So much is being written about Climategate and the fallout from it, it is tough to cover it all. Here I’m just going to point out a coupe of posts by Harold Ambler at Talking About The Weather that may interest WUWT readers. He’s spent a lot of time on them, give him some traffic, hit the tip jar if you feel like it.
First we have:
Phil Jones offers myriad reasons for not sharing data
The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.
Second:
There has been a lot of interest in this here at WUWT, Ambler actually called the CEO of Google to find out what was going on.
Both are worth a read. – Anthony
Now I know why some of the the Aussie greedy freaks wanted a carbon tax so bad.
CCS technology is just plain stupid. The biosphere loves CO2.
Global CCS Institute To Launch A$50 Million Funding Round Monday
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200912032223DOWJONESDJONLINE000759_FORTUNE5.htm
I’m going to tell Alex Jones about this CCS angle, he’ll ride the topic for all it’s worth.
The BBC main news item this morning is climategateand the IPCC to investigate. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8394483.stm
The emails and data were ‘posted’ on the internet; no mention of being hacked.
I’ve noticed that Al Gore has just backed out of a ticketed COP 15 speech , 600 dollars a head , for Berlingske tidende one of the left wing danish newspapers. This has been booked since august. did he get scared ? all those difficuilt questions, maybe he thought Bjorn was coming.
I remember the movie The Graduate (1967) and the one word piece of investment advice was Plastics. Today the word is CCS.
Seems like the algorithm was replaced with an AlGoreithm!
The piece on Jones is good.
Thoughtful piece. Thank you Harold. If the chair of the investigating committee fails to see anything unethical in Phil Jones actions we will know that the state of institutional science is
“Worse than we thought”
Al Gores money is chump change compared to this.
http://rockefeller.senate.gov/issues/energy/index.cfm
Not working now (7:45am GMT 4Dec09).
Still does not work for me this auto-suggest for climategate…
Measuring the temperature of the planet is sort of like trying to measure the lengths of a bunch of earthworms with a ruler and get an average length . . . but not without arguing a whole lot over whether the divisions of the ruler should be in inches or metric first.
Climate Gate Scandal works on Google Search Suggest. I think they are messing with it but just go ahead and do the search. You’ll find it. I wouldn’t put it past them however but that would just contribute to the cover up.
Who is the denier now? These warmers are denying their lying eyes!
I did a search for Climate Gate at the Houston Chronicle and got no results but a search for Obama got 560 and for Climate Change got 552 and for Tiger Woods got 460. This is the energy capital of the United States if not the world.
Drudge has Houston to have earliest snow ever headline.
It seem the fix is in for those using Google Australia. There is no auto-suggest for climategate. You have to type in the whole word and the hit count here is up to 29 million.
Random factoid: here in Switzerland there is a weekly, prime-time popular science program (it’s even on the most-watched television channel!). In the program last night, they had another round at global warming, with a scientist and a gigantic water bowl, showing how increasing CO2 is about to cause “overflow” and destroy the planet. Quote (translated to English): “All scientists agree”. Not a word about Climategate or any possible opposing views. Needless to say, in the course of the interview, the water bowl overflowed…
I immediately sent them a comment, asking if they would please address the other side of the debate. The last time I sent them a comment, they actually answered within a day. It will be interesting to see if they do so this time – and what their answer is…
Not autosuggesting currently.
Results 1 – 10 of about 30,300,000 for climategate. (0.08 seconds)
Result number one?
News results for climategate
Harvard professor weighs in on climategate – 1 day ago
Over 21000000 hits on google when you type in ‘climategate’ yet the Globe confines it to this green blog and 1 op-ed earlier today. Embarrassing. ps: Oh and …Boston Globe – 1357 related articles »
Senator Barbara Boxer’s new name for Climategate – Telegraph.co.uk – 48 related articles »Climategate fallout – National Post – 482 related articles »
Evil corporations our out to get us!!
