By Chris Horner, ATI
Michael Mann made his way back to the Commonwealth of Virginia yesterday to watch his U.S. lawyer reprise the dark conspiracy theories previously weaved throughout his Canadian lawsuit against Tim Ball for repeating the old joke about “belong[ing] in the State Pen, not Penn State”.
The forum was a hearing in the American Tradition Institute’s Freedom of Information Act (VA) case against the University of Virginia (UVa) for certain records sent to or from Mann accounts while he was at UVa. That period is when the chatter about deleting records to circumvent FOI laws and other wagon-circling took place among the self-appointed “Hockey Team”.
That sort of paranoia sounded even worse in the spoken word that it reads in a brief. The judge gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head when my colleague David Schnare wondered aloud, when his turn came, about responding to all of the ad hominem. Enough already, this gesture seemed to say.
The Court allowed Mann to enter as an intervenor in this dispute, from the bench and without explanation. So there’s little we can offer there except that, when all is considered, this does provide the Court with the path of fewest problems (though hardly none, if Mann’s record in pleadings and argument is any basis to judge by; possibly some allies will try and delay matters yet again when we next proceed).
Given Mann’s argument was almost entirely limited to a vast right-wing conspiracy if one involving some names I’d never even heard of and in an apparently studious avoidance of the applicable law, we can only surmise the rationale for this move was grounded in equities found elsewhere than that curious display.
ATI opposed Mann’s motion to intervene simply because he offered no principled basis to intervene. We will appeal therefore with an eye toward settling the question as to what rights, or other considerations, justify a faculty member’s intervention in a FOIA case. For now we welcome Mann to this case to defend the content of his emails in a public forum. Presumably, just more conspiracy theorizing won’t suffice anymore.
We then proceeded to UVa’s effort to reopen the Protective Order, seeking to substitute themselves for us as the party reviewing and selecting exemplar emails from the cache they now admit to possessing. That it would be reopened was pro forma after Mann was deemed to have interests at stake, if what these interests are was left unstated.
The Court noted the distrust between the parties, particularly ours of UVa after all of what they have done, and so did not allow UVA to assume that role. This was despite that in advance they and Mann had agreed to jointly stipulate to this (his lawyer’s rather odd, earlier argument notwithstanding, see below).
But, as we argued, UVa’s utterly terrible record on this matter does not inspire confidence that a fair review and representative sample is to be had from them. Their ill-fit for the newly adopted pose of independent arbiter is somewhat betrayed by their legal bills fighting the AG’s Civil Investigative Demand now heading toward a million dollars. Then there is the enormous pressure from their faculty and pressure groups — which they finally copped to, after arguing previously in pleadings that this was all in our heads. Speaking of its track record.
And, finally, UVa has essentially the same interest as Mann at stake and is no more a suitable arbiter than Mann himself (per Mann, that’s “embarrassment”). To say UVa is aggressively focused on limiting the damage of what occurred in its program, with still not a finger toward self-policing lifted to date, is also something of an understatement.
So we have until a scheduled December 20 hearing to agree to a third party reviewer, cost and methodology. If we cannot agree the court will impose a process.
Toward that end, Mann’s attorney informed the Court that, well, Mann is the only person on the planet capable of understanding the content and meaning of emails he sent and received, thereby not only raising questions about his correspondents but making his future objections as to reviewers something less than entirely relevant or credible.
Cost is to be split at worst three ways, one presumes. Mann is surely going to be raising money for this. So, we won’t be shy, either. We can’t match the cool million the University of Virginia is pouring into their effort to make the embarrassment the revelations in ClimateGate emails to and from Mann’s UVa accounts has caused them go away. But every little bit helps.
Can you take Mann’s deposition?
Finding a suitable third party would seem to be a challenge. I imagine that UVA will object to anyone who has ever purchased gasoline for their car as having “ties to the oil industry”.
“Mann is the only person on the planet capable of understanding the content and meaning of emails he sent and received”
emails he sent cannot be understood by the people they were intended for?
People sending him emails did not know what they were telling him?
I think the judge is being wise. Had he ruled that Mann had no standing to intervene, Mann likely would have appealed and would have sought an injunction to prevent the release of the emails to the referee (who ever that might be). Mann’s argument at appeal would likely be some broad argument about speech, property rights and privacy — none of which would advance our understanding of his conduct. And, this would have delayed things.
All the judge has really done is to allow Mann to sit in the big boy chair and watch the proceedings. If Mann objects to the release of any specific email, he will need to make his case before the judge as to why that specific email should not be released. This will force him to describe what things like ‘hide the decline’ mean, under oath and with specificity. These sorts of arguments will advance our understanding of his conduct.
One million dollars and counting… this could get pricey.
Will the MannGassers stop at nothing to prevent the truth from coming out?
How about Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen????
He has the credentials and hopefully the knowledge. He is also retired so he does not have to worry about retaliation.
Delays on delays , I wonder is there a clock being run down somewhere ?
“Mann is the only person on the planet capable of understanding the content and meaning of emails he sent and received”
That’s exactly what I thought about his statistical methods when I tried to comprehend how he processed data in MBH 98. Thank god for Steve McIntyre.
The third party reviewer will have exactly what power? A tie breaking vote? Or authority/expert decision maker status?
John
This is hilarious. Chris Horner appears to have not noticed a host of very interesting things that came out of the filings.
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/scientific_integrity/ATI-UVA-support-memorandum.pdf
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/scientific_integrity/ATI-UVA-Kast-affidavit.pdf
For instance, Horner didn’t mention that:
– his co-counsel (David Schnare) was revealed to be somewhat ‘economical’ with the truth that he was (until the end of September) actually an EPA employee
– that he had never been granted ‘permission to engage in outside activity’ to work for ATI (required of all civil servants).
– that an application he claims to have prepared to ask for that permission (to work for ATI) was strangely dated Nov 16 2010 – before ATI even existed as an entity.
– that, even if this was indeed the real date of it’s preparation, it specifically stated that no litigation for ATI would be performed.
– that Horner, Schnare and Bob Marshall were widely quoted in public as wanting to break the confidentiality portion of the consent decree
It might therefore come as no surprise that the judge was minded to agree with UVa that the existing consent decree (that assumed a degree of integrity and professionalism on the part of Horner and Schnare) needed to be reopened.
The irony is that while ATI is suing NASA to get Hansen’s ‘permission to engage in outside activity’ forms, its own counsel was guilty of what ATI is accusing Hansen of.
Like I said, hilarious!
KnR says:
November 2, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Delays on delays , I wonder is there a clock being run down somewhere ?
I would hazard a guess that the delay MUST be until after the Durban conference. The potential of Durban being upstaged in the same way Climategate upstaged Copenhagen is probably the stuff of AGW nightmares.
A conviction would set an interesting precedent –
Will every Canadian who uses that wordplay in the future go into the locker? Attention, Canadians: You can sell them oil, but don’t crack jokes about them.
FredT says:
November 2, 2011 at 12:38 pm
“- his co-counsel (David Schnare) was revealed to be somewhat ‘economical’ with the truth that he was (until the end of September) actually an EPA employee”
“The irony is that while ATI is suing NASA to get Hansen’s ‘permission to engage in outside activity’ forms, its own counsel was guilty of what ATI is accusing Hansen of. ”
You are right; Hansen should immediately resign. (From your words I take it that Schnare no longer works for EPA)
I did notice a dimming of the collective IQ in these parts. Reading this explains it. Mann was back!
The solution to Soviet Russia did not come through Russian courts, and the solution to Gaian America will not come through American courts.
The Soviet Empire collapsed when it couldn’t afford to maintain all of its imperial mechanisms.
Now we’re starting to see the similar collapse of the Gaian Empire in both EU and US, as debts and depression make it more and more difficult to sustain the imperial mechanisms of subsidies and regulations.
That’s how it ends. Not with the bang of a gavel but with the long fading hiss of a popped balloon.
What’s to hide?
FredT – interesting stuff – for the easily and pointlessly distracted I assume – but my understanding is that this is about members of the public gaining FOI access to material that was generated by means of public funds. Should be pretty straightforward. It should be openly available as a matter of course. An independent observer – they are rare admittedly – would be hard pressed to understand why this is such a big deal, and might be inclined to suspect that Mann has good reason to be fighting this so desperately, ie that there might be a skeleton or two in this dark closet. Declaration of interest: my only interest is the truth . .
FredT,
Wow, I didn’t know that the Virginia Freedom of Information Act “deals in significant part with the policies, programs or operations of EPA”. Will wonders never cease?
The issue in court was whether Schnare and Horner could be trusted. The ruling for UVa indicates that the judge agreed they could not.
The evidence indicating that Schnare had misled the court and UVa was pretty solid, regardless of its wider importance (or not). I would suggest that rather than taking me on, you ask why ATI gave so many unnecessary legal openings to the UVa legal team. If you thought that Horner and Schnare would be your champions, they have rather let you down…
After being hammered for three hours by Mr. Mann’s attorney and the University attorney, I still have my sense of humor. I think the Judge lost his after the first 15 minutes of salacious harangue. Much like I did in court, I simply won’t respond to the baseless ad hominem attacks. I did so in an affidavit and that was good enough for the judge. Funny the UCS didn’t link to that. I’m not going to either. It is just silly noise. Suffice it to say that, as explained below, they had to attack me and Chris Horner and we expected it. It does, however, reflect the old legal adage that when the law is with you, argue the law; when the facts are with you, argue the facts; and, when you have neither, attack the other side. They did and we are still standing proud.
As for the decisions, UVA lost its motion. They wanted to replace me and Chris Horner with themselves, thus allowing UVA to control what emails would be used in the legal arguments about exceptions under the Virginia FOIA. Because they had previously agreed to us picking the 50 or so emails out of the collection of about 12,000, they had no option other than to claim they had lost trust in us. This they did in an ad hominem attack that was utterly untrue. For those familiar with the Virginia code of ethics for lawyers, their attack was also unethical. As a fair man, I have to also tell you that Richard Kast, the lead attorney for UVA, was clearly uncomfortable making the attack and he said so to the judge. He claimed he had to do it because his client wanted out of the previous agreement and this was all he had to get that to happen. Poor sod. Crappy client, but that’s what lawyers have to put up with.
What did happen? The court recognized before the hearing had even begun that the trust level needed in the case had disappeared. Once all the bloviating finished, he first looked at me, knowing I would understand, and read a prepared statement that essentially was a rebuke to all of us to find a neutral third party to pull the example emails by December 20th or he would take over the entire process, most likely appointing his own third part. He was not a happy judge. In fact, when Pete Fontaine (Mann’s lawyer) rose and asked to be heard on the UVA motion the judge barked back “Why?”. After another 5 minutes of salacious attack from Fontaine everyone but Pete could see the Judge had had it. Than’s when he pulled out his previously prepared decision and let UVA (and us) have it between the eyes, essentially saying – play nice, damnit and get this case going forward!
As for Mann’s role in the case, ATI welcomes him. Among other things, Mann’s attorney cited to no words in the Constitution (citing to the wrong article in the first place while claiming a privacy right), no sections of any statute and not a single case, while claiming he had a germane interest in the matter. Because the judge did not offer any insight into what interest Mann had, on appeal Mann will have to make an actual legal argument to defend the decision below. For us lawyers, it is going to be fun to watch him make potage without a pot.
Can we depose Mann? Probably, and we might choose to do so. I’m not going to explain that at this point, but if we think it worthwhile, we will. If you have any questions you want asked, send them to me at schnareati@gmail.com. Serious contributions only, and I humbly ask you not abuse my email address, please. Also forgive all misspellings above. Not my strong suit.
Sincerely,
David W. Schnare, Esq. Ph.D.
FredT says: November 2, 2011 at 12:38 pm
www.
ucsusa.org/assets/documents/scientific_integrity/ATI-UVA-support-memorandum.pdf
ucsusa.org/assets/documents/scientific_integrity/ATI-UVA-Kast-affidavit.pdf
Amazing that they thought that it did not matter!!
Schnare snared, Horner cornered. ATI-Gate!!
Dr. Schnare, if you welcome Mann’s participation in the lawsuit, why are you suggesting that you will appeal these decisions?
I welcome your desire to avoid ad hominem ‘noise’, but perhaps you should mention this to your co-counsel whose blog postings on this and other lawsuits consist of very little else. For instance.
And please, could you post your affadavit in response to the UVa motion? I’m sure you share my desire for open and transparent proceedings, and if the allegations made by counsel in relation to your employment at EPA and compliance with ethics guidelines are false, it would certainly be better for that to be widely known.
Best of luck David.
Beast of Traal says:
November 2, 2011 at 1:43 pm
“Amazing that they thought that it did not matter!!
Schnare snared, Horner cornered. ATI-Gate!!”
From
http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Ravenous_Bugblatter_Beast_of_Traal
“Known for its never-ending hunger and its mind boggling stupidity, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is such a stupid animal that it thinks if you can’t see it, it can’t see you.”
You might consider changing your nickname.
FredT, if you are not engaging in ad hominem, why do we see no comments regarding the substance of the matter, that of disclosure of the emails.
We objected to the decision to reserve the issue for appeal. We will appeal the intervention when all other appeals are also made. We will appeal so as to get an appellate court opinion as to what interests allow intervention in a FOIA case. This is unsettled law, and one of our missions it to address these areas of law. This is not about Mann. This is about getting in place a clean, crisp rule of law so that in the next case someone brings there won’t be any need to spend time on these kinds of preliminary issues. In this case, Mann will have to give his side of the argument in response to ours. Should be fun.
FredT – let’s wind back all the legalities here – why on Earth would you believe that the work product of a government employee is somehow exempt from FOIA?
mwhite says @ November 2, 2011 at 11:57 am
Obviously M.Mann speaks in tongues only he can understand.
I just feel sorry for the judge.
This one really takes the biscuit:-
http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/10/special-investigation-whos-behind-the-information-attacks-on-climate-scientists.html
Ironic, isn’t it, that Mann’s emails can only be understood by himself…and that he’s taking a sabbatical right now to study how Climate Science communication is failing and how to fix it. He just MIGHT be the wrong guy for the task…
No, let’s face it, the truth is that Mann’s emails are way too understable. If they were, in fact, impenetrable, why, there’d be no problems releasing them at all. It appears to me that the his lawyers have put him in a bind…
Fascinating! Best of luck David and Chris.
JEM, what do you think is the point at issue here? No parties to the case are objecting to VFOIA in principle – UVa has already delivered thousands of pages to ATI (which ATI promised to disseminate but is nowhere to be seen on their website – maybe they are too tedious). You might have got a different impression from Horner’s public statements, but they are somewhat misleading.
Instead the issue is about how one should deal with exemptions to FOIA (which exist in all FOIA legislation). UVa has asserted that there are emails which are exempt, and ATI is seeking to challenge those exemptions. The initial plan was that ATI themselves would look at everything ‘in camera’ and make arguments on the merits of each email – but that involves everyone trusting that Schnare and Horner would not somehow use or disclose the contents of exempted emails. That trust has clearly eroded, so the judge agreed that a new method (involving an independent third party and a selection of exemplar emails) will need to be negotiated. ATI clearly lost on this point.
Dr. Schnare, “This is not about Mann” – really? You are just pursuing this to improve the clarity of the law? That’s funny.
David Schnare says: November 2, 2011 at 1:41 pm
” the first 15 minutes of salacious harangue.”
???
Schnare,
You lost. Get over it. In their filing they claimed that they were willing to have a neutral third party examine the with emails which they claim to be exempt and to allow for an in camera resolution of disputes, and that appears to be what the judge approved.
The problem now appears to be for the two sides to agree to a third party. May I suggest a lawyer who expert in VFOIA and has worked for neither the UVa nor ATI or any affiliated organizations?
FredT;
Could you please come up with something of substance? You are clearly a troll trying to justify the positions of Mann and UVa and your comments are rather contrived and, frankly, boring.
The non-exempt UVA emails released by the university are on the ATI website at:
http://www.atinstitute.org/law-ctr/hosted-foia-documents/
davidmhoffer, I wish I could match your natural affinity for the language, cogentness of your argument and excitement of your comments, but alas, it is not to be. I hope you will somehow manage to get by regardless.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
November 2, 2011 at 6:17 pm
Schnare,
You lost. Get over it. In their filing they claimed that they were willing to have a neutral third party examine the with emails which they claim to be exempt and to allow for an in camera resolution of disputes, and that appears to be what the judge approved.>>>
Good lord, you think Schnare is losing? UVa fought releasing the emails in the first place, and after all kinds of shenanigans got backed into a corner. They had to agree to the release or be ordered to. So they agreed. Now they are trying to circumvent their own agreement with the same kind of shenanigans, and they are backing themselves into a corner yet again. Did you not read the judges decision? The parties will agree to a neutral 3rd party, or he’ll do it himself.
Frankly, I think that hands all the power to Schnare. Why should he bother to find a neutral 3rd party at this point? That will just go around in circles as UVa objects every time the neutral 3rd party makes a decision they don’t like. The only possible truly neutral 3rd party is going to allow the exact emails they are obviously working so hard to keep hidden. The best possible outcome for Schnare at this point is for the judge to make good on his threat and himself be the neutral third party.
