Climategate: PA group demands independent investigation in Mann's research

Reading those emails where they are asking for revisions to global warming statements in order to appear more certain or more alarming reminds me of how Blair was accused of having the reports on Iraq’s WMD programme ‘sexed up’.
I’ll be interested to see if the left ever uses that terminology to discredit any of those who played politics when they were supposed to be doing scientific research.
Cheers
Michael

Mann is like manna to PSU. Why would they want to disturb such a capable rainmaker in the meteorology dept?

Yes, an outside investigation is warranted.
The Commonwealth Foundation is to be commended for spearheading the effort.
The logic & reasoning for requesting the investigation is sound.
Let’s hope the Pennsilvania Legislature takes action.

In the correlation does not equal causation Pakistan blames the northern hemisphere cooling on the US. Aparently we pierced a hole in the atmosphere.
http://www.daily.pk/norway-time-hole-%E2%80%9Cleak%E2%80%9D-plunges-northern-hemisphere-into-chaos-14311/?hnbgfv

Michael Mann is not Joe Paterno. Penn State can afford to lose Mann.

Hopefully there’s enough pressure on PSU that they will see the long term value of ditching Mann if it is determined he messed around too much. I any event, if they do ditch him you can be guaranteed it will be framed as the result of a massive right wing conspiracy to punish angelic climate ‘scientists’ who are just trying to save the world from evil carbon polluters.

If the link below is correct, Mann is guilty, in the minimum, of extremely unethical behavior and a demonstrated lack of integrity. This should remove any doubt that “inverted data sets” were merely mistakes as opposed to intentional actions.
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2010/01/top-climate-scientist-accused-of-more-false-reporting.html?cid=6a00d8341c51bc53ef012876a3a04e970c

The feed back in other programs from the impact of a Con-Mann is logical.
Send Mann to check out tree rings in Siberia. Fieldtrips would help him clear his mind.

Hmm, the “Commonwealth Foundation.” Let me guess: yet another right-wing thank tank?
I’ll repeat it again: no-one who matters takes any notice of right-wing think tanks.

An excellent chronological explanation of the emails is being performed by Dr John Costella on this website:
http://www.assassinationscience.com/climategate/
Lots of references to M. Mann there. His copyright says basically: “Please distribute”

There’s already the Albany university investigation of Wei-Chyung Wang, co-author with Jones, that looks like a whitewash. W-C W was suspected of fraud (inventions of Chinese records, used to dismiss UHI concerns IIRC) by Doug Keenan who demanded an inquiry… and was then left out of said inquiry. Altogether a sordid-looking story and not a ghost that UPenn would want to haunt them I think.

Twaki (13:29:45):

“They can either do an honest and transparent investigation and save the reputation of the university or try and protect the reputation of Mann and destroy the reputation of the university. Either way Mann’s actions are in the public domain – all they can do now is clean up the mess instead of pretending it didn’t happen.”

I’m not sure you can count on an “honest and transparent” investigation, even from the state. As several have already stated, there is way too much money and reputation involved in a negative outcome. Both the university and the state must consider that if Mann is found guilty of misconduct, malfeasance or outright fraud, what their exposure is to being held liable by the government and other funding organizations for the research funds he may have misused. One might make the case that, because of a lack of proper supervision, the university was partially responsible for the misuse of funds and must repay those funds to the government or other funding organization. That could get very expensive, very quick.

John Hooper (13:38;07) – So who does matter ? Please enlighten us .

HotRod (13:25:27) :
the Commonwealth Foun dation – respectable, influential, serious? Or oil industry shills? Can an American comment for me?
Mission:
The Commonwealth Foundation is an independent, non-profit research and educational institute that develops and advances public policies based on the nation’s founding principles of limited government, economic freedom, and personal responsibility.
Values:
The Commonwealth Foundation’s research and educational efforts are firmly established on several core values that form the basis of a “civil society.” The activities of the Foundation are therefore committed to:
Respecting and protecting the lives and property of others.
Recognizing the inseparability of personal and economic freedom.
Upholding personal responsibility and accountability for one’s actions.
Challenging the general perception that government intervention is the most appropriate and most efficient means of solving societal problems.
Demonstrating the power of private institutions—both for-profit and non-profit—to create a good and civil society.
Promoting the use of economic reasoning to understand a world of scarcity, trade-offs, and the unseen consequences of governmental solutions to societal problems.
If only the U.S. government adhered to these policies.