This sounds like all the stories you get about Exxon funding Steve M in a huge disinformation campaign.
Googles searches as well as thier auto-fill function i assume are based on very complex proprietary algorithms. Climategate is a very new term and it does not surprise me that weird computer burbs could cause it to appear and disappear. it would also not surprise me that at first it disappeared becouse of a burp then reappeared because after Ambler wrote her email the CEO had the term hard coded into the system in order to avoid a computer burb causing a pablicity problem. But the most important thing people shoudl relize is that google’s alogrithms are as i mentions and highlighted about PROPRIETARY. Theya re going to give you the run around no matter if they intentionally hard coded it or if it is a computer burb…..they do not want the general public knowing how their code works simply because they have spent millions of dollars and years developing it.
Everything Ambler found looks exactly like how a company should look if they are trying to protect how their systems work from out side competing eyes.
You know if you just stand back and think for a minute about Global Warming is going to flood the world. Lets look at Midway Island as see if it’s going underwater. If the hockey stick temperature graph and the claims of melting ice caps were true wouldn’t you see something different then this? And this information is readily available from (are you sitting down) NOAA and other sources.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=1619910
It’s amazing how gullible and lazy the public has become in not investigating this on their own and keeping an open mind.
Michael
“Now I know why some of the the Aussie greedy freaks wanted a carbon tax so bad.”
I’m an Aussie engineer… I don’t want a carbon tax…. most people here don’t even understand what it is.
Not believing 100% in “Dangerous Climate Change” is a thought crime in Australia. K.Rudd the Prime Minister made a speech to the Lowie Institute that was one step short of inciting violence against “Extremist Deniers” read reasonable, sceptical scientists.
We have a whole new generation of educated idiots that are now in middle management positions. They don’t have science or engineering degrees, they’ve got masters in sustainability, bachelors of environment. They don’t even understand basic chemistry. They are simply incapable of critical thinking.
I’ve been threaten with violence by AGW nuts for simply asking questions.
Our country is run by school teachers and union thugs. Now the kids are taught that Carbon Dioxide is a pollutant and that their parents are evil and are destroying their future.
A major metro newspaper in Melbourne Victoria has not even mentioned Climategate. It claims to be a paper of record. The ABC (Aussie BBC) refuses to run the story because it says it is just “fodder” for the deniers.
It is truly Orwellian.
We are in the ridiculous situation where the main politician (Tony Abbot, leader of the opposition) who is a defender of open scientfic debate is a card carrying member of Opus Dei.
But you are right. There is clearly a bunch of greedy bastards who think they are going to get rich and powerful from this. The former leader of the opposition was one of them (Malcolm Turnbull).
BBc starting to finally wake up on this.
Newsnight on bbc2 did a piece that was around 10 minutes long and at least made some good points, especially on the HARRY code with a programmer making comparisons to some of nasa’s stuff.
The cru code was basically condemned.
A question i wanted to ask.
If the models are so good, and they have total confidence in them, would they stake their or their childrens lives on it if the shuttle computers were programmed in such a manner?
I doubt it!
The BBC’s flagship Today programme on Radio 4 led for the first time with Climategate (UN to investigate, Saudi scepticism abt Copenhagen). The tone was still one of damage limitation, but to my mind it’s a sign that the dam has broken. They’ve never even mentioned it before but their report nonchalantly assumed that we all knew what they were talking about.
Googlegate is an interesting discovery. I discovered today that the Google pagerank for my blog went down, despite the fact that I’m receiving 20x more visitors, and that links to my blog have increased exponentially.