Let the judge be the judge, and determine what emails should be exempt and which not.
Then let’s see Mann try and argue that the judge isn’t capable of understanding the emails. It is just oh, SO much fun when someone stands up in court and explains to a judge what the judge does and doesn’t understand! I’d pay good money to get to see it.
FredT says:
November 2, 2011 at 6:32 pm
davidmhoffer, I wish I could match your natural affinity for the language, cogentness of your argument and excitement of your comments, but alas, it is not to be. I hope you will somehow manage to get by regardless.>>>
Oh don’t worry, I will get by. Now, are you going to come up with something of substance or not?
FredT, I do not detect hilarity in your posts. More like nervous giggles.
davidmhoffer,
The reference to losing is to these two matters alone:
1) Mann as an intervenor
2) Restructuring of the protective order
ATI lost on those two points.
There are two things here which no one has commented on. The first is that Dr. Schnare is the only lawyer on the ATI side admitted to the Va Bar. The second is that the UVa complaint challenges his ability to represent ATI because he was not (properly if at all) released by the EPA to do so.
The third is that if he was not released by EPA there may be trouble on the horizon for him.
Has the court taken possession of copies of all the emails? I would be concerned that persons unknown at UVA might be quietly culling the archive of the most incriminating stuff, if such things exist.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
November 2, 2011 at 7:25 pm
davidmhoffer,
The reference to losing is to these two matters alone:
1) Mann as an intervenor
2) Restructuring of the protective order
ATI lost on those two points.>>>>
Did they? UVa said they said they no longer trusted the process that they previously agreed to and proposed a new one. The judge said no to their proposed fix. He advised that if they didn’t want to go forward with the process they first agreed to, he’d allow them to use a neutral 3rd party instead, but warned them that if they couldn’t agree to a neutral 3rd party, he would do it himself.
That’s a win for UVa?
The fact is that neither said got what they asked for. The question is, who came out stronger as a result?
ATI clearly wins on the second of your two points.
On the first, well, I don’t know who won, but I know who lost. Mann yet again exposed his desperation to keep those emails from the public eye, and his assertion that no one but he could understand their contents is not only hilarious, it is now on the record. Can you imagine what happens now as those emails finaly come out and the notion that what they say can’t be understood by, for example, the judge himself?
In any battle, both sides take casualties. Pointing to some minor casualties on one side tells one nothing about the progress of the battle.
I haven’t seen the judge’s order yet (got a link) but it appears as though the proposal of UVa was accepted pretty much in toto. Real the first of FredT’s links. UVa appeared to be proposing a Vaughn index (as per Federal procedure) I don’t know if that was accepted. But it would seem that the neutral 3rd party was accepted. I look forward to the judge’s decision which should clear this up.
Jeff Alberts says:November 2, 2011 at 7:42 pm
…I would be concerned that persons unknown at UVA might be quietly culling the archive of the most incriminating stuff, if such things exist.
In this one statement you accuse without evidence UVa employees of illegal acts, and, without trial or evidence, manage to state that “someone” is a criminal!
Well done!
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
The fact that beings like Rattus and FredT have come rushing here to spread disinformation and some blatant lies tells us who ” lost ” it.
Venter,
I hardly think that FredT’s links to submissions to the court are “misinformation”. Like I said, I haven’t seen a link to the judge’s order yet, but it appears to include a 3rd party to review the exempt documents. Is that disinformation?
I accused no one. I merely speculated that such a thing was very possible. Way to read more into what someone types.
I would think that the court would want to maintain the integrity of the evidence in this case. Would you let an accused car thief keep possession of the car until the trial is over?
davidmhoffer says:
November 2, 2011 at 6:25 pm
David is right. In this whole mess I’m trying to figure which is worse–Mann or the UVa, the UVa or Mann.
I haven’t been able to decide which! It simply boggles the mind–does the UVa wonder why their alumni aren’t too proud of that once-great institution? They probably don’t know and they don’t care, having cast their lot in with Mann (hence no difference in the two). And Mann’s only defense is that nobody can, should or will understand him.
Wow! (Replace Josh’s recent cartoon of Muller beaten up yet smiling with Mann and replace Curry with the judge. The UVa is in Mann’s hind pocket.)
John Majikthise says:
November 2, 2011 at 8:38 pm
It all went out the window as UVa spent $1,000,000 in taxpayer money to thwart the legal process. That’s what happened.
Besides, it wouldn’t be out of line to “be concerned” (that’s the quote–he didn’t state they had), but I’m in league with Jeff–I’m very concerned, too! And so should everybody based on UVa’s past behavior (do you think the university regents will look kindly on $1,000,000 spent tilting at windmills when they could have just obeyed the law?)
I find it very difficult to believe that a reasonable person would not find it very questionable to believe that Mann and UVA don’t have something very dark to hide considering the expense of monies and credibility being spent to keep results of publicly funded research from the public. It all needs to be made public now. UVA is throwing itself under its own bus. UVA’s decision makers need to wake up. Something is very wrong here.
“JEM says: November 2, 2011 at 3:36 pm
“FredT – let’s wind back all the legalities here – why on Earth would you believe that the work product of a government employee is somehow exempt from FOIA?”
Well, it seems the ATI case may itself be the work product of a government employee. From UVA’s court submission:
“It is clear from the letter sent by the EPA’s Senior Counsel for Ethics, see Aff. Exhibit 26 (EPA letter), that Dr. Schnare was a full-time attorney at the EPA throughout the course of this litigation until September 30, 2011, thet he was required to obtain written authorization for any outside legal activities, and that he failed to obtain such authorization. The EPA letter suggests Dr. Schnare may even have fabricated the memorandum attached to its letter.”
This has been pointed out before, but not one armchair critic at WUWT or anywhere else is remotely interested in asking ATI to post this material online, which ATI is absolutely free to do. They’ve had it for months. (And no, this is not the embargoed documents – they really are free to disseminate the 3000+ pages of Mannian documents they received from UVA a few months ago)
This isn’t about transparency, FOI or whatever. All they want is to slay a dragon. There’s no principles involved, and it’s nauseating that they lean on principle to pursue their rabid desire.
For the record, I’ve contacted ATI twice to release the documents they have and are permitted to make public.
John Majikthise says:
November 2, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Jeff Alberts says:November 2, 2011 at 7:42 pm
…I would be concerned that persons unknown at UVA might be quietly culling the archive of the most incriminating stuff, if such things exist.
In this one statement you accuse without evidence UVa employees of illegal acts, and, without trial or evidence, manage to state that “someone” is a criminal!
Well done!
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Hundreds of thousands of men and women have been proven guilty in thousands of criminal courts under what is termed “circumstantial evidence.”
Method.
Means.
Motive.
Opportunity.
Add to those above
(A lack of) Morals.
Madness. (Extreme prejudice towards doing the action, and extreme hatred of those who will be harmed by the action.)
Money.
Morale.
(How many worldwide TV audiences would it take to elevate YOUR self-esteem and YOUR sense of accomplishment and glory and self-worth? Would YOU lie or exaggerate to get in front of a fawning international TV and movie press at numerous world-renowned climate gatherings? People who have come from across the world to hear YOUR favored theories of a dawning future YOU can change if YOU given control?
Would YOU lie or hide your errors if YOU were going to proved a lying fraud who fakes data and exaggerates the knowledge everybody is now applauding you for?
(How many tens of billions does it take to influence a “climate scientist” and his Department Head into hiding their errors and getting more grant money? Mann claims a paltry $250,000.00 twenty years ago will pollute every skeptics’ arguments against his dogma of CAGW. Clearly then, 79 billion will be able to corrupt the Mann-made CAGW theists! )
A very brave whistleblower released the email gathered in one directory (prior to deliberate deletion?) to fight innocent, well-meaning FOIA (English-version) requests at CRU in Nov 2009. We have seen through their own words in their own emails that all of the above have been committed by “the Team” – strongly pal-revered” cabal of like-minded amoral individuals who recommended to each other that they delete emails, remove evidence, hide evidence, and write cross-stories to thwart FOIA inquiries.
Do you need more evidence of their willingness to apply those (VERY PROFITABLE!) illegal methods again?
Great victory for an individual’s right to privacy.
Why an individual should not be involved in the disposition of his correspondence I do not know. Nor why a group supposedly devoted to liberty shoud try to prevent it.
The agenda of ATI is well undersood – find portions of e-mails that can be discreetly and selectively leaked to attack Professor Mann’s character. Legalised e-mail hacking , in fact. Sound familiar?
barry;
This has been pointed out before, but not one armchair critic at WUWT or anywhere else is remotely interested in asking ATI to post this material online, which ATI is absolutely free to do. They’ve had it for months. (And no, this is not the embargoed documents – they really are free to disseminate the 3000+ pages of Mannian documents they received from UVA a few months ago)
For the record, I’ve contacted ATI twice to release the documents they have and are permitted to make public.>>>
WHICH THEY HAVE POSTED ON THEIR SITE AND YOU WILL FIND A LINK TO SAME UPTHREAD.
Toby;
Why an individual should not be involved in the disposition of his correspondence I do not know>>>
Because it isn’t his. He was paid to work, and his work is property of his empoloyer.
This is, of course, all displacement activity, as you know perfectly well that what you call the ‘hockey stick’ is an accurate representation of the state of the climate, well corroborated by other independent lines of research.
Otherwise, you’d be out there analysing the data and reporting your results. Wouldn’t you?
BTW, I’m surprised a lawyer uses the word ‘salacious’ without knowing what it means.
I tried to donate to the ATI fund but as a UK citizen the Zip code is alphanumeric whereas the donation page only allows numeric only and you can’t not enter a zip code, so I’ll have to hang on to my £15 for now
D. W. Schnare — November 2, 2011 at 6:26 pm
“The non-exempt UVA emails released by the university are on the ATI website at:..”
David Schnare — November 2, 2011 at 1:41 pm
“Much like I did in court, I simply won’t respond to the baseless ad hominem attacks. I did so in an affidavit and that was good enough for the judge. Funny the UCS didn’t link to that. I’m not going to either. It is just silly noise.”
Ah, go to great lengths to read someone else’s correspondence, criticise another party for not showing your response to their criticism, but cry off with feeble excuses when you could simply set the record straight. Very bad form.
So pleased that the money I sent to Scott Mandia has done some good. So pleased that I sent some more yesterday.
John McManus
Toby funny how the ‘individual’s right to privacy’ was of no interest when it was Greenpeace that came knocking at UVa for another person e-mails , guess that was ‘different ‘
Meanwhile all this messing around is merely making things worse for UVa’s rep , who now would believe they don’t have something to hide even if they release the e-mails .
schumpeter what ever your day job is don’t give it up becasue you no chance of making any money in comedy .
John McManus,
A fool and his money are soon parted. Keep sending your $$$ to Clown Mandia. Everyone will be happy, including me.
davidmhoffer says:
November 3, 2011 at 2:02 am
…WHICH THEY HAVE POSTED ON THEIR SITE AND YOU WILL FIND A LINK TO SAME UPTHREAD.
Wouldn’t it have been the decent thing to remove peoples private email addresses and phone numbers from the published documents.
Even the stolen CRU emails were sanitised in that way.
This seems a gross breach of ethics to me. Despicable (or incompetent).
JJT
KnR says: November 3, 2011 at 4:55 am
“Toby funny how the ‘individual’s right to privacy’ was of no interest when it was Greenpeace that came knocking at UVa for another person e-mails , guess that was ‘different ‘”
As I recall Greenpeace failed to get ANY information. were do you get you warped information?
http://www.virginia.edu/foia/climatechange/
Q: Did U.Va. give Michaels’ emails to Greenpeace?
A. No. After a series of emails and narrowing of the group’s request to reduce its costs, and a letter confirming what the amount of those costs would be, U.Va. heard nothing more from Greenpeace.
JJT
Dear Chris and your team,
I make a great independent third party, and I’ll be glad to go through the stash of emails for y’all!! I work cheap–all I need is a month’s supply of beer and popcorn, and I’ll have those non-exempt messages winging the judge’s way.
JJThoms says: November 3, 2011 at 5:46 am
As I recall Greenpeace failed to get ANY information. were do you get you warped information?
Nice try, JJ, but why is it warmist trolls like yourself feel the need to twist and spin everything? Greenpeace didn’t get the Michaels e-mails because they dropped the request immediatiately after Cuccinelli demanded the Mann e-mails. The university was prepared to hand over Dr. Michaels e-mails as soon as Greenpeace had paid a very modest processing fee.
Mann has introduced in court the claim that only he can understand the meaning of his emails or the emails he received. For those who are supporting Mann, I have one question: What if he is serious? My answer to that question is that he believes that words mean only what he makes them mean and nothing else. Need I say more?
@Theo Goodwin – Ah! The Bill Clinton defense!
“John Majikthise says:
November 2, 2011 at 8:38 pm
“Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”
That concept only holds in court, not outside court. Outside court, people have the right (and sometimes responsibility) to make whatever decision regarding guilt or innocence they choose. Or, another way of looking at it, they have been “proven guilty” in that person’s mind. That doesn’t mean the “verdict” is correct or is even based on fact.
Although I agree with your distaste for hurling accusations and coming to premature conclusions, in the real world (outside of court), people don’t require a court to decide everything for them. I am reminded of a recent article (wish I could find it) where someone was essentially arguing that a person shouldn’t be allowed to shoot someone trying to rape them because they hadn’t yet been found guilty of attempted rape. There is, and needs to be, a middle ground.
What will $1,000,000 buy these days? Only a shrunken, crusty glove that doesn’t fit… It seems. GK
I tried to access the emails as sugested above but no luck. Sometimes a buch of code came up, once I got one rather banal email read and then my screen went back to gibberish and sometimes it just works away until my computer gives up and locks up.
Is anyboby else having this problem. If not I suspect my computer .
John McManus
David Schnare,
Based on some comments above (Jeff Alberts says: November 2, 2011 at 9:07 pm) about concerns of maintaining the integrity of evidence, is all the UVA info in contention held or protected by the court at this time?
John
From Theo Goodwin on November 3, 2011 at 7:03 am:
So Mann sends out messages only he can understand, while receiving messages that even those who sent them can’t understand?
Heh, sounds like passing messages along in a revolutionary/terrorist cell network, as if Mann was part of some sort of conspiracy… Oh wait. Never mind.
Schumpeter
” as you know perfectly well that what you call the ‘hockey stick’ is an accurate representation of the state of the climate, well corroborated by other independent lines of research.”
No it’s not.
Reading the emails. The one from Caspar Ammann about geologists is hilarious.
Hmm, Can’t copy the text.
Toby says:
November 3, 2011 at 1:19 am
Heck no! Release the whole kit and kaboodle. Besides, neither Mann nor the UVa get to select what gets released, so I’d say Mann showing up and getting slapped in the face is no “Great victory” at all!
You’re asserting Mann’s “individual right to privacy’ applies to his work. But NOT when he’s working for a public university paid by taxpayers. Clue: He wasn’t working for a private company or university, and even if he were, if he’s getting government grants he should be completely open about it. He’s certainly open (and forceful) about his “results”.
And ATI isn’t planning on “leaking” anything–they’re not some Climategate thug delving into the secret nooks and crannies of the e-mail server. I say let’s see the entire record and determine whether Mann’s communications are supposedly so incomprehensible the content is known only to him! Sound similar to his “hokey stick” statistics? (Spelled “hokey” on purpose.)
Absolutely laughable!
TG, k, and others: “Mann has introduced in court the claim that only he can understand…”
I presume that is based on “Toward that end, Mann’s attorney informed the Court that, well, Mann is the only person on the planet capable of understanding the content and meaning of emails he sent and received”.
Those aren’t Mann’s words, those are by Chris Horner. What did Mann *actually say* that is being interpreted by CH?
UVa responded to Greenpeace exactly as they responded to ATI, in other words, send us a check to cover our costs and we will send you what we think is FOIA responsive. Eli thoroughly approved of this both then and now. ATI sued for the kit an kaboodle.
John McManus says: November 3, 2011 at 7:43 am
John, I’m having the same problem. Barry, If you were able to read the documents, which were apparently posted to SCRIBD, what browser are you using?
WOW there is some wriggling being done on FOIA hook here, I cannot understand with the legal system is so slow on this, application approved, not conformed with, someone goes to the State Penn (sarc) put the (sarc) in because I do not want to be sued.
schumpeter says:
“This is, of course, all displacement activity, as you know perfectly well that what you call the ‘hockey stick’ is an accurate representation of the state of the climate, well corroborated by other independent lines of research.”
Then explain to us why Mann’s MBH98 hokey stick can no longer be published by the IPCC.
The IPCC loved Mann’s alarming hockey stick chart. It scared plenty of people and generated huge amounts of grant money. The IPCC would gladly continue using it, if it had not been completely debunked as fraudulent for cherry-picking only proxies that supported it, and hiding proxies that falisified it in an ftp file labeled “censored“. When the censored data is included, this is the result.