“Lucy Skywalker (14:00:08)
It’s Pennsylvania State University, Penn State, not the University of Pennsylvania. Two different schools. We need to be careful here. Many states have two universities, similarly named. I live in Washington. We have Washington State University, in Pullman in the southeastern part of the state, and the University of Washington, in the western part, home of Eric Steig of RC and a few Climategate emails.

kadaka (14:02:38) :
Michael (13:27:55) : Wrote
“(…) I’m from Pennsylvania, and it is a conservative state. (…)
I’ve always been here, and before we can claim that in national elections we first have to cancel out Philly and Harrisburg/York. Which currently looks to be a lot easier come November. Don’t get me started on party-switching Senator Arlen Specter, whose “greenhouse gas emissions” position would qualify him as one of Al Gore’s “useful idiots.””
Spector and Philly government has always been a thorn in my side. PA does have the Amish though.

HotRod (13:25:27) :
the Commonwealth Foun dation – respectable, influential, serious? Or oil industry shills? Can an American comment for me?
Does it matter if they are oil industry shills? Seems even Rajendra Kumar Pachauri seems to fall into that category.

@ boballab (14:18:40) :
Lucy Skywalker (14:00:08) :
Just a slight nit to pick UPenn is the University of Pennsylvania which is a completely different school then PSU (Pennsylvania State University).
Penn is Ivy League. Penn State is a state-funded school.

Harold Blue Tooth (14:16:08) :
If Penn State does cut Michael Mann loose that would mean they see guilt in him. Would they be responsible to return all monies brought to the University by his name? If so they may not want to find guilt in him.
If the money goes to the department then it stays with the department. If it was specified as specifically for his own research then it stays tied to him, until revoked for fraud, willful misrepresentation, or whatever reason gets cited. At least, that’s how I presume it works.
Harold Blue Tooth (14:19:55) :
I’m not sure this request will mean anything to the Pennsylvania government.
We Pennsylvania citizens have been wondering if any requests to our state government mean anything, unless coming from a politically-powerful and/or campaign-donating group or individual.
However, do not worry about Penn State losing significant amounts of funding. Our Governor Rendell, a non-convicted former Philadelphia mayor, has now gotten table games added for the casino businesses to increase the taxes and fees the state takes in, after he successfully brought slot machine gambling and Atlantic City-style casinos to our fair state. So in no time Harrisburg will have truckloads of cash to drop on our state educational institutions, like Penn State. The glorious days of prosperity are heading our way soon!

John Hooper (13:38:07) :
Hmm, the “Commonwealth Foundation.” Let me guess: yet another right-wing thank tank?
I’ll repeat it again: no-one who matters takes any notice of right-wing think tanks.
Polly want a cracker?

Is Mann being protected?

Penn State is in Pennsylvania. The Governator of Pennsylvania is a fellar named Rendell (from Philadelphia). The senior Senator in Pennsylvania is Arlen Spector (from Philadelphia). Philadelphia wins. Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania lose. Mann declared innocent on all charges. Penn State (the state and the university) become bigger jokes. Mann despised by older and new colleagues; his contemporaries will think he walks on water till they realize its ice.

