nvm

[ainwood]

This isn't evidence of a conspiracy. It is evidence of authors attempting to sex up their paper so its more likely to be published. Unethical, yes, but hardly evidence of a worldwide conspiracy.

There is evidence of conspiring to prevent information being released under the FOIA:

Ben,
When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals. The VC is also aware of what is going on – at least for one of the requests, but probably doesn’t know the number we’re dealing with. We are in double figures.

There is evidence of conspiring to keep dissenting views out of the IPCC:

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

 

[Princeps]

And the whole "global Warming" issue is one where (most of) the industry's interest and the financier's interests collide. The first will be asked to pay a tax on a virtual "product" (CO2 licences),

I'm sorry. These licenses are not "virtual products", but a form of property, like fishing quota licenses in Iceland. And private property is necessary for the functioning of the market process.

That particular dataset also shows no real year-on-year increase in temperature after 2001, only very small variations around the same value, except for a bigger dip in 2008. No noticeable trend for warming. Which was my point. And which contradicts the public discourse, and the IPCC models, about continued global warming.

This is entirely irrelevant and expected, it's simply natural variability. We've had a longer pause in global warming before, and it generally goes zig zag, but the long 25 year trend is still up.

Edit. like this:

 

[JerichoHill]

There is evidence of conspiring to prevent information being released under the FOIA:



There is evidence of conspiring to keep dissenting views out of the IPCC:

Ainwood,

Not arguing a conspiracy there. But it's what, 3 dudes? Not a global conspiracy. It's three guys being unethical. Just like 3 guys figuring out how to rob a bank.

 

[Princeps]

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

Which can be interpited in many ways.

Gavin Schmidt of NASA and the Realclimate blog responded to it with this: "Bad papers clutter up assessment reports and if they don't stand up as science, they shouldn't be included. No-one can 'redefine' what the peer-reviewed literature is."

 

[Princeps]

It is a personal incentive for whoever is in charge of the political entity that has the capability to use the resources. He can then launder the resources with whatever scheme, increase political connections by doing favours to others with it. And the launderers are always 1 step ahead of the internal checking, just like software pirates and drug dealers are of their antagonists

I don't think this actually describes governments internal functions quite well.

And even when leaving the extra tax incentive aside, the very fact of life that it is impossible to enforce regulation evenly due to shortages in the production of regulation, means that the use of regulation is necessarily subject to political decisions of how and where to use it, which can be monetized. You gotta think business man

You mean regulation has to be prioritized? Of course that's true. A government has to persecute the worst polluters first, imprison the worst murderers first, root out the worst organized criminals first and so forth. There is no reason assume, really, especially when regulators can be well-paid in the west, that this process of provision is corrupt. It usually isn't if the state is enough cleared of parochial and private sector interference. The illegal market effect in regulation can be minimized.

Governments can only function thanks to private contracting anyway.

Private contracting is a system defined by government instituted laws.

The production line has become way too long for governments to centrally plan the production capacity, it already was in the 70s when soviet planning couldnt scale with the innovations.

I wasn't talking of centralized management.

Politician or bureaucrat makes money how he can and chooses what is more useful for him, we can only speculate. Again, possibly support green taxes to gain more political power or gain from favours related to it to other bureaucrats, which might be less risky or more easily accomplished than motor-industry favourable regulations.

But this is obvious nonsense. 1. supporting established industries is far more profitable and less riskier for a politician than experimenting with infant green industries. Oil companies and their supporting industries make far more money than their equivalents in green and sustainable energy sectors. 2. Supporting "green economics" usually goes against parochial interests as well, not just personal. And these interests tend to be very strong. 3. You are being excessively cyncial in the believe that none of these politicians actually support cap-and-trade propertization of pollution, for example, out of genuine concern for the environment. This cynicism is based on groundless libertarian bias: if it was true, there wouldn't be any green regulations or industries in the first place.

Just look at who pays the money to them.

Obviously that doesn't prove anything. People like Noam Chomsky can and do work in largely publically funded institutions. Last time I checked, at least several anti-statist ideologues came from the public or semi-public academia. Again, the idea that the entire intellectual class in the US is nothing but a sockpuppet for the state is a delusional conspiracy theory that the libertarians and many other fringe ideologues conveniently use to excuse their own short-comings.

 

[ainwood]

Which can be interpited in many ways.

Gavin Schmidt of NASA and the Realclimate blog responded to it with this: "Bad papers clutter up assessment reports and if they don't stand up as science, they shouldn't be included. No-one can 'redefine' what the peer-reviewed literature is."

Gavin Schmidt of NASA has very little credibility. His censorship of any dissenting opinions starts at his realclimate blog (in fact, its such a joke that there is another blog set-up for people to post comments that Gavin deleted at realclimate).

You could also interpret Gavin's comments as "Bad papers" are the ones that don't agree with his opinion. The thing is, they rely on "peer review" to keep the bad papers out. And now there is evidence that they've been working at keeping any dissenting views out of the peer reviewed literature as well (editorial chnges).

 

[Princeps]

Gavin Schmidt of NASA has very little credibility.