Mann continued his climate alarmist misinformation campaign in Mann08, when he used a known corrupted proxy – Tiljander – to produce another fraudulent paper. The Tiljander proxy was found to be upside down sediments due to road work and other construction activity that had overturned the formerly pristine lake sediments. Mann was informed of this before he published. But he published anyway, because the Tiljander proxy gave him the hockey stick chart he wanted.
schumpeter, you really need to get up to speed on Michael Mann’s scientific misconduct. Even Nature was forced to issue a Correction to MBH98. And they’re on Mann’s side.
> Mann’s MBH98 hokey stick can no longer be published by the IPCC…
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-ts-20.html
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-6-10.html
William M. Connolley says:
November 3, 2011 at 9:12 am
“What did Mann *actually say*
Dono… why don’t you or Mr Mann tell us?
However, if it came from Mr Mann’s attorney….that IS his [ Mr Mann’s ] “Mouth piece.”
Frankly, I have no sympathy for any of you involved with any sort of censorship issues… BUT especially Mr Mann and Mr Jones.
William M. Connolley is being devious as always. The confusing spaghetti graphs he linked to are poor substitutes for the very effective and alarming [but completely bogus] MBH98 graph that I specifically linked to above. The IPCC uses them because it can no longer publish Mann’s MBH98 chart, because that chart has been repeatedly and thoroughly falsified.
I’ll apologize to Connolley if he can produce an official, current IPCC document that contains Mann’s repeatedly falsified chart. Otherwise, Connolley is disseminating false climate alarmist propaganda – something he has always done, AFAIK.
> “What did Mann *actually say*… Dono… why don’t you or Mr Mann tell us?
Well, if people don’t know what Mann actually said (mwhite, Louis Hooffstetter, Robert of Ottawa, etc.), wouldn’t it be a good idea to find out before discussing it? CH is the one who brought it up, perhaps he knows exactly what Mann said. If he doesn’t know, how can he paraphrase it accurately?
> However, if it came from Mr Mann’s attorney…
The quotes here didn’t. They are from the opposing side. It is just possible that they may not have been exactly what Mann said.
> The IPCC uses them because it can no longer publish Mann’s MBH98 chart
I’ve just linked you to two graphs from the IPCC AR4 that use MBH99 (which is just an extension of MBH98). If you’re capable of seeing a pic using MBH99, but then denying that IPCC uses it, you’re lost. AR4, of course, is the current IPCC assessment report.
Smokey:
Mann produced lots of charts and lots of papers with hockey sticks rampant. So did lots of other authors. Papers and charts were published contemporaneously and republished since. That new papers appeared as data banks were added to and methods refined is surprising to no-one although alarming the anti-science crowd.
It is surprising however to see you acknowledge the spagetti graph. Don’t you see that you are admitting that hockey sticks emerge no matter what data is used or what method is employed.
Funney eh.
John McManus ( the earliest hockey sticks made here by the Miqmaq are not like the ones made in China today but they are definitly hockey stick).
Connolley can’t produce a current IPCC publication that uses Mann’s extremely effective chart. Instead, confusing spaghetti imitations are used that do not have nearly the visual impact of Mann’s bogus MBH98 chart, which the IPCC can no longer use because it has been debunked.
Connolley can game the system on Wikipedia and make it his personal climate propaganda blog. But he is impotent here on the internet’s “Best Science” site which, unlike Wikipedia, does not censor opposing points of view.
rumleyfips,
You’re deliberately evading the point: the IPCC can no longer publish Mann’s highly effective [but bogus] chart.
The spaghetti graphs are pale imitations. They are confusing and much less effective than Mann’s falsified MBH98 chart. You say:
“Don’t you see that you are admitting that hockey sticks emerge no matter what data is used or what method is employed.” FYI, hockey sticks emerge from random red noise using Mann’s algorithm. You can input baseball scores or addresses from the phone book, and a hockey stick pattern will emerge. Therefore, Mann’s algorithm is totally worthless, except as alarmist propaganda.
You and Connolley need some education:
The planet has been emerging naturally from the LIA along the same trend line [the green line]. The predictions of an alarming rise in temperature have been falsified. Global temperatures have not been accelerating.
And this hypothesis remains unfalsified: CO2 is harmless and beneficial. At current and projected concentrations, more CO2 is better.
The catastrophic AGW conjecture has been debunked by the ultimate authority: planet earth.
Smokie:
Ever play hockey? Players have taped their sticks, carved rocker into the blades, added curve etc. None of these things changed the legitimacy of the original stick.
Mann and many ( too many for some sensitive personalities) have taken Mann’s stick and rethought it. Different procedures, different information but always a hockey stick.
Just like the one Mann used to score the winning goal in 1998.
Maybe you should go the Gordie Howe’s house and tell him his career was a sham because he didn’t use a carbon fiber stick.
As ol Red Green says” Keep your stick on the ice”.
John McManus
Mann’s 1998 graph has not been “debunked” by scientists, although better temperature reconstructions have since been published by Mann as well as other teams. The newer reconstructions, especially Mann’s, are the ones cited in most current research. That’s how science works.
There are many studies now that are more detailed and accurate than one published in 1998, it would be strange if there weren’t. Mann’s basic conclusion, that recent warming exceeds that of the MCA, has held up pretty well.
As for the “spaghetti graphs” that confuse Smokey, that’s just one way to put a number of different data sets that are now available into one graph, so you see where they agree and differ. You could graph any one of them individually if you think that one is the “truth,” but it’s informative to show the variation.
“if he’s getting government grants he should be completely open about it”
That’s one aspect nobody seems to ask about, but I’ve been curious about. I get much of my funding through the National Institute of Health. In order to receive that funding, I have to sign an agreement stating who owns my work (they do), and what information and even materials I’m obligated to share with others if asked. If I don’t, and somebody complains to the NIH, I could lose my funding. It could also pose a potential problem for the University regarding funding to others, since the University is a party to that agreement.
So when it comes to transparency, I’m bound not just by federal and state law, but University policy and agreements I’ve signed with the NIH (as well as other funding organizations).
The agreements Mann has signed with government funded agencies should be available. I’ve often been curious as to what they say regarding the data he’s accumulated and who is to be provided access.
Smokie:
Please see BEST. The latest research shows more warming than CRU etc. I don’t know if getting warmer over ever diminishing time periods means deacceleration or not. Probably not.
I am confused by your repeated use of “can’t”. Why not? Are they prohibited by copywrite, has Mann asked for royalties? What. If you think they are not using it by choice then where is the compulsion implied in the word can’t?
Just to make something clear, do you think Time magazine prints a new cover every week just because they “can’t” print a picture of Junior Bush again. Do you think it may be because other stuff is interesting too?
Keep your stick on the ice:
John McManus
William M. Connolley says:
November 3, 2011 at 11:05 am
It is just possible that they may not have been exactly what Mann said.
Sorry, you are missing the point:
In open court “his [ Mr Mann’s ] attorney stated in open court that the only person “in the universe” qualified to select example emails was Mann himself. The court rejected that notion by simply ignoring it.”
http://www.atinstitute.org/press-release-ati-welcomes-michael-mann-to-the-case/
IMO, you make a Great spokesman for Mr Mann….censorship is not a big issue with either of you.
A rat, a stoat and a rabbit walk into a bar …
rumleyfips,
Did you not click on the links I provided? The WFT graph specifically falsifies the MBH98 hockey stick graph.
Mann preposterously tried to erase the MWP and the LIA, and today, thirteen years after his debunked hokey stick chart, Mann still refuses to disclose all of his data, methodologies, metadata and code [if and when Steve McIntyre says he’s satisfied with Mann’s transparency, that will be good enough for me].
The scientific method requires total transparency, so that other scientists can replicate or falsify Mann’s results. The fact that Mann hides his methods, data and code is enough to call into question every paper he has produced. Michael Mann is simply a scientific charlatan, and he will remain a charlatan until he provides full transparency regarding his taxpayer-funded work.
Q – Can I find significance from the perspective attached below?
A – Yes. Professional integrity in science does profoundly matter to individuals outside of the immediate climate science community. The matter of trust in science is involved.
John
* * * * *
In perspective wrt investigations & litigations associated with involvement of M. Mann:
– two reviews/investigations of UEA CRU by separate British groups initiated from concerns related to Climategate release info => M. Mann was broadly involved in the concerns stemming from Climated info release
– one internal PSU administration investigation of M. Mann initiated from concerns related to Climategate released info
– one internal NSF investigation of M. Mann’s activities while at UVA initiated from concerns related to Climategate released info
– [prior to Climategate released info] US Congressional Hearing related to M. Mann’s research methods. From which an academic sanction action started against the Mann/Hockey Stick critic Wegman.
– Ongoing VA Attorney General filing of requests for UVA info on M. Mann’s activities while at UVA which was initiated from concerns related to Climategate released info and fallout from the US Congressional Hearing
– Ongoing ATI court action against UVA for FOIA request for info on M. Mann’s activities while at the UVA which was initiated from concerns related to Climategate released info and fallout from the US Congressional Hearing
– Ongoing legal case initiated by M. Mann on T. Ball based on a statement by T. Ball about M. Mann’s activities related to Climategate released info and related to the results of the US Congression Hearing on M. Mann.
Ah Smokey, I see you’ve been using Girma’s techniques to hid the incline.
Smokie:
I’m thinking of changing my nom de plume to ” The Bandit”. We all know how well Smokie did in that one.
Yes I say the WFT graph. Back in th e60’s I bought a copy of “How to Lie Wiith Statistics for a course. I still have it. It didn’t take much effort to learn that the same information on different axix give different impressions. That is why Mann’s graph doesn’t falsify the WFT effort .
Lamb said 50 years ago that he thought the Mideavil Warming was not worldwide but confined to some of the land around the North Atlantic. He also took care to document cold periods in that area in the time in question. Hard to dissapear something that was never there. Or maybe easy?
I have read Mann’s data and I have read Mann’s methods. All there for all to see. Just because McIntyre is not competent to write an programme with this much material does not reflect on Mann.
NIH does not own the research results except for intramural programs. The institution, organization or company which receives the grant from NIH does. NIH does set limits and conditions on what can be done with the results of one of it’s grants, but it also allows the institution which receives the grant to patent the results (AFAER) with the condition that the US government has free use.
There are important differences btw resarch grants and contracts.
Gneiss;
Mann’s 1998 graph has not been “debunked” by scientists>>>
How is demonstrating before a congressional committee, that no matter what data set Mann’s computer program analyzed, that it came up with the same graph, not debunking it? How is demonstrating that the code combs through the data and assigns an increased weight to hockey stick data and a lower weight to “non” hockey stick data, not debunking it? How is showing that his subsequent 1000 year reconstruction was constructed from just 7 trees to represent the entire globe, and of these, ONE tree was weighted to be 50% of the data, not debunking it?
The better question is not if Mann’s hockey stick has been debunked. The better question is has Mann produced any work at all that had any credibility at all? Mann’s desperation to keep his data and methodologies secret, his desperation to keep emails regarding the work he did, how he did it, and why, from the public eye, speak loudly in that regard.
William M. Connolly said:
“What did Mann *actually say*… Dono… why don’t you or Mr Mann tell us? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to find out before discussing it?”
William, we understand which side of this debate you’re on, but playing these games is childish. Finding out what Mann said is the point of the lawsuit. This suit had to be brought because Mann refuses to tell us. If you are on the side of scientific truth and integrity, perhaps you could convince him to release the e-mails?
Would that be the bandit in Johnny Quest?
Henry Galt,
Ahhh, jokes . . . the sport of kings and their ragged jesters!
Let me try . . . .
A rat, a stoat and a rabbit walk into a bar …
(a) . . . and the bartender says, “Hot d@mn! An alarmingly high degree of infestation! I gotta either make a 911 call to the city varmint control officer or to Smokey”.
(b) . . . and the bartentder says, “Where is the moonbat today, vamping with the hairy underbelly of the IPCC Bureau?”
(c) . . . and weasel says, “We would like a pint of non-carbonated warm stout with three straws. One red straw, one green straw and yellow-striped straw for the pooka.”
I could go on forever . . . . : )
John
Mann is correct about one thing…there is a vast right wing conspiracy against him. We’re right and he’s b.s.
Oh. I get it . Stoats are so sneaky.
We don’t have Mann or his lawyer saying that Mann is the only yada , yada, yada . We have the AHI, already carrying their asses in both hands , having it handed to them by the judge for being untrustworthy, telling us what Mann ( or his lawyer said ).
Well that’s good enough for me.
John McManus
rumleyfips says:
“I have read Mann’s data and I have read Mann’s methods. All there for all to see. Just because McIntyre is not competent to write a program with this much material does not reflect on Mann.”
As a science oriented individual, I was convinced as soon as I read “no matter what data set Mann’s computer program analyzed, that it came up with the same graph.” Do you not understand that Mann’s statistical method generates a ‘Hockey Stick’ from random data? This is the definition of “garbage in – garbage out”. It is scientifically indefensible (yet you persist). What are you reading or seeing in MBH 98 that the rest of us are missing? Enlighten us.
“How is demonstrating before a congressional committee, that no matter what data set Mann’s computer program analyzed, that it came up with the same graph. not debunking it? ”
You’re referring to the Wegman report, and that really has been debunked. It was not original analysis, and did not demonstrate anything of the kind. The famous “hockey fest” graphic that purportedly showed you could get hockey shapes from random data turned out to show the most hockey-like simulations out of 10,000 random runs, to exaggerate the political point. But Wegman himself did not do the data analysis in his report, so he could even accurately the statistical method that produced the graph in his own report.
When people (including a National Academy of Sciences group) tried to replicate Wegman’s work, they found that it was impossible from the description he had given. Meanwhile, Mann’s basic finding of anomalous modern warming has been replicated by study after study, using different data and methods.
Eli:
More accurately, NIH has limited rights to the research results, but typically waves them in favor of the institute which receives the grant. (“Typically” means not always.)
This “first right of refusal” shows up in patent processes, where you have to get a waiver from NIH, before your institute can apply for a patent related to research partially funded by NIH. (Yes I said “partially”.)
This “priority of ownership” also shows up when you are PI and have equipment purchased under an NIH grant. Generally the equipment is “portable”… meaning the grant money and associated equipment goes with the PI, if he shifts institutes, rather than staying with the institute where the grant was originally received.
I happen to like NOAAs open data rules better, though I understand the issues for companies and proprietary information.
(I don’t understand why Michael Mann can’t be completely open with his emails, analysis and data, at least using an independent third party as an adjudicator of what is “privileged information” and what is not. The simplest way to prove you don’t have anything to hide is stop hiding things.)
Louis:
Please remember , the programme you are referring to was not written by Mann.
As a ” science oriented individual” your fuzzy little stoatlike ears should have perked up at the mention of thousands of runs and the illustration of only about a dozen. What happened with all the other runs. Well there was some admission from ol Stevie that some of them went down and we now know that some of them were flat. Just about what you would expect from random data
But add a little line to select for the hockey stick shape , take the top hundred, hand select a few and bingo: scientific fraud. Not Mann of course but the man who wrote the ” select for hockey stick” line and suppressed that information.
The upshot is this. Mann can be shown to be a fraud only by fraudulant means.
John McManus
[snip. Multiple labeling of others as “deniers”. Read the site Policy for guidance. ~dbs, mod.]
rumleyfips
You said;
“Lamb said 50 years ago that he thought the Mideavil Warming was not worldwide but confined to some of the land around the North Atlantic. He also took care to document cold periods in that area in the time in question. Hard to dissapear something that was never there. Or maybe easy?”
Dr Mann was under the impression that Hubert Lamb did not believe that the records he accumulated had any relevance beyond a narrow geographic area as regards the MWP. He wrote.
“Indeed, when Lamb (1965) coined the term Medieval Warm Epoch, it was based on evidence largely from Europe and parts of North America.
AND
“Although Lamb (1965) did not argue for a globally synchronous warm period, his characterization has often been taken out of context, and used to argue for global scale warmth during the early centuries of the millennium comparable to or greater than that of the latter 20th century”
(both comments from this 2002 document below)
http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/medclimopt.pdf
This interpretation is not strictly correct as Lamb believed Cet (and other written records, observations etc from the CET area) had a much wider relevance beyond that of the central portion of England. He observed in Chapter 5 of ‘Climate history and the modern world;
’…that the last centuries (CET) records ‘have been highly significantly correlated with the best estimates of the averages for the whole northern hemisphere and for the whole earth ‘ and also;
‘over the 100 years since 1870 the successive five year values of average temperatures in England have been highly significantly correlated with the best estimates of the averages for the whole northern hemisphere and for the whole earth’ (In this last comment he is no doubt referring to his work at cru where global surface records back to 1860 or so were eventually gathered) he continued; ‘they probably mean that over the last three centuries the CET temperatures provide a reasonable indication of the tendency of the global climatic regime.’
‘Tendency’ is a very good word and is preferable to ‘preciseness’ which has become an integral part of the climate scientists lexicon.