All I’m saying is the Left is playing this as a political game and wiping the floor with the Right. I mean absolutely bucketing it all over us.
It doesn’t need to refer to GreenPeace or any of the many socialist hives for support, it has not only the UN, NASA, but practically every scientific body, scientific journal, university and government in the world on its side.
It even has Hollywood.
So if you think pulling out some small time overtly right-wing lobby group as some kind of trump card, you’re kidding yourself. It’s too easy to dismiss.
They just say “oh another one of these crackpot, gun toting, redneck, creationist, oil funded, anti-health care, oil funded, friends of Dick Cheney and Haliburton” and read no further.
It doesn’t matter whether they’re right or wrong, it’s about marketing. Just ask any Brit how they feel about Tony Blair after he jumped in bed with George W Bush.
Until we have scientific bodies that can match NASA on our side, we might as well be just a bunch of 911 truthers.

What should happen is if they whitewash this they should lose their accreditation.
What will happen is something entirely different I fear.

John Hooper (17:13:30)
Until we have scientific bodies that can match NASA on our side, we might as well be just a bunch of 911 truthers.
Go have a good cry, John, then maybe you’ll feel better.

“Pennsylvania State Senate Education Committee Chairman Jeffrey Piccola has already promised Penn State that if its investigation is a whitewash, he will do one that isn’t.”
I love it. An aggressive, yet civil, “threat”.
Give ’em hell, Jeffery.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Thanks to The Commonwealth Foundation for speaking out on the need for an independent investigation of Michael Mann’s role in the global climate scandal.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel

Universities rely on external funding to expand thier programmes, Having a “star” Prof. who brings in the dollars is important to an institution. But when the “star ” is shown to have webbed feet, and has created a great deal of resentment among his peers, eventually the funders start looking for more attractive alternatives.
None of he funders wants to admit they have been conned, so expect to see a sudden slide sideways where funders will start to support new projects with a different set of objectives subtly designed to exclude the likes of Mann and has fellow travellers.
Its already started !!

All the discussion is boiled down nicely by above commenter: this issue is about the president of the United States. (Mike Mann=Obama, Obama goes way back to the creation of the Chicago Climate Exchange, so he’s not about to cave). Another commenter was kind enough to post John Daly’s rundown on Mann’s media list-he’s a special adviser to the White House. This movement exists because of 20 years of weak and greedy politicians. The next logical step is to have the 2007 Supreme Court case reversed, the 5-4 ruling that CO2 was a pollutant. Objective information was not available to the court at that time. For reasons Mike Mann and the many journals he ‘referees’ would be familiar with. This is do-able.