Makes me wonder…
Ecotretas
google.com 1 december 00:29 european time
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/3928/112200902902.png
107.000.000
Re the autosuggest issue – it isn’t necessarily “suspicious” – I’ve just done a lot of work with the SOLR search engine (don’t know if Google uses this, but the principles behind its search algorithm are likely ), and have posted the below over at the “Talking about the weather” blog –
While I don’t know anything about the autosuggest algorithm that Google is using, I do know that autosuggest algorithms can produce results that just don’t seem to “gel” with logic. Take, for example, the Lucene/SOLR search engines. Their default relevance algorithm is based on not just the frequency of occurrence, but also the length (e.g. shorter words which occur more frequently are deemed to be less relevant), words which occur frequently across different documents are ranked lower (may help to explain the apparent dropping of “climategate” from Google’s autosuggest. Word stems can also be factored into the algorithm, e.g “climategate’s” stems include “climate”, “climateg” etc (stems don’t have to be actual words). Depending on how the relevance algorithm is tweaked, this may result in words such as “climategate” being indexed as “climate”. One of the effects of such algorithms is that the more common a word is, the less likely it is to be considered relevant.
Harpo,
no they they don’t.
Howard and Costello tried for Joe Hockey to snook it. Missed big time.
It was a fit up a long time in the making.
I can’t get google to auto suggest “climategate” today.
Carlo>> 107,000,000 hits?? Here in Sweden we get a measly 26,000,000!
In the UK this morning the East Anglia University story was first item on the BBC Radio Four news followed by a 12 minute discussion between Philip Stott and Jonathon Porritt (ex -chairman of the Green Party).
Porritt was backed on to the ropes for most of the discussion . He could not deny that this was now a serious issue but sought to limit the damage by arguing that CRU was but one small part in the jigsaw of “thousands” of studies which supported the orthodoxy of anthropogenic global warming. He alluded to other institutions which backed this view even if we questioned the work at CRU. (NASA?) Eventually , under pressure from Stott he admitted, probably through gritted teeth , that not all of those who questioned this orthodoxy were fruit cakes and that there were serious scientists out there with proper questions . (Bang goes “the science is settled”)
Stott pointed out that the IPCC ‘s structure of argument was an inverted pyramid (nice image) resting on a point which consisting of the work of 30 or 40 modellers. If that point crumbled then the whole structure would fall. Porritt resisted the conclusion but did not fight the image or the suggested numbers
There has been a sizeable retreat by the green Establishment in this country over the past 48 hours.The new line of defence seems to be that , yes , this is serious but not fatal. What they are keen to emphasise (and, I sense, dread finding news to the contrary ) is that infection is limited to East Anglia and that American ground station research has not been corrupted as well.Is there not the additional question of whether satellite data, which is above suspicion but is, I understand ,calibrated against ground station results ,in all innocence, being skewed by the results at CRU? I leave that question to greater minds.
As one with a healthy scepticism about everything, as we all should possess, it is all very plausible, the denialist view that there was no big-brother interefrence in all this. However, those of us who possess that other noble quality about modern lifesyles/attitudes/belief-systems/computer-models, etc, i.e. cynicism, cannot help but think of a maloderous rodent or icthyoid somewhere along the line!!!! Have I watched too many Alfred Hitchcock movies, or should we really be looking at the people behind the scenes, rather than those at front of house, or both?
As the UK soon heads into Pantomime Season, & all jolly good family fun it is too, I suspect that, & I beg forgiveness & indulgence from my Colonial cousins, “They know, that we know, that they know, that we know, that they know, that we know,……………..” etc. Confusing? Well yes, of course it is, that’s what they want to sow, so that Government(s) can be looked upon as shining the leading light for all to follow. Their mendacity knows no bounds, after all, they are professional politicians, & that is precisely what they do best.