Writing about tree rings in the same chapter (this was of course many years before Mann’s 1999 reconstruction made extensive use of this proxy) Lamb commented on the University of Arizona ‘laboratory of tree ring research’ (who Mann collaborated with for his study) concerning bristlecone pine trees in the White mountains. ‘…this long series at the upper tree line essentially registers summer temperatures. It is of interest that from AD800 to the present century (20th) its hundred year averages are correlated in a statistically significant degree, with the temperature derived for central England.’
tonyb
Gneiss:
I can’t speak for davidmhoffer, but I’m referring to McIntyre & McKittrick’s paper where red noise generated “hockey stick” graphs that were indistinguishable from the original. So I reitererate, if you can generate a ‘Hockey Stick’ from random data, that is the very definition of “garbage in – garbage out”. It is scientifically indefensible. Why do you persist?
Carrick,
That is the single simple idea that many people are persistently deflected from maintaining.
That ‘Occam’s Razor’ of an idea is overwhelmingly winning the debate outside of an insider Team of climate scientists who ply the IPCC’s influence routes.
John
Gneiss;
You’re referring to the Wegman report, and that really has been debunked>>>
That claim, and your entire post, are purely fiction. The code is now public, and does exactly was it has been accused of. The same is true of Mann’s “one tree” reconstruction. The BS is so deep that only a neophyte or someone with an agenda would attempt to defend it.
Robert E. Phelan @ here
Firefox.
Louis Hooffstetter:
Congtatulations! You’ve correctly identified the original source of the fraudulent “analysis” that Wegman parroted to Congress — McIntyre and McKittrick.
McIntyre is a retired mining engineer, and may or may not have known their “analysis” was cooked; McKittrick, though, had to be aware that their “random sample” was a fraud. What they did wasn’t an “error” — but clearly a deliberate choice to misrepresent.
Wegman — consciously or not — took the bogus “analysis” he was spoon-fed by Joe Barton, and presented it as his own work.
Still…if it makes you comfortable to believe this stuff…don’t let reality get in the way.
John McManus/rumleyfips and Gneiss,
What color is the sky on your planet? On earth, it’s a nice cerulean blue. You should visit some time. When you get here, find a computer and click on this.☺
And Mann is still up to his shenanigans.
> Smokey says: Connolley can’t produce a current IPCC publication that uses Mann’s extremely effective chart
I already have. I’ve provided the links. Here is one again:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-6-10.html
that is from the current IPCC report, the AR4. That link falsifies your claim that “Mann’s MBH98 hokey stick can no longer be published by the IPCC”.
> Louis Hooffstetter says: Finding out what Mann said is the point of the lawsuit…
Err, no. Read the blog posting again (its the text at the top, before any of the comments). Notice that paraphrase of what Mann is supposed to have said. Clearly that isn’t what Mann said, merely a paraphrase. What Mann *actually* said is the point at issue. I find it rather interested that none of the dedicated skeptical truth-seekers here have any real interest in what Man said, but are quite happy to accept what his opponents reported him as saying.
> demonstrating before a congressional committee, that no matter what data set Mann’s computer program analyzed, that it came up with the same graph, not debunking it?
> red noise generated “hockey stick” graphs that were indistinguishable from the original.
Because it doesn’t work. You have to fake it. See http://deepclimate.org/2010/10/25/the-wegman-report-sees-red-noise/
> kim;) says: In open court “his [ Mr Mann’s ] attorney stated in open court that the only person “in the universe” qualified to select example emails was Mann himself. The court rejected that notion by simply ignoring it.
Again, you’re confused: those aren’t Mann’s words, those are the opposing side. No-one has managed to quote Mann’s actual words on this subject. But many people have been very happy to condemn Mann, based only upon a paraphrase from his opponents.
Moderator,
My comment to ‘Henry Galt’ did clear moderation then vanished without a snip.
Can you advise please?
John
[Reply: Sorry John, my mistake. I thought I saw it double-posted, so I deleted what I assumed was the second post. I’ve put it back now. ~dbs]
Smokey @ here
The graph you linked is MBH99 – not 98, which only covers the last 600 years. You’ve got the right picture but you attribute it to the wrong study. This is a copy of the original paper as submitted. The graph you want is on page 3.
It’s MBH99, and they include the mean profile in a couple of spaghetti graphs, showing that there is fairly good agreement between many reconstructions (of the time).
There’s no reason why IPCC should have reproduced MBH99 as a standalone graph when there were new reconstructions to include. IPCC followed the progress of science. Some people prefer to live in the past…
Isn’t this FOI thing all a big waste of time? MBH98 and 99 have been superseded by many other reconstructions, even from data and groups not associated with Mann and colleagues, and the results aren’t that much different.
What good is supposed to came from this brouhaha again? I’ve lost sight of the point.
Anyway, here’s the link to the 3000+ pages of declassified material again
http://www.atinstitute.org/law-ctr/hosted-foia-documents/
Happy reading.
Carrick > I don’t understand why Michael Mann can’t be completely open with his emails…
That will be why you, our host Watts, Chris Horner of the ATI, etc etc. all maintain a publiclly-accessible archive of all the emails… oh wait, you mean they don’t?
So how about you stop playing silly games? We all know that no-one wants all their emails to be released, nor does anyone want all their private data to be released.
William Connolley,
I said current. Your source is from back in 2007 [where the co-chairman of WG-4, Ottmar Edenhofer, stated:
“…one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.” By the IPCC’s own admission they have an anti-science agenda]. Since then, the IPCC has issued publications as recently as this year. Show us a current IPCC publication that contains this graph.
> Smokey says: I said current. Your source is from back in 2007
Err, yes. AR4 was published in 2007, and is the current IPCC report. They work on an approximately 5 year cycle. AR5 is under preparation. See http://www.ipcc.ch/.
> the co-chairman of WG-4
There is no IPCC WG-4. http://www.ipcc.ch/working_groups/working_groups.shtml described WG I, II and III. As to your quote: it is sourceless. If you have no source, it is not credible.
If people are having trouble seeing the emails on their browsers, move the mouse to the bottom of the page and see if a download option pops up. If still no luck, here are links to three Word files with the lot of them (I hope, never used this site before). The links will last 90 days.
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cfc22f1/n/Mann_emails_1.docx
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cfc220c/n/Mann_emails_2.docx
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cfc220f/n/Mann_emails_3.docx
(Mods, would it be a good idea to post a Word version of the documents @ WUWT? Then you could get many eyes on them.)
William M. Connolley says:
November 3, 2011 at 4:13 pm
………:That will be why you, our host Watts, Chris Horner of the ATI, etc etc. all maintain a publiclly-accessible archive of all the emails… oh wait, you mean they don’t?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Nice try….Bit of a difference when there is hundreds of thousands of tax-paid grants being issued.
William M. Connolley says:
November 3, 2011 at 4:13 pm
So how about you stop playing silly games? We all know that no-one wants all their emails to be released, nor does anyone want all their private data to be released.
Yet prostitutes are expected to show all… When you insist on being in the limelight and taxes pay – YOU ARE OWNED.
You make it sound like we care whether he had a private affair with some undergrad.
Henry Galt says:
November 3, 2011 at 12:24 pm
A rat, a stoat and a rabbit walk into a bar …
______________________________
…in California. Mother Nature saved the day with a massive earthquake and tsunami. Mankind was saved. And everyone lived happily ever after.
Smokey, you’ve moved the goalposts into the next county. AR4 is the current report. AR5 is not due out until 2013.
Smokey, if Mann 1999 is going to be shown in any modern document it’s obviously going to be shown in a “spaghetti graph” alongside all the other work that has been done since. This is obvious. I can’t fathom why you expect older work to be given prominence over newer work. If anything common sense dictates to expect the opposite – that newer work is given prominence over older.
I have no idea what publications you think the IPCC has published this year. For a test of good faith how about you list the publications you are thinking of. They better have paleoclimate relevant sections considering your argument…
I don’t get your point, Smokey. There are many charts and graphs that were published in TAR that weren’t carried forward as new work emerged. Science progresses. There’s no reason for IPCC to keep publishing the same material. Your complaint is based on a very daft notion. MBH99 is referenced in AR4.
If you’re saying the IPCC has published something on millennial reconstructions since 2007, link it here. We’ll see what progress has been made.
Norway rat,
AR-4 was the last IPCC publication to use Mann’s falsified chart. If I’m wrong, post a current publication.
• • •
Wm Connolley says:
“There is no IPCC WG-4. http://www.ipcc.ch/working_groups/working_groups.shtml described WG I, II and III. As to your quote: it is sourceless. If you have no source, it is not credible.”
UN/IPCC WG-4 citations:
click1
click2
Regarding your comment that my quote is sourceless, I simply didn’t bother linking the source; and there are other sources. See, you can’t alter comments here at the internet’s “Best Science” site like you do with your despicable, mendacious and cowardly censorship of opposing views at Wikipedia. It is you who lacks any credibility.
“William M. Connolley says:
November 3, 2011 at 4:13 pm
So how about you stop playing silly games? We all know that no-one wants all their emails to be released, nor does anyone want all their private data to be released.”
Talking of silly games, how about you stop pretending that any of the emails or data at issue are Mann’s emails or private data – they are owned by the institution and are accessible by FOI. When one accepts public funding one must also accept that they become accountable to the public in respect of how their (the public’s) money is being spent.
If you don’t want data or emails that you have produced to be subject to FOI legislation then don’t accept public funding. It really is that simple.
dbs,
Hey thanks.
What would the world do without some of those bar jokes about a stoat, rabbit and rat . . . . it would be arguably less. . . . . something.
Take care.
John
DavidE says:
November 3, 2011 at 3:51 pm
Louis Hooffstetter:
Congtatulations! You’ve correctly identified the original source of the fraudulent “analysis” that Wegman parroted to Congress — McIntyre and McKittrick.
McIntyre is a retired mining engineer, and may or may not have known their “analysis” was cooked; McKittrick, though, had to be aware that their “random sample” was a fraud. What they did wasn’t an “error” — but clearly a deliberate choice to misrepresent.>>>
Amazing. You just get to make up your own facts plus your own history?
Spend some time on Climate Audit where you’ll find all the in depth detailed and DOCUMENTED analysis of just who did what when. The only way a claim such as your holds up is if people are too lazy to check for themselves. That you continue to spout purile nonsense in defense of Mann on the assumtion that you can fool at least some of the people THIS time says much about you. Care to come out from that mask of anonymity and make that accusation directly to McIntyre and McKittrick?
For all of you defending Mr Mann.
If the tables were reversed – do you actually think he’d defend you?
And can you ask him why are economic stimulus funds [ $541,184 ] being given to a university for scientific research?
William M. Connolley says:
November 3, 2011 at 4:13 pm
So how about you stop playing silly games? We all know that no-one wants all their emails to be released, nor does anyone want all their private data to be released.
_________________________
I worked in a lab and sent work related e-mails. I EXPECTED my e-mails to be read by others.
Anyone who sends e-mail while at work and does not expect them to be public is absolutely NUTS!
http://nl.blr-news.com/c.asp?791502&dcc2fc3b01d1fc49&9 (This is from a 2009 e-mail so link may not work)
An excellent example of the “right to privacy” mess is Monsanto who contracts out to private investigation firms like Pinkerton. The agents trespass on farmers fields collecting samples. Based on these samples Monsanto has sued thousands of farmers. From the court’s point of view Monsanto can take the samples because there is “no expectation of privacy” in a field of corn or soy beans.
The FOIA was enacted in 1966. Any one who is working in a government setting or with publicly funded grant money is a complete fool not to be aware he may be subject to an FOIA ESPECIALLY when working in a high profile area.
Climate Scientist should therefore have “no expectation of privacy” just like farmers have learned to have “no expectation of privacy” when PETA shows up with pictures of the old pet pony in the paddock out behind the house and brings charges of “Animal Abuse” (Happened to my neighbor who was a go 1/2 mile off the road)
kim ; ) says:
November 3, 2011 at 5:12 pm
—————–
kim ; ) ,
Maybe a Mannian reverse catharsis like:
John
“So I reitererate, if you can generate a ‘Hockey Stick’ from random data, that is the very definition of “garbage in – garbage out”.”
So what is your “very definition” of “random data”? That’s not an idle question but the crux of the comments I made. Wegman, in his report to Congress, falsely stated that by “random data” he meant a simple red noise model, AR(1, .2):
“One of the most compelling illustrations that McIntyre and McKitrick have produced is created by feeding red noise [AR(1) with parameter = 0.2] into the MBH algorithm.”
Sure, that’s a straightforward kind of random data, but it wasn’t how McI got those hockey stick shapes. Wegman did not know this because he had just copied McIntyre’s code without understanding it, or even noticing that McI cryptically referred to “persistent red noise.” Which is not AR(1, .2) but then again it’s not a precise or even standard term, and for years McI was evasive about exactly what he meant so his work was impossible to replicate. The NAS folks (unlike Wegman) saw the problem but could only guess at the solution, I believe they used AR(1, .8), which is unrealistically high for these data, but it turns out McI had gone even farther and used a “fractional ARIMA” algorithm as his definition of “random data.” This fits many more parameters to the data, and by doing that borrows more of its structure.
The NAS folks did find a slight hockey-stick bias to Mann’s method, although not as strong as McI’s partly because they did not use his fractional ARIMA trick and partly because they did not use the other trick of showing a few examples out of 10,000 (half of which turned downwards, BTW) that had the highest “hockey stick index.” More importantly, however, the NAS review found that improving the statistical approach did not much change the main result. That’s been abundantly confirmed by other researchers using many different data and statistical methods. Replication is the acid test in science. The alternative reconstructions have differently curvy handles but they all show that hockey stick blade, because it’s real.
You can see that blade even in the new BEST land surface index, much to the surprise of that project’s lead scientist who apparently was sure he’d find something different.
I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFULL WIZARD OF OZ. DON’T LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN!
Who knew the rewrite would be this complicated?
Smokey @ here
There is no WG4 in the IPCC. Your first link is to a group called Biofuel Watch, not the IPCC. In your second link the blogger gets the reference wrong – if you look at the link he provides for reference to his material, it says clearly ‘WG1’.
The reason you have linked to such weird and wacky sources to back up your claim that IPCC have a WG4 is that you cannot find it at the IPCC website. There is no IPCC WG4.
“If the tables were reversed – do you actually think he’d defend you?”
He might. From my brief interactions he seems like a decent guy, keeping a sense of humor about things even as he’s the target of all this hate.
Smokey,
I love arguing with you because you are so often blatantly wrong it is easy to destroy you.
In the case of AR4, that was the last IPCC publication (of which I am aware) to deal with the paleo record. The report(s) published this year are the SRREN (The renewable energy report which raised such a kerfuffle earlier this year) and the upcoming report on “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation”. Nope, no paleo review there… No other special reports issued since AR4 show up on the IPCC website.
As for your links to IPCC WG4 citations. I’m laughing. The first was to a project called COST which does not appear to be a UN or IPCC project, but rather a project looking at soil carbon budgets. The second is a blog post by someone who apparently made a typo in the headline, since the figure he links to is from AR4 WG I (as in one, not roman numeral IV with an invisible V).
Here is what the IPCC says about it’s organization:
http://ipcc.ch/working_groups/working_groups.shtml
Notice something? Only 3 working groups.
Link to COST’s about page:
http://www.cost.esf.org/about_cost
Nope, not UN or IPCC….
Gneiss says:
November 3, 2011 at 5:44 pm
“If the tables were reversed – do you actually think he’d defend you?”
He might. From my brief interactions he seems like a decent guy, keeping a sense of humor about things even as he’s the target of all this hate.>>>
David Ball quips that Mann should be in the State Penn in stead of Penn State and Mann sues him. That’s a sense of humor?
I find this fascinating.
It shows how the world has changed not least due to WUWT and Anthony: the more power to his elbow.
Here we have the once mighty Stoat himself, he of taking science by the throat, come as champion to defend a Mann. On this blog?
But then of course WUWT speaks truth to power and is open to honest debate: unlike the propaganda. Of course if Romm ever turns up here I will have a giddy turn.
Otherwise remember that the Weasel is Weasilly distinguished because the Stoat is Stoatally different. I entirely forget which changes its coat in the winter.
But there do seem to be a lot of turncoats around these days, Muller must be flip flapping his coat so fast as to have a serious draught up the rear end.
Kindest Regards
Carrick, Eli thinks you are wronger than he is. The NIH policy guide says
8.2.1 Rights in Data (Publication and Copyrighting)
In general, grantees own the rights in data resulting from a grant-supported project. Special terms and conditions of the award may indicate alternative rights, e.g., under a cooperative agreement or based on specific programmatic considerations as stated in the applicable RFA. Except as otherwise provided in the terms and conditions of the award, any publications, data, or other copyrightable works developed under an NIH grant may be copyrighted without NIH approval. For this purpose, “data” means recorded information, regardless of the form or media on which it may be recorded, and includes writings, films, sound recordings, pictorial reproductions, drawings, designs, or other graphic representations, procedural manuals, forms, diagrams, work flow charts, equipment descriptions, data files, data processing or computer programs (software), statistical records, and other research data.
Rights in data also extend to students, fellows, or trainees under awards whose primary purpose is educational, with the authors free to copyright works without NIH approval. In all cases, NIH must be given a royalty-free, nonexclusive, and irrevocable license for the Federal government to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the material and to authorize others to do so for Federal purposes. Data developed by a consortium participant also is subject to this policy.