CLIMATEGATE
THE TRACK RECORD OVER FOUR DECADES
a.n.ditchfield
My environmental awareness was aroused in mid 1971, when I was invited to a meeting of the Club of Rome in Rio de Janeiro. It first struck me as a constructive publicity move of FIAT, the sponsor. At intervals of a few months the Club of Rome invited noted scientists and intellectuals to meetings at tourist attractions like Rio de Janeiro, with all expenses paid. They were asked to meditate about the predicament of mankind and to listen to progress reports of a team of young MIT engineers who were using a computer model to project the impact on the planet of expanding economic activity. The results of the study were stated in the 1972 book, Limits to Growth, of which some 12 million copies were printed. The launching of the book was a masterpiece by editorial standards and its contents still remain central to such thought, including that of John Holdren, science adviser of Obama.
One of the new tools used in the study was the feed-back algorithm developed by Prof. Jay Forrester, of MIT, to portray the unfolding of complex systems over long timelines. All relevant factors are displayed in elaborate flowcharts and their interplay shown in a succession of stages like snapshots, in which the end of one stage is the beginning of the next. The idea is much like that of cinema, in which the rapid display of successive photos creates the optical illusion of movement. Forrester used his feedback innovation to the study of location problems of industry (Industrial Dynamics) and to explain the decay of metropolitan cities in America (Urban Dynamics). The new effort applied Forrester’s technique to demonstrate the Club of Rome proposition that a finite planet cannot support growth of population and economic activity at the pace seen for two decades after World War II. The conclusion was ready; it needed rationalization with a computer model to give a scientific look to what was the belief of the sponsors, FIAT chairman Aurelio Peccei and the renowned scientist Alexander King.
Limits to Growth had a large number of gloomy forecasts, speculative thought as such, but not science, and time rejected their validity. The earliest of the kind, the Malthus Essay on the Principle of Population published in 1798, foretold a grim 19th century. The population of Britain, stable at 5 million until the middle of the 18th century, had grown to 8 million and was expanding at a geometrical rate, while the supply of food expanded at a lower arithmetical rate. As Malthus saw it, population was bound to collapse to a sustainable level through famine, disease and war. But during the 19th century the population of Britain became four times larger and the economy sixteen times greater, an expansion supported by the Industrial Revolution. Most Britons entered the 20th century well fed, clothed and healthy, housed in cities with good sanitation. Gone were the days of the “dark satanic mills” of the early 19th century. The technology that had expanded industrial output also provided the means to end squalor.
Malthusian thought was discredited but remained dormant until the 1968, when resurrected by Paul Erlich with his equally grim Population Bomb. This time world population was bound to collapse on a planet that was running out of arable land to feed it; he reckoned that over the next two decades hundreds of millions would die of famine. The reasoning was crude and was superseded by the more sophisticated approach of the Club of Rome that put in motion the PAT idea, a formula that summarizes the impact of human activity on the environment I = P×A×T. In words: Human Impact (I) on the environment equals the product of population (P), affluence (A): consumption per capita; and technology (T): environmental impact per unit of consumption. Population was still at the root of coming doomsday, and its impact on the planet is multiplied by growing demand for non-renewable resources (fuel and minerals) to sustain better living standards. Food scarcity was only one factor among many driving mankind to destruction.
I made three objections to the assumptions underpinning the Club of Rome study.
• Population forecasts are uncertain. What had come about in mid 20th century was the dramatic fall of mortality while fertility remained the same. I held this to be exceptional. Nothing warranted the assumption that this imbalance would persist indefinitely as projected in the study. Indeed, UN world population forecasts now show stability to be reached in the 21st century.
• Given the vast land area of the planet the idea of an excessive population is farfetched. Overcrowding is a local problem. It is evil in Calcutta and has been successfully coped with in many metropolitan cites.
• The concept of non-renewable resources was untenable. Most of the crust of the earth remains unknown. The Club of Rome assumption was that mineral reserves stated in sources like the Minerals Yearbook of the U.S, Bureau of Mines were all that remained and, given the naïve arithmetic, most would be depleted by the end of the 20th century.
Dennis Meadows, the project team leader, conceded that simplifications were made to make the World Model fit into the humble IBM 1130 computer, but these did not invalidate the axiomatic idea that a finite planet cannot support infinite growth. I challenged the axiom too. If Meadows reasoned at limits, I had equal right. I claim that all human consumption does not subtract one ounce from the mass of a planet subject to the Law of Conservation of Mass. Theoretically, everything can be recycled. The limitation is one of energy, and fusion energy reactors will make it available in practically unlimited quantities. It may be argued that we cannot count on technology not yet developed, but we must not discount it either. That is the flaw of Malthusian thought: the assumption that technological development will cease and stagnate forever at current levels.
What amazed me was the sight of the elderly sages of the Club of Rome accepting the computer printouts and graphs as sayings of a pagan oracle. To my mind they just illustrated the truth of the adage: [garbage in] = [garage out]. I know the content of the Forrester programs in the intimacy of FORTRAN statements, so I was not awed by the mathematics or by the computer of the MIT team. As an engineer, I had a professional interest in the Forrester programs because I was then engaged in location studies for large industries.
Eight weeks after the Rio de Janeiro Club of Rome meeting I traveled to New York on a business mission, after an absence of five years, and felt that I had landed on a different planet. On the ride from airport to Manhattan I was surprised by the sight of leafless trees in full summer. The cab driver explained that a pest was killing the trees and a court order had banned the use of pesticides; New Yorkers were exchanging their trees for a collection of insects. I found fleas in the subway, cockroaches in my hotel room and flies galore everywhere. I learned that the new Environmental Protection Agency, in one of its first acts, had banned the use of DDT with no scientific evidence to back the claim that it was harmful to human health. Over the previous decade the Silent Spring book of Rachel Carson had demonized it to the American public until it became politically correct to curse all chemical products used by modern farming. The anti-scientific ban was to have consequences beyond the discomfort I was experiencing. It stopped a world wide drive to eradicate malaria, as was done with polio and smallpox. Over four decades 40 to 50 million preventable deaths can be laid at the door of the promoters of this environmental cause. One of them was Alexander King, leader of the scientific team at the time of World War II that gave the world large scale availability of DDT, and the hope of eradicating insect-transmitted diseases. In his memoirs King let slip a senile remark: “my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem.”