Wait a second. You're using the way he runs his own blog to criticize his comment on this issue instead of commenting on the point he made. I think that says more about your credibility that Gavin's. I have seen quite a lot of dissenting posts in Realclimate and various other climate blogs. The problem with them is that they're frequently BS and repeat the same old tired nonsense, with compulsory "wake up peaple!" calls.

You could also interpret Gavin's comments as "Bad papers" are the ones that don't agree with his opinion.

Bad papers are papers that are not scientific. He said "if they don't stand up as science".

Again, you cannot really judge the comment from the E-mail without a context. Its wording is also strange, refering to "peer-review literature" instead of the process.

And now there is evidence that they've been working at keeping any dissenting views out of the peer reviewed literature as well (editorial chnges).

No, there is no evidence that they are keeping out dissenting papers, except these probably out of the context comments from a dubious, possibly distorted and edited source. There are dissenting papers, even papers that have questioned the very core ideas at the heart of carbon dioxide forced GW theory. They have not been ignored or refused publication. They're just wrong.

 

[ainwood]

Sorry - I meant that he has very little credibility with respect to his comments on this issue, because as far as I can tell, he is implicated in it.

Even that statement may be a little harsh. Instead, people should recognise that his comments are from someone who is involved, and they should therefore be seen as comments of defence, rather than comments from anyone giving an independent view.

Secondly, yes, there is dissenting opinion on RealClimate, and I agree: A lot of it is the shrill rabid-wing of the sceptics. There however, is a lot of very reasonable questions asked there that are censored. Maybe its the difficult ones?

In fact, one of the release e-mails deals directly with this issue:

Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.

There are enough rejected comments that the RealClimate Rejects blog was set-up for people to post their comments that get rejected. Many are dross, but there are some interesting examples. For example, RealClimate did a rebuttal of Steve McIntyre's post on the Yamal issue. Apparently, when he tried to comment it got rejected.

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.

You may be interested that archive also has some data files, including code used to calculate some of the climate reconstructions. The "trick" is also explained in this code:

; Plots (1 at a time) yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD
; reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

I see no new thread is necessary

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/climate-sceptics-hackers-leaked-emails

Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists

Hundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world's leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online.

Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world's leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

The files, which in total amount to 160MbB of data, were first uploaded on to a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: "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. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it."

A spokesperson for the University of East Anglia said: "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all this material is genuine. This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and have involved the police in this inquiry."

In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

This sentence, in particular, has been leapt upon by sceptics as evidence of manipulating data, but the credibility of the email has not been verified. The scientists who allegedly sent it declined to comment on the email.

"It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating," said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "You can't tell what they are talking about. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick."

In another alleged email, one of the scientists apparently refers to the death of a prominent climate change sceptic by saying "in an odd way this is cheering news".

Ward said that if the emails are correct, they "might highlight behaviour that those individuals might not like to have made public." But he added, "Let's separate out [the climate scientists] reacting badly to the personal attacks [from sceptics] to the idea that their work has been carried out in an inappropriate way."

The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data - reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. "Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data," he said. "At the heart of this is basic physics."

Ward pointed out that the individuals named in the alleged emails had numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. "It would be very surprising if after all this time, suddenly they were found out doing something as wrong as that."

Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: "I'm not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows."

When the Guardian asked Prof Phil Jones at UEA, who features in the correspondence, to verify whether the emails were genuine, he refused to comment.

The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from sceptics in recent years. There have been repeated calls, including Freedom of Information requests, for the Climate Research Unit to make public a confidential dataset of land and sea temperature recordings that is "value added" by the unit before being used by the Met Office. The emails show the frustration some climatologists have had at having to operate under such intense, often politically motivated, scrutiny.

Prof Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, "Evidence for climate change is irrefutable. The world's leading scientists overwhelmingly agree what we're experiencing is not down to natural variation."

"With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic."

A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "If you looked through any organisation's emails from the last 10 years you'd find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world's leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke."

Hackers find out Scientist are humans as well, capable of being a-holes. CFC-OT comments: "No! Get the heck out of here!"

 

[luiz]

Hackers find out Scientist are humans as well, capable of being a-holes. CFC-OT comments: "No! Get the heck out of here!"

They can also behave in a completely unscientific manner, and make statements without any scientific validity. Such as:

"With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic."

I specially like his certainty. Very scientific of him. The problem is imbeciles see a statement like this made by a "Professor", a "climate scientist", and they freak out. The above statement is political, not scientific, and this man is using his scientific credibility to push his political agenda. And this is so common in climate science nowadays that it barely be called a science.

 

[azzaman333]

I've always thought that the "proof" for anthropomorphic GW/CC was a little shakey, but these emails don't really prove anything.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

They can also behave in a completely unscientific manner, and make statements without any scientific validity. Such as:

I specially like his certainty. Very scientific of him. The problem is imbeciles see a statement like this made by a "Professor", a "climate scientist", and they freak out. The above statement is political, not scientific, and this man is using his scientific credibility to push his political agenda.

That's media goggles for you. The media will track the feller with the most extreme statement regarding anything so they have stuff to print that makes people go

And this is so common in climate science nowadays that it barely be called a science.

