drives climate, it doesn't, it follows climate.

 

[BasketCase]

Here's another, the Earth's tilt is 23.44 degrees, about 1 degree less than the maximum obliquity we hit during the early holocene warming. Putting that in terms of our annual climate change, we're still in late August.

A bit of wierdness you'll want to know about.

The primary driver of climate change right now isn't obliquity--it's (apparently) eccentricity. Interglacial periods, for the past half a million years, have happened always and only during a spike in eccentricity. Below, for reference, there's a neat and nifty picture of the three variables, and below that is the Milankovitch graph.

On the Milankovitch graph: eccentricity, the important one, is the green line second from the top. Obliquity (Dear GOD, that one's hard to type ) is blue, and the precession index is in red. Planetary average temperature, derived from ice core data, is the green line at the very bottom--just above that is another temperature graph from ocean sediment rather than ice cores.

 

[El_Machinae]

the same mechanisms that caused damn near every other warming trend since the ice age ended. Just a couple, solar radiation has increased (Maunder Minimum 'peaked' during the little ice age ~350 years ago, another is volcanic activity - during the little ice age the Earth averaged a major eruption every 20 years, major eruptions have been rare since. Here's another, the Earth's tilt is 23.44 degrees, about 1 degree less than the maximum obliquity we hit during the early holocene warming. Putting that in terms of our annual climate change, we're still in late August.

I'll keep your 'Earth tilt' concept in mind when I'm watching the debate: though, honestly, you seem to be the only person mentioning it. I mean, yeah, others are mentioning it, but it's not reaching mainstream discussion in any way.

it aint that CO2 doesn't or shouldn't warm us up a bit, its that the AGW crowd exaggerates the effect and thinks CO2 drives climate, it doesn't, it follows climate.

If one were to observe my bedroom window, they'd suggest that it follows climate. It opens in the morning & closes in the evening. It responds to the cycles of daily heat. However, if someone were to close my window during the day, it would be reasonable to suggest that closing the window was responsible for some of the later warming in my room!

CO2 does follow climate for a series of reasons: the concerns about arctic methane acknowledge that point. But CO2 can cause changes in climate as well.

 

[Flying Pig]

I'm actually not sure if we caused it anymore. The number of people taking the idea that these leaked e-mails are evidence that the information is wrong is worrying - and apparently almost all of the big studies got the raw data from these people. I think that we can slow it down, probably, but I'm not sure how much.

 

[El_Machinae]

Would this "don't even talk about illegal things" moderation policy also apply to discussion of whether we've downloaded/read these files, and firsthand discussion of their content?

Moderator Action: Sorry for the delay. Linking to & quoting from blogs & newspapers is okay. Talking about what you've read is okay. Linking to stolen information, except through blogs & newspapers, is not allowed. You're allowed to quote what someone else has already published. Please play within the spirit of the rules.

I very much doubt that this material can be called "illegal" any longer. And I absolutely do not believe the leak to have been the work of an hacker. Whomever collected those files knew what he/she was doing and had to get it from multiple places. It looks like the work of a whistleblower.

That's a pretty cool prediction. I'm quite fond of whistleblowers, in general. Some whistleblowers release distorted data, though (I've seen it personally with PETA & research facilities), but whistleblowers are still essential in stopping corruption.

Scientific American was publishing this article just before the hacking kerfuffle broke.

Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense

Claim 1: Anthropogenic CO2 can't be changing climate, because CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources. Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, so changes in CO2 are irrelevant.
...
Claim 2: The alleged "hockey stick" graph of temperatures over the past 1,600 years has been disproved. It doesn't even acknowledge the existence of a "medieval warm period" around 1000 A.D. that was hotter than today is. Therefore, global warming is a myth.
...
Claim 3: Global warming stopped a decade ago; Earth has been cooling since then.
...
Claim 4: The sun or cosmic rays are much more likely to be the real causes of global warming. After all, Mars is warming up, too.
...
Claim 5: Climatologists conspire to hide the truth about global warming by locking away their data. Their so-called "consensus" on global warming is scientifically irrelevant because science isn't settled by popularity.
...
Claim 6: Climatologists have a vested interest in raising the alarm because it brings them money and prestige.
...
Claim 7: Technological fixes, such as inventing energy sources that don't produce CO2 or geoengineering the climate, would be more affordable, prudent ways to address climate change than reducing our carbon footprint.

So, if this is where you're focusing in the controversy, there's a good chance that you're rather behind on the debate. There's a decent chance that you're repeating fed astroturf objections.

That said, I don't know if they fully KO some of the objections. They 'disprove' objection six by pointing out that research funding for climate change is dropping, and thus 'raising the alarm' hasn't gotten them what they want. This just shows they're ineffective, not that they're not motivated. The main 'status' in climate change research is to find cycles that explain some of the variance, anyway.

 

[El_Machinae]

Update: well, I know that most people have already made up their minds, but I figured more information is always useful.

tl;dr, the emails indicate anger, frustration, and a strong desire to not have to deal with the skeptics. This is somewhat understandable, because for every good objection, there are about a hundred loud & angry & stupid objections. People have learned that opening up the data is going to have to be policy, but you can understand that the researchers don't have a continuing obligation to forever reply to the demands of skeptics

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2009-12-12-14-31-45
There's a lot more than what I'm quoting

AP IMPACT: Science not faked, but not pretty
LONDON (AP) -- E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data - but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
....
One of the most disturbing elements suggests an effort to avoid sharing scientific data with critics skeptical of global warming. It is not clear if any data was destroyed; two U.S. researchers denied it.

The e-mails show that several mainstream scientists repeatedly suggested keeping their research materials away from opponents who sought it under American and British public records law. It raises a science ethics question because free access to data is important so others can repeat experiments as part of the scientific method. The University of East Anglia is investigating the blocking of information requests.
....
The e-mails also show how professional attacks turned very personal. When former London financial trader Douglas J. Keenan combed through the data used in a 1990 research paper Jones had co-authored, Keenan claimed to have found evidence of fakery by Jones' co-author. Keenan threatened to have the FBI arrest University at Albany scientist Wei-Chyung Wang for fraud. (A university investigation later cleared him of any wrongdoing.)

"I do now wish I'd never sent them the data after their FOIA request!" Jones wrote in June 2007."
...
As part of the AP review, summaries of the e-mails that raised issues from the potential manipulation of data to intensely personal attacks were sent to seven experts in research ethics, climate science and science policy.

"This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds," said Dan Sarewitz, a science policy professor at Arizona State University. "We talk about science as this pure ideal and the scientific method as if it is something out of a cookbook, but research is a social and human activity full of all the failings of society and humans, and this reality gets totally magnified by the high political stakes here."