I realized the strength of the grip of this new misanthropic attitude when I strolled down Lexington Avenue and stopped at a grocery that displayed boxes of worm-infested peaches on the sidewalk – sold at premium price! I entered for a word with the grocer. He claimed that he sold what the customers wanted: the presence of worms was taken as proof of legitimate “natural” fruit. To me it proved that fruit flies had sat on the peaches. I laughed. Someone with the wits to sell rotten peaches at high prices has the talent to sell anything at any price. I advised him to sell the grocery and move a few blocks west, to Madison Avenue, the hub of the advertising business, where he would earn a fortune as a gifted liar.
The mindset of America, and indeed of the Western world, was being shaken by a tectonic shift. For two centuries the Industrial Revolution had bestowed bounty on much of the world and was fast banishing the specter of dire want everywhere. Industrialization was fostered everywhere, and a national steel mill and national airline were emblematic of newly independent countries. Progress, once a universal aspiration, was now being challenged by contrarians of a new breed, not by the reactionaries of some failed Ancien Regime, of which the world still has plenty. The picturesque hippies of San Francisco who rejected progress and aspired to a life of idleness and poverty were only an echo of a wider movement that was engulfing the academic sphere and especially social studies. It was postmodern doctrine with its rejection of science, progress and of rational thought itself.
Prof. Alan Sokal, a physicist of New York University saw through it and concluded that there ain’t no thing called a social science. Anything goes, provided it is well written, scholarly-looking, in tune with the prejudices of the editor, and proved his point with publication of his paper, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. The paper would have been perceived as a hoax by an engineering student, but was published as serious in Social Text. In one statement the number PI had a value of 3.141592… because it was arbitrated by the current social context; future generations in a different context would give it another value, because all is relative. Sokal didn’t invent such postmodernist nonsense; it is supported by more than 100 references to what had been published about hard science by social “scientists”. Engineers and scientists stopped being pinup boys and were vilified as robots mindlessly herding mankind to the cliff edge. It was claimed that the higher knowledge of postmodernist government was needed to avert disaster.
During the decades dominated by Thatcher and Reagan a limit was put to the politics of envy that exploited the cynical saying that “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul”. This was laid to rest by market economy reforms that returned power to Victorian values that rewarded hard work, enterprise and ingenuity instead of political craftiness. Neither Blair nor Clinton dared tamper with reforms that worked well. The market economy was accepted all over the world because it was more efficient in meeting the needs of mankind than any alternative.
In the shadow of that time Environmentalism became a big business with a myriad of non-governmental organizations that evolved into a huge extortion racket, protected by law and supported by ample funds and publicity. With the turn of the political tide the racket is out for its own grab for power.
• Its objective is to place energy production under control of governments, and ultimately of an international body. Energy consumption would be rationed. Taxing the air you breathe will no longer be a figure of speech; it will be world wide policy to submit the acts of every human being to central control.
• Its technique is the one of the Club of Rome: rationalization with computer models to give a scientific look to what is an unproved and non provable belief: that anthropogenic global warming would end civilization (no longer attributed to overcrowding and exhausted resources). One finds the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change In the old role of the Club of Rome, with vastly expanded propaganda resources.
• Its instrument is the postmodern Precautionary Principle: where there is a deadlock in understanding, bureaucratic whim trumps science.
The instrument carries the threat of being lethal to democratic institutions. Its first notable use was ushered in by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under the tenure of Carol Browner, during the Clinton years, to implement her anti-tobacco project with the justification that second hand smoke caused cancer in non-smokers. Numerous medical studies commissioned by the Agency failed to deliver the justification. The studies had been done under the stern rules of Food and Drug Administration with double-blind reviews. Big Tobacco hired lawyers to state their case and these resorted to expert testimony of scientists – exactly what the other side did. This is litigation, not science, with the pot calling the kettle black. Carol Browner circumvented the deadlock with a legal dodge of the Precautionary Principle: “if an action or policy has suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action.” This opened the gates to endless mischief. On December 7th 2009, the day that lives in infamy, Obama decreed that carbon dioxide a pollutant dangerous to health, when it is the nutrient that sustains the food chain of all that lives on the planet. EPA rulings, not acts of Congress, are now the law of the land. America was turned into a Bobama Republic ruled by decree. Carol Browner is now energy adviser to Obama, not for her knowledge of the field but for her expertise in chicanery. Her achievement in the field was banning the drilling for oil on the continental shelf of Florida.
At the Copenhagen Climate Conference Hugo Chavez blamed global warming on capitalism and got a standing ovation from delegates of 191 sovereign states. Evo Morales blames Americans for the summer floods of Bolivia. They have the support of the Castro brothers, Amhadinejad, Kim Jong-il and of Osama Bin Laden. With friends like these, does Obama really need enemies?
In November 2009, three thousand documents with FORTRAN source codes and one thousand private e-mails were placed in the public domain, revealing peer-reviewed climate science as a joke on which rests the proposed expenditure of trillions of dollars. Climategate may come to rank with the climacteric events of World War II, as an event that changed the course of world history.