TGIF rant, although I wouldn’t agree with any of them, if one of them was to get to his/her feet & just say, “Hey, look, we don’t think it is right for poor people to exist in modern times, so we want to tax you to oblivion, seize the means of energy production, oppress your freedoms & lifestyles but not ours, (naturally), give all that dosh to a semi-corrupt unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic, unsackable, Marxist Socialist World Government, & we (ooops),…. they will decide who gets what on a fair (ly) reasonable basis to erradicate poverty. The fact that I & all my colleagues will enrich ourselves at the taxpayers’ expense, (then book deals/speech circuit, on how I saved the nation, continent, world, solar system), into the bargin because you are all too stupid to deserve better, is neither here nor there. The fact that many poor countries are run by rich, corrupt, & at times plain evil people & parties & business interests, & that around £385 will go to the populace of those countries, for every £M (385ppm) slipped into the back pockets of said politicos & business interests is irrelevent. They’re socialists of sorts so it doesn’t matter any way.” I would applaud them for their honesty, I really would! Then I would sit down with a beer & watch the last 10 minutes of V for Vendetta! I cannot think of one single UN scheme that has not been corrupted for financial gain somewhere along the way. Suggestions anyone?
HAGWE!
Neither Google, Bing or Yahoo auto-suggest climategate. AltaVista does.
What else are they surpressing? Probably not a lot, but we know Google censors for China at the very least.
The only thing that makes these huge companies pay attention is if they start losing market share. So I’ve changed my home page and default search engine to AltaVista. I suggest anyone else concerned does likewise.
No auto-suggestion in Spain [for English and Spanish language pages] with:
“climategate” with about 29,000,000 pages
“climate gate” with about 9,730,000 pages
“climate-gate” with about 27,800,000 pages
But we go get:
“climate gates” with about 10,100,000 pages
But i have a feeling that entry is there because of:
Climate Auto Gates manufacture and install automated domestic and commercial gates, bespoke gates, bollards, barriers, intercom systems and access controls.
http://www.climateautogates.co.uk
Just for fun i took a look at their website where they indicate they are
“COVERING – CAMBS – BEDS – ESSEX – HERTS – SUFFOLK – AREAS”
Have a feeling there are a few people wishing that Climate Auto Gates also covered NORWICH so they could have better protected their Climate Gate data.
Note for non UK readers: Norwich is in the county of NORFOLK which has a border with the county of SUFFOLK…. so close but yet so far…
Well it made me laugh…. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Nikki (23:26:26) :
I’ve noticed that Al Gore has just backed out of a ticketed COP 15 speech , 600 dollars a head , for Berlingske tidende one of the left wing danish newspapers.
I hate to correct you, but Berlingske Tidende is definately not a left-wing newspaper. The paper is in Denmark known for its conservative stance on political and social issues. It traditionally has a primarily bourgeois readership.
PS
The StartPage search engine http://www.startpage.com/
has at least 54,299,493 matching results for climategate
Needless to say they are now my default search provider!
now at Copenhagen:
http://i45.tinypic.com/2m7dgrc.jpg
LOL…GoogleGate was a pretty amusing read…
I can’t believe how persistent this guy was…
If whitewash futures were traded in Chicago and London I’d buy as many as I could now that the UN is “investigating” the emails—no way will it accept ANY responsibility for this. Choo-choo Pachauri will say he was duped. Yeah, right… duped just after the graphs were doctored.
Some notes on the behaviour of Google in Sweden, regarding searches for “climategate”. You presently get ca 27 Mill hits. You can select hits in Swedish, which are ca 80 000.
However, on Altavista you get 492 000 hits in Swedish!
You have to use the trick of entering “climategate AND och AND det”. Altavista will only report the worldwide hits if you select Sweden, but the common Swedish words “och” (means “and”) and “det” (“that”) will indentify what in most cases would be Swedish texts.
And here’s something interesting. Searching for “watergate”, the mother of all Gate Named scandals:
Altavista: 15 Mill hits
Google: 1 Mill hits.
What does Google have against scandals named something with “-gate”?
–Ahrvid
The line from Google should be read as: “The suggestions change dynamically over time through automated processes based on relevance Al Gore-ithms”
I don’t know what is up with the auto-suggest anyway. It is all whacked anyway, just see what typing “why” autosuggests. I wouldn’t read too much into that.