————————————————————–
More to follow
On inventions, the institution owns the rights, but can lose them by not pursuing implementation
————————-
8.2.4 Inventions and Patents
The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 (Public Law 96-517; 35 U.S.C. 200-212) and the related EO 12591 (April 10, 1987) provide incentives for the practical application of research supported through Federal funding agreements. To be able to retain rights and title to inventions made with Federal funds, so-called “subject” inventions, the grantee must comply with a series of regulations that ensure the timely transfer of the technology to the private sector, while protecting limited rights of the Federal government. . . . .
Some of the steps required by the regulation to retain intellectual property rights to subject inventions include:
Report all subject inventions to NIH.
Make efforts to commercialize the subject invention through patent or licensing.
Formally acknowledge the Federal government’s support in all patents that arise from the subject invention.
Formally grant the Federal government a limited use license to the subject invention.
barry,
You’re right, I was saying WG-4, when Edenhoffer was co-chair of WG-3. Big deal, eh?
Of course, since that appears to be the best alarmist argument, then they’ve lost; Edenhofer’s comment that the real agenda is a redistribution of wealth [ie: theft], rather than legitimate science, is now on record. No doubt he has been chastised by his fellow UN kleptocrats for his brutal forthright honesty.
The execrable censoring propagandist Connolley hangs his hat entirely on the difference between working group numbers. That’s his best argument. He’s used to being the censor, and he’s not used to pushback. Tough. This site allows all points of view, unlike Wikipedia, and here the truth is separated from BS like wheat from chaff.
The fact of the matter is that Mann has been debunked. Thoroughly. And that is why he hides out instead of defending his failed conjecture. There are only excuses from Mann’s true believers about why his hokey stick chart is no longer published by the IPCC.
Also, I note that no alarmist has the balls to try to falsify this hypothesis, per the scientific method: that CO2 is harmless and beneficial. Show the global harm, True Believers – if you can. Make it testable and falsifiable per the scientific method. Or admit that you’re engaging in pseudo-science propaganda.
Eli, I’lll agree that you are slightly less wrong than me on this. 😉 But it’s d@mned nuanced.
Bayh-Dole was a game changer, because it opened up the channels for receivers of federal grants to gain the rights to particular products and ideas. It has lead to the blossoming of medical breakthroughs in the US and (dare I say it) some of the income gap increase we’ve experienced (guess what… if you become a millionaire you expand the gap, that rule of thumb works until the average income is $1 million or greater).
However… and this probably does depend on the particular federal institute—and I will admit I don’t have any patents involving NIH funded work—it is definitely the case when we get products and ideas patented there is a federal approval process involved. Since I have never filed that paperwork myself (we have people in our lab who do this for us tb2g), it may well be their characterizations of the process are not accurate. I remember a USDA grant where it did seem like some sort of “right of first refusal” had to be given, but that was plus-up money and may not follow the same rules.
I do remember that the government retains right of usage. And they can block the public release of the patent if it is deemed in the interest of national security (so called classified patents).
And I do know with respect to data, that the data also track with the PI, if the PI switches institutes. How much of this is legal requirement versus “if you ever want funding again from NIH you’ll do it this way” I cant say. But it does bugger up the notion that the institute, rather than the PI, owns the data outright.
Norway Rat says:
“I love arguing with you because you are so often blatantly wrong it is easy to destroy you.”
“Destroy”?? heh, Hey, my hypothesis is still standing tall: CO2 is harmless and beneficial. The only thing that is destroyed is your failed True Religious Belief that CO2 causes runaway global warming. Get a clue.
CO2 is harmless and beneficial at current and projected concentrations. Falsify that if you can, junior.
davidmhoffer says: November 3, 2011 at 6:24 pm
“David Ball quips that Mann should be in the State Penn in stead of Penn State and Mann sues him. That’s a sense of humor?”
He said more than that. As I noted at the time the headline on his site was:
“Evidence Points To Mann’s Criminal Misconduct”
This is fascinating. The WUWTers can’t be bothered to cite anything in a factual way, and when asked to do so (to allow actual focused argumentation), they complain that the alarmists are trying to derail the discussion and distract from what matters. Meanwhile, they spend all their effort trying to get juicy quotes from emails of people they dislike, and ignore the broader science. Irony can be so ironic! Even the lawyer Schnare has little more to offer here than his interpretations of what he thinks are a bunch of knowing looks.
I guess it’s the same with Al Gore and Charles Monnett. Focus on individuals and sling mud. As Schnare said above, that’s what you do when you don’t have the facts on your side. Someone talked about circumstantial evidence above (method, motive, means, opportunity) — but you also need a crime. Where’s the body? The world is warmer — there was no decline in *temperatures* to hide.
[REPLY: Stevie, you just made the point. No one here at WUWT interprets “hide the decline” as a decline in *temperatures*… Mann’s trick of grafting the instrumental record to his proxy record was intended to hide the fact that the treemometers can’t be relied on and are usless as proxies. Another attempt by a troll to distract. -REP]
Please do not confuse me (David Ball) with my father (Dr. Tim Ball). I do not speak for him and he does not speak for me. We are two different people with our own viewpoints. Please bear this in mind.
Gneiss:
“The alternative reconstructions have differently curvy handles but they all show that hockey stick blade, because it’s real.”
A. None of those blades can match the magnitude of the the instrument record like HadCrut3, and even less so of BEST.
B. And they can’t match it even though temperature series are cherry picked for inclusion in the reconstruction based upon how well they match the instrument record.
In any case, the red noise thing never was all that important other than as a nice headline. What is important, however, is that Mann used proxy data upside down (Tiljander) three times. Two of those after he had been told. It’s also important that the infallible peer review process never caught it. And it’s important that the editors of these highly respected journals never caught it. And it’s important that all of the scientific societies that are supposedly in unanimous agreement about AGW never caught it.
Exactly the same misses apply to Mann’s use of Graybill data. Data that cannot be reproduced but is weighted higher than any other by a huge multiplier. And Mann continued to use the Graybill data after Ababneh’s doctoral dissertation showed that it’s strong hockey stick shape was a product of the trees going split bark, not a product of warming. And all of Mann’s buddies continued to use it as well.
Then, of course, there are all the problems with Yamal tree ring data. Turns out that Mann can’t get his hockey stick unless he uses at least one of the bad tree ring data sets or, alternately, the upside down Tiljander data.
Connolley: “So how about you stop playing silly games? We all know that no-one wants all their emails to be released, nor does anyone want all their private data to be released.”
What’s the matter Connolley, getting lonely at your site? They won’t let you propagandize wiki any more? But welcome in any case. You are right, no one wants their private emails to be released. But, when you sign on the dotted line and when you use government paid for computers and government paid for internet and government paid for time, that is exactly what the public is entitled to. If you want to discuss in private, no one is stopping you. After you get off work, go to your home computer, use your home internet account, and send messages to Phil Jones’ home account. Then it’s not covered by FOI. I admit that I sometimes sent private e-mail while I was at work. But I never sent anything that I couldn’t stand for the world to see. LOL – I think that applies to what I send on my home computer as well. I guess I’m just a dull guy.
Henry: “A rat, a stoat and a rabbit walk into a bar …”
And Gavin dropped in on McIntyre last night. Must be a new “Get out there and engage them” memo out. LOL. Should be fun!
So, let’s start from the beginning. Exactly what is the emergency, gentlemen?
We’ve sorted out WG4. Excellent. As to what E said: whatever he said, it was in German. You’re looking at a translation, which may or may not have been honest.
> SteveW says: If you don’t want data or emails that you have produced to be subject to FOI legislation then don’t accept public funding…
Schnare worked for the EPA. You urge him to release all of his emails too, yes?
William M. Connolley says:
November 4, 2011 at 2:46 am
Yea. Verily. As soon as you, someone, anyone, shows that, via the instruments at HIS disposal in HIS previous employment, HE is advising, pressuring, aiding and/or abetting those who have, amongst many other things, put my mother and father in a position where they must freeze (heaven forfend – to death) in winter because their combined pensions no longer allow them to eat AND heat their home because of price rises caused, directly, by policy that HE insists must be adopted to save the world from a phantom of HIS imagination.
A phantasm conjured out of thin CO2 with zero evidence, less intelligence and malice aforethought.
Let us see every scrap that was produced at the public tit to support this guesswork. For conjecture is all it is and it cannot be honoured with the epithet of hypothesis as it meets NONE of the required criteria.
What I truly think of YOU and your cohort, sir, cannot be adequately expressed in polite fora.
Sorry bill, but you are just plain wrong. Perhaps it is because I have had Internet email since 1990, but I long ago learned that what you email on company time (or the tax payer dime) is not yours. I have no problem allowing any and all to see every email I have received and sent using company/state owned email servers. While I am sure they are not as exciting as the fiction in yours or Mann’s in and out box, mine have nothing to hide.
I suspect you mean “no one who has anything to hide wants all their emails to be released”. I figure most of mine have been viewed by people who they were not intended for, and I stand by everyone.
That is actually not up to him. It is up to the EPA, as they belong to the EPA, and by extension the taxpayers. You want them? Simple. File a FOIA. You do not have to have a reason for your FOIA. I am surprised you have not done so already.
Smokie:
You keep using the word debunked ( [SNIP: Crude, not funny and juvenile. -REP] )
If you have a paper retracted by a journal I would agree that you are debunked. Has this happened to Mann? No. Has it happened to any “skeptics”. Yes. Wegman ( not climate yet but wait). Spenser has enjoyed the retraction of his latest effort.
If editors resign in disgust I would agree that you were debunked. Has this happened to Mann? No. Has it happened to any “skeptics”? Yes. Soon; Spenser.
If scientists ignor ones paper and few citations follow publication, I would agree that one is debunked. Has this happened to Mann? No. There are hundreds , maybe even thousands of citations of his papers. Obviously his work has been found to be accurate and usefull.Do “skeptics” get cited . Yes but not many of them and not many citations ( To be fair, most skeptics are not climate scientists and don’t present many papers for publication. They are not likely to get many citations under these conditions).
Keep your stick on the ice:
John McManus
Should emails discussing student assessments and grades be released to the public? Should we redact residential addresses or would that be depriving the public of their right to view every tittle of email text that ran through the computers and servers their taxes have paid for?
Are there no limits? FOI as implied by Mann’s critics seems way too heavy-handed.
So what dirty little secrets do people expect to see if and when these emails are released? I assume there’s something in mind apart from a fishing expedition to see if you get lucky. What is it we’re expecting to find?
William M Connolley;
Schnare worked for the EPA. You urge him to release all of his emails too, yes?>>>
You guys just keep on coming up with one distraction from the issue after another. If you have reason to, by all means, file an FOIA and go get them. That has zero to do with the issue of Mann’s emails and you bloody well know it. Have you no shame at all?
John McManus;
If scientists ignor ones paper and few citations follow publication, I would agree that one is debunked. Has this happened to Mann? No. There are hundreds , maybe even thousands of citations of his papers. Obviously his work has been found to be accurate and usefull.Do “skeptics” get cited . Yes but not many of them and not many citations ( To be fair, most skeptics are not climate scientists and don’t present many papers for publication. They are not likely to get many citations under these conditions).>>>
You’ve completely ignored the reality of history. A small handfull of like minded scientists peer reviewed each others work and conspired to prevent the work of others from being published. they’ve gotten editors fired and papers blocked. The ClimateGate emails refer to their intent to do so, and there is plenty of evidence to show that is exactly what they did. Spencer, to whome you refer, is the victim of just that, with the editor of Remote Sensing resigning not because there was a single thing wrong with Spencer’s science, but because he feared the wrath of Kevin Trenberth who wanted the paper suppressed. Had Trenberth even a modicum of science on his side, he could have shredded the paper in publication. But he had nothing, so he used his position at the IPCC to threaten the editor, whose own research grants and projects were beholden to Trenberth, and the editor, one Wolfgang Wagner, caved like a coward.
Trying to justify the warmist position on the number of papers and citations is a total joke, a farce, a complete comedy at best. The peer review process has been poisoned, and that is the reason that the facts are coming out in alternative information sources… like this one.
Dear REP — do you mean to tell me that if I search back through WUWT, I’m going to see a lot of effort by this website to set the record straight among skeptics that “hide the decline” is not about temperatures but about proxies? And not one of your commenters made the accusation that a decline in temperatures was hidden? Ha. I would think a moderator would read the comments!
What do you expect to find in Mann’s emails? The divergence problem wasn’t hidden, it’s not a crime to use one set of data in one part of a figure and another in a second part of the figure, and glaciers don’t lie. Go see for yourself how they’ve retreated. Mann’s data are public, and we know how he spliced the figure together. So I ask again, where’s the body? Explain to me how this isn’t a fishing expedition for the purpose of harassment.
You say thermometers can’t be relied upon. Funny — I thought our host said he’d accept the BEST results. He didn’t say, “The BEST results, since they rely on thermometers, will be meaningless.” Did he? No, I don’t think that’s what he said. And if you think thermometers and proxies are useless, just how do you expect to measure global climate change? Are you anti-data? Strange position for a ‘science’ web site. Oh wait, now I get it — you want to measure temperatures with emails. Interesting method.
Is WUWT being graced by the same William Connelley that was banned from Wikipedia? Their loss is our gain, I suppose.
It’s amazing the hullabaloo generated by a simple request for Mann to show his (taxpayer-funded) work. These people should not be associated with anything claiming to be science.
So let me get this straight. A lame joke by Ball that got him hauled into court and forced a retraction by his publisher ( not to mention embarrassed Ball) is fine because it denigrates Mann. A joke about Ball’s retraction is bacd because you like Ball.
Have I got that right?
John McManus
[REPLY: No. What Dr. Ball publishes on his site is his problem. We’ve snipped crude comments about people we’re not fond of. Your’s was crude and juvenile. -REP]
Barry:
I still can’t get at those emails. Schnarle’s stuff just locks my computer and a can’t find anything clickable at the site you suggested. They just try to sell me stuff.
Any idea what I am doing wrong?
Thanks for your help:
John McManus
This is good background information on William Connolley:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/19/wikibullies-at-work-the-national-post-exposes-broad-trust-issues-over-wikipedia-climate-information
[Link corrected per request. -mod]
Well, this is going to be very amusing. Let us assume for the sake of argument that Dr. Schnare used a non-EPA email account (like gmail) when responding to ATI. Since UVa has shown that he posted emails during normal working hours at EPA, unless he did so from his cell phone or similar, it went through the EPA network. What are the odds that it was captured? Being an EPA lawyer, one wonders how much of a billing record is kept?
Does Eli have to file an FOI request? Probably not because UVa probably has. Schnarenfreude indeed:)
IPCC reliability index WGI > WGII > WGIII >> WGIV
Davidmhoffer:
Another example of Spencer debunked. Spencer and Christy got the arithmatic wrong and sat temps. Skilled climate scientits found and corrected the error. After leaving false information hanging around , Spencer finally surrendered and corrected his work. Now that’s a debunk. Mann? Hasn’;t happened.
Trenberth didn’t need to shred Spencer’s paper. Lots of shredding was done onlots of blogs and not a Trenberth in sight. Is this the type of fact that is coming out in alternate information sources to which you refer.
You seem to think that Trenberth was resposible for Spencer writing a fataly flawed paper. No Spencer was.
Keep your stick on the ice:
John McManus
Dr. Scott,
You do realize that if your linked reconstruction was accurate it would imply an extreme climate sensitivity….right?
Pretty sure I’ve sen multiple commenters on this site state that they don’t disagree that the world is warming or that the radiative properties of CO2 do contribute to a greenhouse effect. They say these basic facts aren’t disputed, it is simply a question of how much the earth warms in response to a change in radiative balance and all suggestions otherwise are straw men.
John McManus/rumleyfips said:
“Just because McIntyre is not competent to write an programme with this much material does not reflect on Mann.”
Time to put up or shut up: Provide the link where can we download Mann’s MBH-98 data and code to independently verify his results. If you can’t, you’re done.
William M. Conolley: Louis Hooffstetter said: Finding out what Mann said is the point of the lawsuit…
You replied: Err, no. What Mann *actually* said is the point at issue.
Reading your convoluted logic is like watching someone stab their eyes out. It’s senseless and almost too painful to watch.
“Mann’s trick of grafting the instrumental record to his proxy record was intended to hide the fact that the treemometers can’t be relied on…” – REP
So why then is ‘the divergence problem’ openly documented in the scientific literature? Why has it been the subject of presentations at high profile conferences? It’s not a secret. It’s not being hidden.
Nor is there any expectation in scientific writing that rejected parts of a data series or other extraneous bumpf should be detailed in a paper or plotted in a graph not specifically about rejecting parts of said data series (see Effective Writing. Improving Scientific, Technical and Business Communication – Turk and Kirkman).
There is still no crime. ‘Hide the decline’ is nothing but a strongly cured kipper. You should neither allow yourself to fall for it or, worse, perpetuate the myth in the hope of tricking others.
And given that there is no crime, the burning desire to snoop through someone’s socks and knickers draw in case they’re part of a communist plot is really kinda creepy.