Smokey (21:55:19) :
“It should always be remembered that the pejorative term “right wing” refers to the largest fraction of Americans….(etc.)”
__________________
And here I thought I was all alone on this planet. You bring tears to my eyes. I wonder if there are any more of our species. When we move on to the great beyond look me up and I’ll buy you a heavenly beer.

“Pennsylvania State Senate Education Committee Chairman Jeffrey Piccola has already promised Penn State that if its investigation is a whitewash, he will do one that isn’t.”
“promised”…..really? Are skeptics still this naive?
The likelihood of “any” investigation concluding anything substantive is nil. With millions of dollars at stake, and the political power of the University, they can control any state Legislative commission. “Hand-picked” lackys will simply sustain the current AGW response with: Nothing to see here…move along.
Like painting over rust.

” Gilbert (19:16:59) :
John Hooper (13:38:07) :
I’ll repeat it again: no-one who matters takes any notice of right-wing think tanks.
The epitome of arrogance..”
Jeezuz, it’s no wonder we get called “denialists.”
We don’t have to win over the far-right. We have to win over the moderate left and right. And we won’t do that by recruiting the far-right any more than you’re won over by Chavez, Chomsky, Moore or the International Socialists.
We are on a licking to nothing in this campaign, and the last thing we need is for the one site that isn’t tarnished by connections to dodgy “greed is great” lobby groups to recruit the jeering masses of GOP fanboys, who’ll instantly alienate us from the moderate left we need to win over.
If you think ClimateGate is a coup, perhaps you need to look at the likes of Exxon Secrets, anything by Monbiot, Wikipedia, etc etc etc. Reams and reams of dirt on every pundit we put forward. Oh no, you don’t like it, it’s all so Left-wing. Well sneer you may. Go into denial, as they say. It won’t win us this campaign by sticking our collective heads in the sand. No one is listening.
Heck we don’t even have the Skeptics on our side:
http://www.skepdic.com/climatedeniers.html
So if we want to challenge Al Gore, every Government in the world, every national scientific body in the World and the appearance of a “scientific consensus”, we have to push them to the far left and place ourselves as the moderate center.
Otherwise we just look like loonies. And last time I looked that’s what we’re being called in all but the most tabloid press.
The fact is most journalists lean left, and they always will. You might not like it, but this is what we have to work with it. We must win them over, not alienate them. And the surest way to lose credibility is to rely on right-wing think tanks for support.
As far as they’re concerned right-wing think tanks represent mankind at its most selfish and greedy. Irrespective of how you see it. Google me wrong.