If google was into conspiracies, I’d think they’d work on suppressing the 50M + entries instead of some insipid auto-suggest feature. Maybe they are, but I think that the hole in the dike is already too big.
Peter Dunford (02:32:18) :
“…… I’ve changed my home page and default search engine to AltaVista. I suggest anyone else concerned does likewise”.
AltaVista was the first and still the best in my view. I’ve been using it for over ten years, since it was released onto the web. Google is far too close to the CIA and has been caught censoring content – in UK/USA – again and again over the last several years. I’ve been aware of this long before climategate.
And I hate it when people say “Google this”, or “Google that”….
Try searching for Googlegate I got 12,600 hits… on google. That must hurt… snigger
Google tries to eliminate duplication, so it an item contains multiple instances of a single term, or if a post is re-posted on several places, google will initially count all instances, but later prune away the duplicates. I think.
Not sure if anyone else is aware, but Al Gore is involved with Google…
http://www.generationim.com/about/team/gore.html
Google-gate may have some legs after all. And I think I’ve found an Google-Gore links somewhere besides Generation Investment…
As of 8:23am CST I do not think the autosuggest is working in the United States via Google.
I typed “climateg”and it shows up with “climateguard” as the first auto suggest.
There is clearly intervention preventing climategate from being suggested.
I accept that the algorithms have a “life of their own.” However, “global warming” and other terms that I have been searching do not appear to get tossed around on the sea of algorithm this way. Google is counting on algorithm idiosyncracies to lend their actions plausible deniability here. Bear in mind that this is one of the biggest news stories of 2009, growing in the number of hits by the hour. The algorithm had figured out how to auto-suggest Climategate when it only had a few million hits. The fact that the auto-suggest function is not working with Climategate at 10 times that number of hits does give one pause.
There is no smoking gun here, merely food for thought.
When I type in “climatega” or “climategate”, Google auto-suggests
“climate guatamala.” Either Google can’t spell or they think I can’t type.
I think Bob might have struck on something in his post on Talking about the weather.
“Ok, some people believe “climategate” surpassed “global warming”. Take a look at this link:
http://google.com/trends?q=climategate,+global+warming,+al+gore
You can see “climategate” is a blink in the rader, even if it surpasses “al gore”. It does however also report “climategate does not have enough search volume for ranking” which seems to indicate that the index hasn’t made it a “real term” yet.”
This definitely seems like a plausible reason. It doesn’t explain why it has popped in and out the way it has, but it does explain why it doesn’t come up in auto suggest yet. My speculation is that there are multiple algorithms in place, when a hot term pops up it gets added and then removed again when the longer term algorithm kicks in. Basically, to keep current they have a short term filter, after a few days it kicks over to the long term filter (typical news cycle for trendy stories is typically only a few days). Since this is a new term, it doesn’t register on the long term filter yet.
Just a thought.
Brian B (06:22:32) :
Not sure if anyone else is aware, but Al Gore is involved with Google…
http://www.generationim.com/about/team/gore.html
Google-gate may have some legs after all. And I think I’ve found an Google-Gore links somewhere besides Generation Investment…
Try Kleiner Perkins
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/energy-environment/03gore.html
News stories of 2010. Last summer Joe Romm commented that we may be near having the last Winter Olympic games ever. No snow and not cold enough. whistler has 18 feet of snow at the end of November breakin the old alltime record by 19%. 18 feet deep is a lot 3 weeks before winter.
When we google, we forget false forcasts. I will look to see who forcasted record snow. I suspect no one. They have their math models cramked up to the “hot” setting.
Precipition is condensation of water. The physics behind it tells us it takes energy out of the air.
Whistler is inland from the Japanese current. This is curent events. The media will talk about 2050 weather when current recordings don’t fit the scheme.
Google-gate must be tracked also. There is a lot of disinformation by googling.