Best,
Jay
Louis:
I didn’t say code. I said methods.
When the Muir Inquirey wanted to check the instrumental data, they read the methods and wrote their own code ( remember they are scientists). They didn’t run about wriging their hands demanding someone do their thinking for them; they took personal responsibility.
Much more convincing to do your own work without cribbing isn’t it?
Keep your stick on the ice:
John McManus
@- Louis Hooffstetter says: November 4, 2011 at 10:37 am
“Time to put up or shut up: Provide the link where can we download Mann’s MBH-98 data and code to independently verify his results. If you can’t, you’re done.”
Not sure why you would want to mess around with data and code over a decade out of date to ‘verify’ the results of a paper that has not only been confirmed but significantly improved upon by more recent work…
But try this link for the code and data –
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/codes/WA_original.tar
Let us know how you get on with it, if you have any problems this might help –
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/CODES_MBH.html
“The New York Times (Inadvertently) Demolishes Mann’s Defence”
“Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged. “The big problem is that the culture is such that researchers spin their work in a way that tells a prettier story than what they really found,” said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s almost like everyone is on steroids, and to compete you have to take steroids as well.” […]”
http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/the-new-york-times-inadvertently-demolishes-manns-defence/
If noone’s seen it
“There are three things that smell of fish. One of them is fish.” – Frank Zappa
Rabbit says-
“Let us assume … ”
Exactly. We have to assume. Some of us, based partly upon the ‘rigorous’ defence of the hokey stick by all you big guns visiting this thread and the continued, costly refusal to disclose … well, anything pertinent wrt the reasoning, collaboration and methodology that produced said stick, assume the worst.
Because it really is simple.
If your heroes just showed their work, before, during or even after they ask the modern world to spend it’s diminishing wealth by further investigation of their demons’ characteristics, pursuing those monsters and killing them, there would not be this sticky mess for us to wade through and all you sploogemops would be doing something other than chasing those of us who are asking that a modicum of method is applied to your heroes’ guesswork in the vanishing hope that there be some there there.
A smidgeon, tad or splinter of evidence that current or projected concentrations of CO2 in atmosphere will cause the calamities you require us to bend to your will to avoid.
Your lacking that evidence (not the endless junk referenced at numberwatch.co.uk ) may well be the cause of your initially amusing contortions and the increasingly vile attacks on those of us that are attempting to make some sense of your runaway fears.
Most probably because, contrary to your false assertions, the results of the paper were not “confirmed” and were not “significantly improved upon by more recent work”, and are the subject of a state legislative inquiry and a state prosecutorial inquiry into its propriety with respect to fraud in the awarding of taxpayer funded grants.
You sound very very confused, talking about code, methods, the Muir Inquiry and they’re being scientists. Have you perhaps been taking walks on the other side of Alice’s mirror?
D. Patterson:
What does a self serving investigation by a small time political hack have to do with scientific accuracy?
No confusion, just amusement.
If you think that only one code will do for any particular problem , you don’t understand . Give a bunch of data and pose a question ( method) to a bunch of programmers and you will get a bunch of different programming ( code) back. All of it will work but in the end only one will be chosen for reasons of cost, speed, personal bias etc.
Take a look at Smokie’s beloved spaghetti graph. One question, a bunch of data and some programmers. The code is different in each case ( different approaches) but the results are similar. That’s because it is the data that determines the result not the adherenceof line by line code to the whims of an auditor.
I mentioned Muir because “skeptics” whined about not having Jones” etc. code for years. Muir didn’t even ask. They are scientists: they did their own programming and then compared the results with Jones etc. An excellent way to verify; much better than auditing each fly speck on 40 year old fortran punch cards, dripping with mold and half eaten by mice.
Keep your stick on the ice.
John McManus
rumleyfips,
I don’t know how to help you. The pages worked in my browser first time. I’m running Firefox 7.0.1 on Win7 Ultimate.
We can’t swap email addy’s due to policy here, so if you or anyone knows of a nice free file-sharing website I could upload to that will link for public access let me know.
The first word doc of emails has some interesting comments::
Kept this email because it identifies may of Mann’s email contacts.
From (S_F___________-000000000005) 02-01-2002_18:14:01_
From: “Rxxx Sxxxx”
To: “Rxxx Sxxxx”
Subject: Re: Fwd: FW: Ah – another virus, yet easy to remedy
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 14:11:46 -0400
I assume this is from schnare and co.
Harvesting emails for more FOIs?
A number of family members have served in law enforcement careers ranging from municipal police officers and state police officers to state prison wardens. Their tales about the stupidity of criminals have one common theme. The criminals typically think they are cleverer than most everyone else, more brazen than their victims, and inevitably commit the stupidest of errors which get them caught sooner or later. It’s like the bankrobber who orders the bank teller to hand over the cash, but gives his driver’s license when the teller insists upon having some identification before writing the withdrawal receipt.
Likewise with embezzlers, who ought to know a routine audit is liable to expose the embezzlement scheme before the funds can be returned or the embezzlement can be hidden. Some scientists have typically enjoyed a virtual license to commit fraud with grant awards for many many years now. Too often law enforcement has refused to even contemplate the investigation of such fraud, much less prosecute even some of the most egregious examples of such fraud. Nonetheless, some scientists have managed to outstrip the patience of even the most lethargic and reluctant government prosecutors and courts, and convictons for a number of felonies by scientists have occurred. Few of those prosecutions have occurred without their defenders decrying an infringement upon certain unique privileges scientists effectively claim to belong to them above and beyond the law. Like the banrobbers self-incriminating themselves to the bank teller and the embezzlers leaving behind their fraudulent bookkeeping records, they always have a blizzard of pitiful excuses why they committed no crime or the crime they committed was not serious enough for them to be held seriously accountable and punishable for their actions.
It is remarkable to note how the defenders of Mann are so quick to declare with righteous indignation that “there is no crime” at the very hint of any form of inquiry. It is remarkable in one respect because the British government has already acknowledged the deliberate refusal to release the Climategate e-mail constituted a violation of their FOIA laws, but the violation of the law could not be prosecuted because of an extraordinarily brief statute of limitation upon such a violation..It is remarkable in another respect because no crime was officially alleged with respect to Mann’s activities at the University of Virginia.
The inquiry in regard to Mann at the University of Virginia arose when a state legislator in a state committee responsible for the state’s appropriations of funds for Mann’s grant/s and later such grants for other researchers attempted to exercise his duty to provide legislative oversight of the funding. Since the British government acknowledged the e-mails evidencing the usage of funds appropriated from taxpayers had been unlawfully withheld from FOIA disclosures, the State of Virginia’s legislature had a public interest in determining the appropriateness of past and future appropriations for such grants. This legislative inquiry was then obstructed when the University of Virginia and/or Mann falsely represented the e-mails no longer existed, when in fact they did still exist. Ken Cuccinelli’s official state inquiry came about in part as a consequence of the University of Virginia and/or Mann misrepresenting destruction of the e-mail in question and the implications for the obstruction of the legislative inquiries. Still, the inquiry did not constitute an accusation of a crime being committed by Mann or the University of Virginia. It constituted nothing more than an inquiry to determine whether or not the University of Virginia and Mann were compliance with the applicable laws of the State of Virginia, especially with respect to grant funding in light of the violations of British FOIA laws.
Reluctantly, the University of Virginia started to prepare for the release of the requested e-mail, when the politicians supporting Mann intervened to once more obstruct the release and disclosure of the e-mail and other requested evidence. The amazing and interesting part of this political intervention to obstruct the inquiry is its seeming self-destructiveness. Even if the State’s inquiry found the e-mails had been unlawfully withheld from disclosure, the fine for doing so was trivial and non-consequential beyond any contents of the e-mail itself. The continued obstruction of the State of Virginia’s inquiries into the Mann e-mail and other documents risked a huge expansion in the scope of future discoveries and legal costs far far beyond the original e-mail and any fine that had been at stake in the beginning of the events. In effect, the University of Virginia and Mann are taking a calculated gamble in a court of law that the content of the e-mail, its continued confidentiality, and non-disclosure to public oversight is significantly more important than the multi-million dollar costs of litigation, any loss of confidence in the integrity and openness of the University of Virginia, and any loss of confidence in the integrity and openness of Mann and his associates. The general public can be excused for wondering whether or not such an extraordinary escalation in risks being taken by Mann and the University of Virginia is prompted more by a stand on principles of conscience or more by consciousness of serious criminal misconduct hidden behind illusory and false principles of conscience. In any case, there is still no pending criminal investigation of Mann’s e-mail, which makes a supporter’s assertion, “there is no crime,” sound more like a criminal trying to avoid a routine non-criminal audit or inquiry that could discover potential evidence of criminal conduct. Does Mann really need this kind of destructive support?
What really is “creepy” is the implication that Mann and his associates think they can prevail upon their friends in politics to appropriate millions of dollars of taxpayer monies in grant funds for their exclusive personal use without honoring an obligation to share all correspondence related to the employment of the publicly funded grants with the general public and/or their legislative representatives. Such behavior tends to invite a comparison to embezzlers who think they should also remain immune from inquiries into their embezzlement.
@- Henry Galt says: November 4, 2011 at 12:07 pm
“A smidgeon, tad or splinter of evidence that current or projected concentrations of CO2 in atmosphere will cause the calamities you require us to bend to your will to avoid.”
I am not sure what the second half of this sentence means…
If the you think the evidence is credible no ‘bending’ is required, you would be persuaded by the evidence.
But what would the evidence – even a smidgeon of it look like that convince you CO2 in the atmosphere can cause global warming?
Are you able to describe the sort of evidence, or climate change, that would cause you to consider the AGW theory valid ?
I can if you wish describe the sort of evidence that would cause me to doubt and re-examine MY position, I wonder if you can do the same?
If you really find it inconceivable that any evidence could change your mind…
Well the next line of your quote is –
“The other two, are living on you!” -FZ
Barry:
I’ll check again ina couple of days. Maybe somethying will work. I have IE9 but my whole system does wierd things now and then.
The one email I got to read was pretty boring- something about followup on a conversation at a conference. I read every climategate email and was underwhelmed.
Thanks for your help:
John McManus
rumleyfips says:
November 4, 2011 at 10:04 am
Davidmhoffer:
Another example of Spencer debunked. Spencer and Christy got the arithmatic wrong and sat temps. Skilled climate scientits found and corrected the error. After leaving false information hanging around , Spencer finally surrendered and corrected his work.
Good grief. The error was minor, Spencer agreed to it nearly immediatly, publicly thanked them for pointing it out, corrected his results while at the same time advising that he’d found additional errors in addition to those pointed out by his critics, also minor, and publicly corrected those at the same time. You imply that he fought them and surrendered. The fact is he acknowledged, thanked them, and exposed more errors in his own work than they found. That’s called scientific progress, not “surrender”.
Now that’s a debunk.
No, that’s a gross misrepresentation of the facts.
Mann? Hasn’;t happened.
Only by being willfully obtuse could one come to that conclusion. If you want to argue M&M’s devastating expose of his work, then I suggest you wander on over to Climate Audit where you will soon look foolish trying to argue the facts with the people who actually debunked it. I’m betting you won’t do that because you know very well that your version of events is a twisted and tangled set of half truths woven together to support an agenda.
As for any other of Mann’s work, can you seriously defend using just seven trees for a 1000 year reconstruction and weighting just one of those trees to represent 50% of the data? If you can defend that, then you will just look silly. after that, how about defending having time series of data inserted in a study in reverse of the rest of the data? Going to defend that too, even though it is clear that is what was done and he’s simply ignored the requests to correct it? I don’t need some scientific journal to publish a PhD paper saying these things are wrong. As Einstein once quipped to a student with a completely screwed up math paper, “that’s not right. That’s not even wrong”.
Trenberth didn’t need to shred Spencer’s paper. Lots of shredding was done onlots of blogs and not a Trenberth in sight. Is this the type of fact that is coming out in alternate information sources to which you refer.
Again, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. If Trenberth had nothing to fear from Spencer’s paper, then why did he demand Wagner’s resignation and then brag about getting an apology from Wagner? Why did Wagner say in his own letter of resignation that there was no scientific problem at all with Spencer’s paper, and that it was properly peer reviewed? How is it that the only criticism Wagner had of Spencer’s paper was that it was observational data and the “modelling community” hadn’t been consulted? Do you know who the leader of that modelling community is? Ooooops, its Kevin Trenberth!
Further, you claim Spencer was shredded on multiple blogs. Aside from name calling, I saw nothing but magic dressed up as science. That said, why is it that you first claim that unless papers have been peer reviewed and published, they are meaningless, but now you claim that blogs count. Which is it? One or the other, you can’t change your mind because it happens to be convenient for your argument.
You seem to think that Trenberth was resposible for Spencer writing a fataly flawed paper. No Spencer was.
No, I said that Trenberth was so terrified of Spencer’s paper that he first tried through pressure on Wagner to prevent the paper from being published, and then, when that failed, tried to discredit it by forcing Wagner’s resignation on the basis that “modellers” hadn’t been consulted. That’s debunking? Nope, that’s the fantasy that the Trenberth’s of the world have that somehow models produce better results than actual measurements. Again, that’s not right. That’s not even wrong.
Keep your stick on the ice:
Well, since I’ve seen you slashing, spearing, cross checking and high sticking from one end of this thread to the other, I’m quite happy to play by the rules. You’re agenda is clear, your twisted version of reality speaks clearly to your agenda, and it just amounts to an own goal.
You do yourself and your argument no favors with such irrational ad hominem rhetoric. First, the inquiry concerns whether or not the grant funds were obtained using declarations the applicant had reason to know at the time were false or likely to be false. The inquiry does not need to determine the truth or falsity of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) conjecture in order to determine whether or not false declarations were used to obtain state grant funds. In past cases, scientists have used false declarations to obtain grant funds even though the scientific conclusions may have been scientifically valid. Pharmaceutical researchers have falsified drug studies to secure government approval, even though the drug was safe and effective. In other words, Mann could hypothetically have falsified his data and reports and thereby made a false declaration to obtain state grant funds, even though AGW were a true fact. Another hypothetical situation is where a researcher such as Mann has inadvertently and unintentionally falsified his data and report, yet the State of Virginia still retains the obligation and the legal right to exercise investigative oversight to detect and correct such unintentional errors when determining appropriations of grant funds. In other words, your comment about “scientific accuracy” is a deceptive strawman argument designed to distract attention away from the reality that the inquiry does not need or seek to serve as an arbiter of the controversy about AGW.
Secondly, your ad hominem comments about “a self serving investigation by a small time political hack” are juvenile taunts which are inaccurate, disrespectful, and needlessly insulting to the majority of the population of Virginia who selected him to represent their public interests. Attorney General Cuccinelli did not open an inquiry until after Mann and the University of Virginia obstructed the apparently lawful inquiry of the Virginia State legislature’s committee responsible for appropriating the grant funds Mann used. Unless a person is the beneficiary of undue political corruption, they are obliged to expect a formal inquiry into their uage of public funds in the wake of the British government finding the FOIA law had been violated by Mann’s correspondents. Your attempts to belittle the Attorney General as “a small time political hack” only serve to make yourself look small, petty, and worse.
The “amusement” of the sel-deluded it appears. For example:
I never said or implied anything whatsoever about there being one code or any number of other codes. You are so self-deluded, you invent these strawman arguments at the drop of a hat and go off in your self amusement oblivious to the real world in front of you. The inquiries into Mann’s e-mail are only concerned with what Mann knew about his own code, data, methods, and other related issues. The inquiries do not even need to know whether or not Mann’s research reached a scientifically correct conclusion. Most government funded grants result in scientific research which reaches partially or wholly incorrect scientific results. The inquiries only need to know whether or not Mann knew or had reason to know his application/s for grant funding included false representations about what the applicant knew at the time of the application.
For example, if a grant applicant knows when applying for the grant that only 500 data points are used in the grant funded study, while the application cheats when it claims 2,000 data points were to be used to exaggerate its comprehensiveness, the inquiry may find the application obtained grant funds fraudulently no matter what the scientific accuracy of the study’s conclusions may have been. Such false and fraudulent applications may wrongly cause the grant to be denied to a more deserving grant applicant who honestly reported 1,500 data points in their grant application. When this kind of grant fraud is allowed to go unchallenged and unpunished for too long, otherwise would be honest grant applicants are forced to consider becoming false grant applicants as well or face being marginalized out of the profession when they are unable to successfully compete for grant funds against more unscrupulous and unpunished frauds. Therefore, it is in the public interest and the interest of science to detect grant fraud and grant funds on the basis of honest applications and honest disclosures of compliance with the terms of the grants.
All of which is your strawman argument set up to avoid a discussion of the right of grantors to govern compliance with the terms of the grants and the information represented in the grant applications. Mann was perfectly free to use code, data, and methods which would produce erroneous results, so long as he provided disclosures as required by law and he did not know or have good reason to know such code, data, methods, and so forth would necessarily produce false results.