John Hooper (09:21:56) :
This time you make more sense, to me at least (before this one, I agreed with replies to you). But IMO this is a battle in the soul – and will be won in that arena first. Your soul. My soul. Everything else then follows like Spring follows Winter.
I’ve deliberately used the word “soul” though this is a matter of Science and fraud and being governed by too many crooks who are all in each others’ pockets. But you see how Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre have done work that has gained momentum, gained traction. How? They are communicators who value their intuitive sense of integrity enough to follow it wherever it leads- and because people care about integrity, deep down. But it takes time. And it takes a lot of schooling in courtesy all round. Why don’t you go and help Jeffrey Piccola to make his promise work? How about it? The two of you, might start to give weight…

Hi Anthony,
It’s encouraging to read this news. My associate, Kent Clizne and me recently drew media and Internet attention to Michael Mann’s role in the Climategate scandal with our audacious offer to Mann’s co-workers of a multi-million dollar whistleblower package to include the assistance of America’s leading attorney in the field and our commitment to maintain their absolute anonymity and any other support we can offer.
But a new and perhaps more important initiative we are running desperately requires expert help from volunteers to help me in our investigation of the facts behind the dropping of 806 ‘cold’ ground weather stations in one year from the GHCN data set.
I’m currently in correspondence with Britain’s Climate Minister, Joan Ruddock and I’m pressing her to come clean about the widely unreported dropping of these 806 ‘cold’ weather stations as first reported by ChiefIO
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/thermometer-langoliers-lunch-2005-vs-2008/
So far, with the help of readers on our site, http://www.climategate.com we’ve painstakingly gone through part of that long list checking into the details of the dropped stations – particularly their location – whether rural or urban and thus likely to be contaminated by the urban heat island (UHI) effect.
You may well have guessed that what we’re finding so far from the few stations we’ve analysed is a trend that its mostly rural stations that have been dropped e.g. the dropped Australian and New Zealand stations are mostly rural (e.g. Port Nelson, Ruttan Lake, Joutel). Our readers successfully determined that the station count for the U.S. (in the GHCN v2_mean file) dropped from 1177 to 136 in April 2006. We were able to confirm this by importing the data and by doing a simple count of all station ID’s beginning with “425″ for the year 2006. Replication is straightforward apparently ( I’m no stats man -my contribution is as volunteer writer and legal commentator). I’m told this is a trivial task for any application developer to write the code to import this data and then analyse it. The most significant observation we have noted is that most of the stations left in the U.S. are airports (for the years 2006 and going forward- that’s a clear UHI type contamination in itself).
What we desperately need is help from other volunteers to complete our task of checking all 806 dropped stations. I want to be able to press the case confidently against the UK Climate Minister as soon as practicable to shame and blame the guilty and to lobby hard for a re-think of the culture of closed-door science and research.
If there is anything anyone can offer I would be extremely grateful. For more info and to read a copy of my latest letter to the Minister please see:
http://www.climategate.com/allow-me-to-correct-you-uk-climate-minister-joan-ruddock
All the best and keep up the great work!
John O’Sullivan

John Hooper:
Do you participate in any sport? If so, you must be a permanent member of the also-ran set.
In Australia we recently caused such an uproar over a proposed Emission Trading Scheme that the Government lost the vote in the Senate. The opposition leader lost his post because, as a former Goldman Sachs man, he supported the legislation. We melted their phones and faxes and jammed their email boxes. We, the people, were bluddy angry that they wanted to foist this huge redistributive tax (read electoral slush fund) on us.
Don’t whinge, fight. If you already think you’ve lost, then you certainly have.

And as a rider to my previous post, It is interesting to note that the CRU funders’ list was not fully exhaustive. I’m sure many people would like to see the full list, all entirely above board I’m sure.