What is not scientific is judging the whole of environmental science by those people you read in the papers, because that will always be geared towards sensationalism. Those people do not make environmental science any less scientific. The presentation towards the public is unscientific. Do not equate the two.

 

[Dragonlord]

*sigh*

Haven't read the whole thread, but still...

Have any of you actually read the mails that are supposed to prove a 'global warming conspiracy'?

What I see is scientists and bureaucrats discussing how to present facts - and yes, there are some passages where a certain predisposition toward global warming can be seen.
Does this mean Global Warming is all one big conspiracy? No, that does not follow.

What I see is scientists who are personally convinced of Global Warming, who realize that some data will be seized on eagerly by opponents and are concerned about how to present it.
Don't kid yourself - the same goes on in every corporation in the world when an important presentation is coming up.

Also, most of the stuff they are writing about here is well-known. Yes, in the short term over the last few years,global temperatures have been constant. Yes, a mean temperature rise globally does not mean that there can't be a cold winter with lots of snow in Colorado.
Etc., etc.

 

[aelf]

I specially like his certainty. Very scientific of him. The problem is imbeciles see a statement like this made by a "Professor", a "climate scientist", and they freak out. The above statement is political, not scientific, and this man is using his scientific credibility to push his political agenda. And this is so common in climate science nowadays that it barely be called a science.

If you think these people are imbeciles, I can't begin to imagine what you must think of financiers and their predictive capabilities.

 

[Mise]

If you think these people are imbeciles, I can't begin to imagine what you must think of financiers and their predictive capabilities.

 

[luiz]

If you think these people are imbeciles, I can't begin to imagine what you must think of financiers and their predictive capabilities.

Note that I was not calling the scientists making the claims imbeciles - but rather the people who freak out when reading such obvioulsy biased, unproved and unscientific statements. And there are plenty of such people. Those scientists are merely intelectually dishonest, but they may be very intelligent for all I know.

And the same is definately true for those who believe in some forms of financial crap floating around - like "technical analysis" of stocks, for instance. Climate science is not the only pseudo-science in the world, nor have I ever claimed it to be.

 

[Mise]

We regularly make policy decisions based on economics that are obviously biased, unproven and unscientific. Yet when we have actual science, actual evidence, and actual proof, people stick their fingers in their ears!

 

[El_Machinae]

So, people don't like GISS because of Hansen. They don't like Hadley CRU because of this leaked report.

Right?

I have to remember people's opinions on the datasources

Granted, this does support the theory of an ongoing global warming, but the sea level has been increasing at the same rate since records have been kept, from about 1870. That's not supportive of the theory of an accelerating, man-caused global warming. And I wouldn't discount the possibility of other causes for these changes of sea level.

Firstly, the acceleration occurs after tipping points, iirc.
Additionally, I'm not going to deny that there are mechanisms that appear 'natural' that are causing the indicators of rising temperature. So, ocean currents are causing X to warm up. Wind currents are causing Y to warm up, etc. And sometimes it will be delayed heat release due to ocean turnover, or whatever.

However, no one is giving a general mechanism for the warming, outside of the AGW people. We've got ice retreating all over the planet, and so there're now people who okay with the idea that the planet is warming. But they don't know why! Like, at all! They'll just suggest that it's 'natural'.

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

 

[innonimatu]

However, no one is giving a general mechanism for the warming, outside of the AGW people. We've got ice retreating all over the planet, and so there're now people who okay with the idea that the planet is warming. But they don't know why! Like, at all! They'll just suggest that it's 'natural'.

And that is the only honest attitude to maintain, so long as there is not enough data for solid conclusions. The planet may be warming (I'm still not convinced that there is a long-term warming trend) but the mechanisms causing it are unknown. AGW models are unproven hypothesis.
And even about the warming: once the infamous "hockey stick" charts obtained by arbitrarily merging different data and ignoring other available data which contradicted that use, are discarded, how much has it been? If indirect satellite measurements over the surface are the best way to estimate a "global temperature" (itself a misleading term), why has the stable/cooling trend observed over the last decade being ignored, in favor of maintaining the earlier belief in the rapid heading trend, created mostly from that infamous "temperature reconstruction"?

Finally, if the argument for global warming is that all glaciers withdrawing, it would be fair to ask for a worldwide inventory of the situation of glaciers. Is it possible that attention is focused on those receding, ignoring others which advancing? Has anyone collected data which proves that all glaciers worldwide are becoming smaller?
In the end we have sea level measurements. But unfortunately even those are notoriously unreliable: they're averages calculated from average values, corrected for tides, form (currently) a few hundred stations around the world. And sea levels do vary, regionally.

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

Actually, not even the importance of CO2 for the greenhouse effect is well understood. There is no consensus even inside the IPCC about that. All we have are unverified models, as there is no way to actually control all the variables for energy received vs. energy emitted over the planet.

 

[El_Machinae]

Remember that not all glaciers will become smaller with any warming scenario. Any glacier that remains in an area averaging less than zero will shrink or grow based on its precipitation received. We expect regions of Antarctica to gain ice as precipitation increases in regions that are sub-zero, for example. And their growth certainly would not disprove warming, since they didn't warm to thawing temperatures.