It is very interesting to see you come right out and admit you don’t care about Muir, Jones, Mann, et al needing to actually behave like scientists by actually using the scientific method and encouraging free public review. It has perhaps not dawned upon you that such comments on your part largely demolishes any hope of your earning respect for the credibility of your other comments and opinions outside of the community of AGW faithful.
As for Jones and the others being “scientists” worthy of being used in arguments from authority, good luck in pursuing that line of irrational argument. A scientist as a would be scientist does the scientific method. More than a few scientific experimenters will object to some of these people being described as anything more than pseudo-scientists, especially the post-normal scientists.
davidmhoffer says: November 4, 2011 at 4:05 pm
“If Trenberth had nothing to fear from Spencer’s paper, then why did he demand Wagner’s resignation”
You just make stuff up.
davidmhoffer,
Loved your (Nov 4, 405pm) Gordie Howe treatment of John MacManus’ garbage post. Not sure if he’ll read it, but I could feel how hard facts ran him into the boards from here. Brilliant!
Nick Stokes says:
November 4, 2011 at 5:07 pm
davidmhoffer says: November 4, 2011 at 4:05 pm
“If Trenberth had nothing to fear from Spencer’s paper, then why did he demand Wagner’s resignation”
You just make stuff up>>>
C’mon. Trenberth bragged about having extracted an apology from Wagner for allowing the paper to be published. Wagner resigned, and Trenberth was trumpeting the apology he personaly got from Wagner the next day or so. Sorry, but creative though I may be, the fact is, even I couldn’t make this stuff up.
S Basinger says:
November 4, 2011 at 5:35 pm
davidmhoffer,
Loved your (Nov 4, 405pm) Gordie Howe treatment of John MacManus’ garbage post>>>
Thanks! And bringing up Gordie Howe…
John MacManus;
Please add elbowing to the list.
Nick Stokes,
That the best you got? It was a question, not any kind of fabrication. Making stuff up is what the alarmist crowd does. Specifically, Michael Mann.
Next, rumleyfips is trying to explain away why the alarmist clique ignores the scientific method:
“I didn’t say code. I said methods.”
The scientific method cannot function without transparency. Now, thirteen years after MBH98 and its debunked hokey stick chart were hand-waved through the climate pal review process, Mann still refuses to provide all of his data, methodologies, code and metadata.
Transparency is necessary for the scientific method to function because it allows other scientists to use the same data and methods to either confirm or falsify a conjecture like MBH98. The fact that Mann withholds crucial information makes it clear that he knows his results will be promptly falsified if he provides the information. And his craven apologists argue to distraction, hoping the central issue of transparency is forgotten.
The truth is that the alarmist crowd is terrified of a properly functioning scientific method, because their cherished CAGW belief system will be falsified. AGW will be seen for what it is: a conjecture. It is not a theory [anyone who uses the term “AGW theory” doesn’t understand]. AGW is not even a hypothesis, because it cannot be falsified at this point. Maybe at some point AGW will become testable, but the only current argument for AGW comes from computer models [I happen to think that CO2 has a small and beneficial effect that warms the planet by a fraction of a degree]. But AGW is still a conjecture.
I challenge anyone to falsify my [testable] hypothesis:
At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless and beneficial.
As usual I expect to hear crickets chirping in response. But if anyone wants to take up the gauntlet, they must use the scientific method; testable, empirical evidence – not models – and provide solid evidence of verifiable global harm due specifically to human CO2 emissions.
Smokey, it is up to you to provide evidence for your hypothesis. Scientific method and all that…
@-Smokey says: November 4, 2011 at 6:34 pm
“I challenge anyone to falsify my [testable] hypothesis:
At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless and beneficial.”
At current and projected levels CO2 will cause some degree of climate change because of the extra downwelling IR that is measured. Even LIndzen and Spencer agree with that; the dispute is HOW MUCH warming.
So your hypothesis can be restated as –
Any change in climate and rise in global temperatures is harmless and beneficial.
– Unless you are starting with the hidden assumption that the measured changes in energy flux at the surface and TOA will have NO effect on the climate?
The idea that a warming of the climate is exclusively beneficial, or at least harmless is refuted by the historical problems of desertification and drought during past warmer climate periods.
Because human large-scale agricultural methods tend to assume a constant climate any change will tend to be disruptive, as with the warming and drought causing the dustbowl and depression of the 30s.
The hypothesis that global warming will ONLY be harmless and beneficial with NO negative consequences is not supported by the historical record.
However I suspect from the tenor of your previous posts that you do make this hypothesis with the hidden assumption that CO2 rising will have NO effect on the climate.
That is refuted by the measured change in the energy balance from OLR and DLR measurements.
The hypothesis –
ANY global warming of the climate will be harmless and beneficial to human civilization.
Is refuted by history.
The only way you could refuse to acknowledge this refutes YOUR hypothesis is if you explicitly add the hypothesis that rising CO2 has NO effect on the climate. Climate sensitivity to increasing surface IR energy is not just small, but zero.
Judith Curry recently had a series of threads dealing with this she called the ‘Dragon Slayer’ posts. They point out very effectively the idiocy of the ‘CO2 has no climate effect’ position. You might want to check them out.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/01/31/slaying-a-greenhouse-dragon/
Rattus Norvegicus says:
November 4, 2011 at 7:09 pm
Smokey, it is up to you to provide evidence for your hypothesis. Scientific method and all that…>>>
Past Smokey’s bed time I suspect. I’ll help you out Rattus.
1. Maximum plant growth occurrs at several thousand PPM of CO2 for the majority of plants, suggesting that they evolved at much higher concentrations of CO2 than we have now, but at similar temperature ranges.
2. If there was no CO2, all the plants would die, and we would starve to death, along with almost all the animal life on the planet.
3. In fact, the above would begin to happen at 180 PPM, the concentration at which most photosynthesis begins to shut down. This suggests that the estimated “normal” background range of 280 PPM of CO2 is dangerously low, and that thousands of PPM is much safer.
4. The ice core and other long term proxy data confirm that CO2 has been in the thousands of PPM in the past, that temps were very little more than they are today, but that the biosphere thrived at levels we haven’t seen since.
5. In the event that CO2 does provide warming of any measurable significance, Stefan-Boltzmann Law demands that very little will happen in the tropics, most of the warming (if it happens at all) would increase night time lows while changing day time highs very little, and warm winters while increasing summer temps very little in high latitudes. This is confirmed by historical and geological evidence showing that this was the case during those periods when the earth was slightly warmer than it is now, and that the biosphere not only thrived in the tropics despite the higher tems, but even more so in the higher latitudes.
6. Historical records clearly show that cold periods resulted in the fall of entire civilizations as a rule, while in warm periods civilizations not only thrived, but expanded across a greater portion of the earth.
Conclusions:
Low CO2 = bad.
No CO2 = Very VERY bad.
High CO2 = good.
Cold = bad
Warm = good.
Feel free to falsify.
Norway rat,
You don’t even understand the scientific method. The evidence for my hypothesis is that there has been no global harm from the rise in CO2. It is up to you to attempt to falsify my hypothesis. If you can, cowboy. Your evidence-free bickering is just impotent distraction. Put up your evidence, or shut up, rat.
Izen is not even wrong, he’s from another universe:
So your hypothesis can be restated as –
Any change in climate and rise in global temperatures is harmless and beneficial.
– Unless you are starting with the hidden assumption that the measured changes in energy flux at the surface and TOA will have NO effect on the climate?
Whoever said “no effect”? Answer: Izen, who typically tries to fabricate my stated position.
The idea that a warming of the climate is exclusively beneficial, or at least harmless is refuted by the historical problems of desertification and drought during past warmer climate periods.
Because human large-scale agricultural methods tend to assume a constant climate any change will tend to be disruptive, as with the warming and drought causing the dustbowl and depression of the 30s.
Once again Izen confuses local climates with global harm due to anthropogenic CO2. Izen needs to go back to school. A warmer planet = more evaporation = more precipitation. Cherry-picking one location and then extrapolating the result planet-wide is a typically mendacious tactic of the alarmist crowd.
“…YOUR hypothesis is if you explicitly add the hypothesis that rising CO2 has NO effect on the climate.”
Cut ‘n’ paste where I said that, Izen. Your juvenile attempts to set up strawmen and knock them down fails as always. If you’re goiung to dispute what I wrote, cut and paste exactly what I wrote, instead of restating it and fabricating it in your own corrupted terms.
Smokey,
Bedtime approaching here, but I’ll be back tomorrow. However, your job is to back up clause 2 of your hypothesis, that levels up to 560ppm (or there abouts) will have not harm. I can cite lots of studies to the contrary w/respect to crop plants…
Norway rat,
You have the scientific method backward as usual. It is up to you to falsify my hypothesis, it is not up to me to prove a negative.
Post any empirical, testable evidence [no models] of crops being harmed by CO2 levels of 560 ppmv. I look forward to easily countering anything you can find with much better evidence. I’d post it right now, but that wouldn’t be as much fun. ☺
Rattus Norvegicus says:
November 4, 2011 at 9:08 pm
” I can cite lots of studies to the contrary w/respect to crop plants…”
This I am dying to see, and will follow up. If you are proposing that elevated CO2 levels are not significantly beneficial to all plant life, you will need extraordinary evidence indeed to counter the massive literature attesting that they are.
While one occasionally hears that other factors can be limiting, this spurious objection overlooks the obvious fact that human farmers are continually, and successfully, looking for ways to optimize their crop yields, and many crops are already grown in near optimum conditions with few limiting factors other than the low ambient level of CO2, so that any increase in CO2 levels will improve the most limiting factor. Not to mention which elevated CO2 improves plants drought resistance by enabling the stomata to remain smaller while still obtaining sufficient CO2.
This is all well settled science, and is only denied by tinfoil hat wearers who think the moon landing was faked:)
davidmhoffer:
This thread seems to have moved on the the old add C02 to your grow op advice but , a few things.
Spenser’s error ,you say, was minor. By minor did you mean that his error was large enough to change the reality of global warming to the magical thinking of cooling? I thought you did. In this case Spenser scored on hid own net.
Spenser agreed almost immediately, you say. By almost immediately do you mean the delay for years before Spenser finally admitted to his error? I thought you did. In this case Spenser’s reputation was damaged by the delay of game penalty.
Trenerth is the leader of the modelers you say. There are quite a few models and quite a few modelers. Europe, Asia even gasp Canada. Spenser even has a model. Hard to believe that Spenser means Trenberth when he says ” take me to your leader”. Trenberth demanded a resigmation. Hochey fight and we all know how silly they are.
Speaking of all the modelers, some, not me of course, use the term hockey team. Since climategate , reading climate blogs every day I am always amazed by the new names that pop up. Someone will point out a new publication or a new conference with all new names. The name should be changed from hockey team to hockey league.
Speaking of hockey; Doesn’t Sydney Crosby remind you of Micheal Mann. Pennsyvania locations. Top players in their respective leagues. Both targets of cheap shots by players with less skill.
david, you seem antagonistic to Muir. How about Muller and BEST. Again , a scientist wanting to examine skeptically did not demand that Jones or Hansen spoon feed them.Much better than some silly line by line audit. The result showed that the warming is in the temperature record, not the code. A game winning goal surely.
Keep your stick on the ice:
John McManus
Robert E. Phelan November 3, 2011 at 6:07 am
“The university was prepared to hand over Dr. Michaels e-mails as soon as Greenpeace had paid a very modest processing fee.”
You need to get your facts sorted.
Climate Change and the Freedom of Information Act at U.Va.
J Bowers says: November 5, 2011 at 11:30 am
You need to get your facts sorted.
Climate Change and the Freedom of Information Act at U.Va.
Q: Did U.Va. give Michaels’ emails to Greenpeace?
A. No. After a series of emails and narrowing of the group’s request to reduce its costs, and a letter confirming what the amount of those costs would be, U.Va. heard nothing more from Greenpeace.
Uhh, and that contradicts my statement how? UVa did not resist the Greenpeace request and Greenpeace dropped their request after Cuccinelli filed his action.
Well that depends on what Greenpeace were asking for, and whether they were willing to accept emails with personal information and other FOIA exempt details redacted, or even not those emails that had any personal info at all. Do you know, or are you tarring Greenpeace with ATI’s brush? The emails ATI have so far have been let loose on the world with email addresses, etc, intact, which puts them one rung below the CRU hackers on the decency ladder, IMHO.
John McManus aka rumleyfips;
1. CO2 is pumped into greenhouses to increase FOOD production. Your drive by insinuation that I am handing out “grow op” advice is insulting, unfounded, and changes not one bit the fact that almost all plant life thrives in high levels of CO2.
2. Spencer’s errors, the ones he found in his own work and the ones found by others were minor in that they did not appreciably change the over all results. Your insinuation that I meant it as something else cannot be logicaly derrived from anything I said. Your suggestion to the contrary is testament to your willingness to put words in another person’s mouth in order to win an argument. If you cannot win an argument with a person based on what they said, then you expose yourself as just another troll pushing an agenda with nothing of value to bring to the debate other than disinformation.
3. I said Trenberth is the leader of the modeling community because he is. Check out his current position at the IPCC, a position to which he was elected by acclamation, and a position that controls the data and how it is used by the modeling community world wide provided that they play nice with Trenberth. Spencer published a paper that was not to Trenberth’s liking, and the editor of the journal (Remote Sensing), one Wolfgang Wagner, resigned, citing as the only flaw in the paper that “modelers” were not consulted. Nearly the next day, Trenberth began bragging the he had received a personal apology for allowing the paper to be published from Wagner. A bit of investigation turns up that Wagner heads the climate modelling group at Vienna University of Technology, and is managing a major modelling project that draws its data, and is beholden to, Trenberth’s committee at the IPCC. Anyone with half a brain who followed that sequence of events can see who did what, and exactly how much power Trenberth has, not to mention the willingness to use it.
4. No, Sydney Crosby doesn’t remind me of Michael Mann. One is a hockey player and the other a bully who demands we believe everything he says, but refuses to show us the proof of what he says.
5. Whining that I’ve said something in response to Muir, but not BEST is just childish. Muir made a claim and I responded. Your attempt at confusing the matter is another example of your unwillingness to debate the actual facts. I could as easily respond with “oh yeah, you quote BEST, but what about RSS?” It is a nonsense argument and simply an attempt to change the subject rather than admit that your current argument is riddled with holes.
Keep your stick on the ice John, but stop pretending you are an NHL prospect when you can’t even score a goal in Pee Wee unless you cheat.
rumleyfips said
November 5, 2011 at 11:10 am :
Again , a scientist wanting to examine skeptically did not demand that Jones or Hansen spoon feed them.Much better than some silly line by line audit. The result showed that the warming is in the temperature record, not the code.
Speaking of which, some time ago, I “hand-rolled” my own simple temperature anomaly gridding/averaging app. Wanted to see what a really “simple” minded gridding/averaging procedure (minus all the bells and whistles that NASA/CRU/etc throw in) would produce vs. the official NASA results. The app that coded up is simple enough to be broken down into a series of homework assignments for a first-year computer programming class. Ran both the *raw* GHCN and the recently released *raw* CRU data through it.
Here are the results: http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/2210/mycrumyghcnnasaghcn.jpg
My own results produced from the GHCN *raw* data are plotted in blue.
My own results with the recently-released CRU *raw* data are plotted in red-orange.
The official NASA/GISS land-temperature results (copied/pasted from the NASA/GISS) web-site are plotted in yellow.
In addition, I’ve experimented with the temperature data, comparing rural vs. urban, effects of the “dropped stations”, throwing out 90% of stations at random, etc., and the results have all been very similar. The bottom line is, no matter how you “slice and dice” the data, you get very consistent warming results. The fact that the results produced by my very simple-minded routine match NASA’s so closely is a very strong indication that all of the data adjustments/homogenization/whatever that NASA employs have very little impact on the final global-average results.
The global-warming signal in the temperature data really is quite robust, and does not depend on any kind of special “black magic” data manipulation techniques. A very straightforward gridding/averaging process applied to raw temperature data really will pull the global-warming signal out of the data quite nicely.
davidmhoffere:
So you now don’t refer tp Mann asart of the hockey team?
Good luck with that.
I don’t know or care about your horticultural pursuits. The fact is CO2 pumped into gro ops is a cultural icon. You know you can lead a whore to cultur but you can’t make a horse drink- or something.
By the way, do you have to slice Spencer’s model twice before it has no sidesÉ No it is alraedy pretty thin.
Keep your stick on the ice:
John McManus
ps. in climate `skeptisism the AKA is usually an epethit for someone not using their real name. My real name is John McMaanus. As Tony says I live in a rural backwater, The woods of Nova Scotia- he has checked up on me. Rumleyfips comes from use at other sites. Sorry to confuse you
J Bowers,
I read your link up to where it said:
“In November 2009, a computer at the University of East Anglia (UK) Hadley Climatic Research Unit was hacked…”
Incredible.
The Climategate email dump was clearly an inside job. Because if a hacker accessed the email system once, he could do it again and certainly would, given the publicity that resulted. Also, only selected emails were leaked. Many others were not, no doubt to protect the identity of the whistleblower.