The IPCC to investigate Climategate emails?
That’s like asking Bernie Madeoff to investigate Bear Stearns.
Yo, the Market ok down there? Great. Listen, I gotta run. See ya.
Good luck with that.
I’m not sure if I’m searching wrong, but I only get 13,800,000 results from Google for “climategate” and 12,000,000 for “global warming.” How are people getting over 100 million results?
The president of Google was at the White House yesterday for the “Jobs Conference,” along with union leaders and other supporters of Obama’s agenda. The US Chamber of Commerce and others who are in disagreemant with the administration, but could contribute a lot to the the understanding of the country’s economic problems, were not.
There is a self serving cozinesss between Google and the administration. Google has problems in the anti-trust arena and wants help on copyright issues. They probably don’t need any prompting to tamp down on the climategate story, especially when Google would be meeting with Obama.
Capn Jack Walker
Sorry mate I don’t understand what you mean. I’m truly interested in your view. Are you suggesting that Howard wanted the ETS?
If he did why didn’t he just push it through when he was in power?
@ joshua corning (00:16:49) :
Googles searches as well as thier auto-fill function i assume are based on very complex proprietary algorithms. ……
But the most important thing people shoudl relize is that google’s alogrithms are as i mentions and highlighted about PROPRIETARY. …..they do not want the general public knowing how their code works simply because they have spent millions of dollars and years developing it.
Everything Ambler found looks exactly like how a company should look if they are trying to protect how their systems work from out side competing eyes.
————————————–
I’m struggling to understand this.
We (google) want people to come to us because our auto-fill function is so good. But because we don’t wan’t anyone figuring out how it works, we make sure it’s not good.
Hunh? But then I’m from Crete and all Cretans are liars.
Wierd… if i type the letters “cli” into Google search, the term Climategate shows up as the 5th choice. If I continue past that point typing each letter in the term Climategate till the end, it never shows up as an option again…
Total entried for the full term is now above 30 million.
I just tried “climategate” [no quotes, all lower case] in Google search, that returned the suggestion “climate Guatemala” . Go figure.
Absolutely priceless!
Just watched a mini-debate between Prof Watson (in the UK) and Marc Morano (via satellite from the US), on BBC’s Newsnight programme.
It was rather annoying that the BBC interview allowed Watson the first and last comments, with all of his ranting about the personal attacks used by the “deniers” and no response on the substantive issues. He started to get rattled and told Morano to “shut up” at one point.
However, the real gem was at the very end, as the debate finished, and Watson must have thought that his microphone was switched off, as he clearly uttered the words
“What an arsehole…”
What a classic!
No doubt that will be edited out of the iPlayer version.
I have the download from iPlayer – and yes, Professor Watson, who is so concerned about personal character assassinations of the alarmist scientists does clearly say of Morano “What an arsehole” at the end of the interview.
I had not seen the preceding content of this programme, which had a piece by Susan Watts, full of the usual freak weather video content, but I have it now, and will post on YT later today (when I have edited out the non Climategate stuff).
It was notable, as always for the selective bias displayed by the BBC, as the Rex Murphy CBC piece was shown briefly (a few seconds out of nearly 4 minutes of complete annihilation of the alarmist position, as I recall).
If you not sure which side google is on then check out:
“Show Your Vote”
http://www.showyourvote.org/vote?skin=mini&bg_color=
This is a google vote on climate change…but you cant vote no!
“Your vote will be presented to world leaders at the COP15 UN climate summit in Copenhagen, telling them to seal a fair and effective climate deal.”
Just in case you have second thoughts about clicking the ‘submit’ button, then you can click on the ‘Learn’ tab and you get Al Gore will teach you like it is.
The Australian Gov broadcaster really like this story:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2009/12/04/2762044.htm
Other stories are clearly not to their liking:
http://australianconservative.com/main-site/2009/11/cru-emails-insignificant-says-abcs-faine/