The university is still posting the fiction that Michael Mann was exonerated in its fake investigation. If there is ever a real investigation in an adversarial setting, with witnesses for both sides being subpoenaed and cross-examined, Mann is going down for the count.
Smokie:
Don’t you think that an insider whistleblower would post all the stuff. The climategate emails wer e carefully edited( at some cost) so unsophisticated readers could make silly assertations. Anyone with an IQ above ambient temerature could see that the emails before and the emails after were not published.
Why? Well context would show .. nothing really.
So: huge slush funds financincing ( well they said they were talented) hackers and the best they could come up with was ( I paraphrase) I should punch that idiot ).
Good work.
John McManus
Caerbannog:
Glad to hear from you. I admire your work .
John McManus
Jaohn McManus/Rumleyfips;
The climategate emails wer e carefully edited( at some cost) so unsophisticated readers could make silly assertations.>>>
Bull. Not one of the authors of those emails has claimed that their words were edited. In fact the opposite. They’ve attempted to spin the meaning of what they said, but not a single one has claimed that the words in those emails were edited.
You’ve descended from semi-clever half truths to outright lies.
“The Climategate email dump was clearly an inside job.”
Smokey, you should send your evidence to the Norfolk Constabulary and the Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime unit. I’m sure they’d be quite fascinated to read it.
http://www.norfolk.police.uk/contactus.aspx
http://www.met.police.uk/pceu/index.htm
rumleyfips says:
November 5, 2011 at 12:47 pm
davidmhoffere:
So you now don’t refer tp Mann asart of the hockey team?
Good luck with that.>>>
Where in this discussion did I make reference to “the team” or Mann’s membership in it? I didn’t. Once again you put words in my mouth and then make a sarcastic remark. How about the legitimate issues I raised regarding things like sets of data inserted into data sets backwards? Why is it that you studiously avoid the actual issues while continuing to distract attention from those issues by just making stuff up?
rumleyfips;
I don’t know or care about your horticultural pursuits. The fact is CO2 pumped into gro ops is a cultural icon. You know you can lead a whore to cultur but you can’t make a horse drink- or something.>>>
You are debating climate issues on a climate site. The research into CO2 concentrations and how the effect plant growth is a major component of the debate. You are once again sidestepping the actual issue which is that there is substantive evidence that plants evolved for the most part in much higher concentrations of CO2 than what we are supposed to consider background levels. Commercial greenhouse operators world wide drive their CO2 concentrations into the thousands of PPM for the specific reasong that it dramaticaly improves production. These are scientific facts born out not just by experimentation, but by commercial greenhouse operations around the world which do what they do because it is profitable, not because it is politically correct. If you were to do some research into the matter and educate yourself some, you would know that this is a standard part of the climate knowledge base, and your attempt to paint me as a “grow op” operator shows either your ignorance of the issues, your blatant attempt to distract attention from the facts, or both.
rumleyfips;
By the way, do you have to slice Spencer’s model twice before it has no sidesÉ No it is alraedy pretty thin.>>>
It disagrees slightly with RSS which uses different satellite data and different methods. I’m assuming by “model” here you mean UAH. If you are referring to Spencer’s paper in Remote Sensing, that wasn’t a model, that was analysis of actual measured data. If you want to be credible at all (and so far you aren’t) you should start by learning the difference between the two.
rumleyfips;
keep your stick on the ice>>>
I wish you would. All I’m seeing is amateur hooking, slashing, spearing and remarks made from ignorance. Put up or shut up. I asked you or anyone else to defend the well known flaws in Mann’s work, specific flaws, and you’ve done nothing but change the subject with half truths and twisted logic and saracastic remarks rebutting things I never even said.
UVa did not agree to give any Emails immediately to Greenpeace or ATI upon payment of a fee to cover costs of EXAMINING the Emails to ascertain if any of them fell within the FOI definition. The response to Greenpeace (and a similar one to ATI) has an interesting paragraph
“Because of the breadth and scope of the FOIA request, it will take some time to complete the search of the records. Please understand that the cost estimate covers only accessing and searching for the requested records. There is no way for the University to predict the volume of records we may find that are, in fact, responsive to your request and are not protected from disclosure by law or for which a FOIA or other lawful exemption does not apply.”
In other words, please hand over your bank account.
The interesting aspect of the situation is this rather strange idea that the Climategate e-mails were allegedley stolen by the person who delivered them to the public. Look at it like this. The Climategate e-mail was subject to a FOIA type law, because the e-mail was public property as a consequence of being funded by public monies. CRU employees and perhaps others allegedley violated the FOIA law by deliberately and sometimes maliciously conspiring to withhold disclosure and delivery of the e-mail and even threatening to destroy the e-mail before permitting it to be released and disclosed to the public who paid for its production. The reality of the situation is that people like Phil Jones is on record threatening to take away the e-mail which was the rightful property of the public and hoarding it for their own selfish purposes. Doesn’t that make the thieves of the e-mail the very people responsible for taking possession of them away from the public who paid for them and had a right to possess them under the FOIA law/s? Why wouldn’t the Norfolk Constabulary be more interested in the theft of public property by the people caught converting public property to their personal use and obstructing the FOIA releases of the public property to the public?
J Bowers says:
November 5, 2011 at 3:45 pm
“The Climategate email dump was clearly an inside job.”
Smokey, you should send your evidence to the Norfolk Constabulary and the Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime unit. I’m sure they’d be quite fascinated to read it.>>>
For anyone with a background in Information Technology in general, and e-mail systems and security in particular, all the information that is public points strongly to an inside job. Circumstantial though the evidence may be, it is very strong, and there is little circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside hacker. In fact, if you consider cases of IT security breaches that were solved (for lack of a better term) the vast majority of them were either inside jobs, or else accomplished through the assistance of someone on the inside. A hack of this sort from outside, with no inside assistance, is almost unheard of in the real world. IT security breaches are nearly 100% inside jobs, or aided and abetted by someone on the inside.
rumleyfips;
“I don’t know or care about your horticultural pursuits. The fact is CO2 pumped into gro ops is a cultural icon.”
Not a cultural icon so much as common practice, in both legitimate and covert indoor growing setups. The reason is quite simple – regardless of the plant type, CO2 supplementation is extremely effective. I have seen nothing from either you or rattus to even attempt to contradict this. You claim you you can, but all you can do is make smart arsed comments about grow ops — does the fact that dope growers use CO2 mean it doesn’t work? If not, what point are you trying to make?
Try asking the many people who handled the released e-mails on the blogs and in the books, and you’ll likely find it was a relatively quick and very inexpensive effort. You exaggerate profusely.
Yes, we’ve already caught the whiff of your contempt and disdain for the readers. Of course, the “silly assertions” are your own.
Ah, there you go again with the arrogance of assuming your colossal intelligence endows you with an overwhelmingly superior insight into all that is worth knowing. I don’t suppose you would be interested in noting that a high IQ has been discovered by scientific researchers to make a person more prone to mental illness and erratic behavior, and a high IQ is not necessarily an indicator the person is capable of exercising good judgment or commonsense.
If you weren’t blinded by your own sense of superiority and intelligence, you might have realized someone or some people may already have more of the information and is just waiting for CRU hang their own reputations before releasing more of the information. Then again, perhaps it is safe for CRU and the others to continue on as before.
LOL, dream on. Never interrupt….
Well, if you know how they were financed, then you must already know exactly who “they” are and have reported their identities and method/s of financing to the Norfolk Constabulary. If not, then perhaps you need to retract the baseless accusation and apologize for attempting to mislead the readers. Also, the conspiracy to obstruct the disclosure of the public financed information subject to FOIA disclosure was an illegal act, which is substantially a greater offense than the mere insults and cowardly posturing as a bully with the threats to punch someone.
Oh, don’t worry Peter, I’m making a list and checking it twice!
davidmhoffer says:
“David Ball quips that Mann should be in the State Penn in stead of Penn State and Mann sues him. That’s a sense of humor?”
Well, l found it amusing. The biter bit and all that.
caerbannog666 (@caerbannog666) says:
November 5, 2011 at 12:35 pm
And not one shred of evidence that it has anything to do with Co2 or mankind. Everyone here has always maintained that the we are warming. The cause is the point of contention. Please try to keep up with the group.
You guys are very entertaining. Like watching Micheál Flatley dancing as fast as you can. It ain’t gonna help. The public are onto you and we are watching too.
@David Ball
caerbannog666’s analysis shows that the warming is real rather than an artifact of how someone else might have processed the data. That is all. It does not attempt to attribute the warming. You are wrong, however, to say that everyone here has always maintained we are warming. But perhaps what you are getting at is that there is no evidence that the “GW is predominantly A”. Well, there are mountains of evidence. Basic physics says CO2 is a GHG, hockey sticks (lots of them) show unprecedented warming relative to at least the last millennium, examination of natural factors show that they can’t explain the warming, etc., etc. The evidence is all around. The only way to not see it is to take the attitude, “I don’t want there to be AGW, so I will focus on any crumb of uncertainty or doubt while ignoring the huge mass of evidence I don’t like. Oh, and I’ll repeat some lies, too.”
David Ball said:
Everyone here has always maintained that the we are warming.
So the surface temperature record is good enough to conclude that the observed warming is real, but the cause is in dispute. Is that your take on this issue?
Don’t act like an idiot troll. We live in an interglacial period during one of the coldest and longest ice ages of the Earth’s past two billion years. If the Earth’s climate had not warmed during the last 10,000 years and longer, the Earth would have been trending closely towards becoming a frozen over iceball of a world. Since this post-glacial period warming is overwhelmingly obvious from every kind of anecdotal and other evidence in the millenia before the invention of the thermometer made it possible for any kind of an instrumental temperature record to exist, your strawman argument is idiotic and inappropriate in the extreme. Since the Earth’s climate has warmed precipitously every time there has ben an integlacial period without the presence of a human civilization, it must be expected that this most recent warming of the past 400 years is part of the ongoing interglacial period, otherwise another glacial period of the current ice age would be resuming ice age conditions. The Earth’s past natural variations in temperature and atmospheric dioxide levels are far larger than anything experienced since humans existed. Demonstrating that humans are capable of and have made any knid of significant contribution to the already existing and naturally occuring post-glacial interglacial period warming the Earth always experiences under such circumstances in the absence of human civilizations is the true issue in contention.
D. Patterson says:
November 6, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Don’t act like an idiot troll. We live in an interglacial period during one of the coldest and longest ice ages of the Earth’s past two billion years. If the Earth’s climate had not warmed during the last 10,000 years and longer, the Earth would have been trending closely towards becoming a frozen over iceball of a world. Since this post-glacial period warming is overwhelmingly obvious from every kind of anecdotal and other evidence in the millenia before the invention of the thermometer made it possible for any kind of an instrumental temperature record to exist, your strawman argument is idiotic and inappropriate in the extreme. Since the Earth’s climate has warmed precipitously every time there has ben an integlacial period without the presence of a human civilization, it must be expected that this most recent warming of the past 400 years is part of the ongoing interglacial period, otherwise another glacial period of the current ice age would be resuming ice age conditions. The Earth’s past natural variations in temperature and atmospheric dioxide levels are far larger than anything experienced since humans existed. Demonstrating that humans are capable of and have made any knid of significant contribution to the already existing and naturally occuring post-glacial interglacial period warming the Earth always experiences under such circumstances in the absence of human civilizations is the true issue in contention.
——————–
Dear D, It’s a question of timescales. In the geological past, “precipitous” may mean a change that takes a thousand years. The recent warming (which we all agree on, yes?) is beyond precipitous and is unprecedented in terms of rate of change – that is the point of the hockey sticks, all of them.
I will state it once again. You do not get to control the discussion. There is no evidence for attribution. I know what the data says.
John B says:
“The recent warming (which we all agree on, yes?) is beyond precipitous and is unprecedented in terms of rate of change…”
Wrong.
“…that is the point of the hockey sticks, all of them.”
Wrong again. The point of the hockey sticks is to generate grant money by alarming the public.
Quips about Penn State and the state pen are well founded.
It appears there are no bounds to what they will do to cover up the misdeeds of their employees..
Breaking news:
Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley, 57, and Gary C. Schultz, 62, senior vice president for finance and business at Penn State, are charged with perjury, a felony, and a summary offense of failure to report, a violation of the Child Protective Services Law.
Read more: http://www.centredaily.com/2011/11/05/2975648/attorney-general-indicted-penn.html#ixzz1cyfrZzNA
That is false nonsense. Even the warmist research papers have reported very abrupt climate changes of 7K in one to ten years on about a dozen occasions in just the Late Pleistocene to Holocene alone. As further research is conducted with some of these relatively recent and new developments in research capabilities, more and more evidence of abrupt climate and temperature swings are being discovered. Abrupt in these examples means climactic changes between glacial and interglacial conditions occurring in as little as a year to decades, rather than millenia.
Current changes are not in the least unprecedented, not even within the recent memory of the current generations. Even more rapid increases in temperature occurred on or about 1934 and perhaps about 1905, long before anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere became significant relative to current emissions. Members of our family remember very well how they had to supplement their water supplies from the rainfall in the cisterns, because the prolonged heat and drought had badly depleted the normally reliable well water supplies. My great grandparents and great-uncle, who was a U.S. Army surgeon with the AEF in France during World War I, described for me how the rapid warming of the climate affected their farm crops and the public health in the decades before the First World War.
The hockey sticks you mention are faulty fantasy models based upon false assumptions about incomplete and inaccurate data. They are incapable of accurately predicting natural or unnatural changes in climate in any centennial or less time frame.
“is beyond precipitous and is unprecedented in terms of rate of change – that is the point of the hockey sticks, all of them.” – This is a specious claim. Not even close to the truth and you know it. Monumental fail.
When I look at the Vostok graph, I see a long series of hockey sticks going in both directions. I don’t see anything different with our current blip.
@Al Gored: Timescales! Vostok will not tell you what happened over a few decades.
@D. Patterson: 1934??? Puh-lease! The only place 1934 was significant is the USA, and the USA is not world. I’m sure your family has aecdotes, but anecdotes are invariably local. The proxy record may be incomplete and uncertain, but when all the proxy studies largely agree, I’ll take that over your family’s, or anyone else’s, anecdotes.
No one claimed the Vostok ice cores would be used for such purposes in the last few decades. You’re being misrepresentative to avoid the obvious conclusion the data contradicts what you claimed.
There you go again trying to be clever and misrepresenting the comments again. 1905 and 1934 are within the coverage of the instrumental measurement period. 1934 was the warmest year in the instrumental period for the United States, so long as you reject recent attempts by Hansen and others to adjust the original temperature measurements to make them appear cooler than originally reported. In any event, the U.S. in the early 20th Century experienced slightly warmer or similarly warm temperatures as the end of the century and the beginning of the 21st Century, despite the alleged increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. The anecdotes were juust that, illustrating what the instrumental record already reported to us.
The proxy studies indicate the Earth went from glacial to interglacial conditions and interglacial conditions to glacial conditions during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene time and again in only one to ten years, which is very very abrupt. The temperature changes of the 20th and 21st Centuries are certainly not unprecedented in the least, whether looking at the most recent one million year time scale or the last one hunded year time scale.
PhilJourdan says:
November 4, 2011 at 4:47 am
Sorry bill, but you are just plain wrong. Perhaps it is because I have had Internet email since 1990, but I long ago learned that what you email on company time (or the tax payer dime) is not yours. I have no problem allowing any and all to see every email I have received and sent using company/state owned email servers. While I am sure they are not as exciting as the fiction in yours or Mann’s in and out box, mine have nothing to hide.
I suspect you mean “no one who has anything to hide wants all their emails to be released”. I figure most of mine have been viewed by people who they were not intended for, and I stand by everyone.
You mean like McKittrick who hides behind Canadian exceptions to their FOI law to keep his emails secret and has bragged about in blogs!
So, now you choosee to argue that e-mail which is lawfully entitiled to be held private must instead be released to the public, while e-mail which is lawfully required to be released to the public who funded their production must instead be kept private in the hands of public employees who conspired to unlawfully convert the e-mails to their own private use.
Somehow, I cannot say that I am surprised by your oxymoron thinking.
Phil – Sorry, did you get waylaid on the way to the post? I thought this blog was about Mann. Perhaps you need to take that right at Albuquerque? You know, the one where you try to divert the topic at hand?
I said my company email. I am not familiar with McKittrick’s email account since that subject is not part of this discussion. Perhaps you can ask Anthony if you can host a guest column where you can then create the topic of your choice. Until then, my statements stand, unmodified, and 100% accurate.
“Time to put up or shut up: Provide the link where can we download Mann’s MBH-98 data and code to independently verify his results. If you can’t, you’re done.”
izen said:
Not sure why you would want to mess around with data and code over a decade out of date to ‘verify’ the results of a paper that has not only been confirmed but significantly improved upon by more recent work, but “try this link for the code and data” –
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/codes/WA_original.tar
Thanks for a “teachable moment” that perfectly illustrates the controversy surrounding Mann and his colleagues. This does not link to Mann’s code or data, but instead to Eugene Wahl and Caspar Ammann’s “reproduction of Mann’s MBH 98 algorithm” (paraphrased from their paper’s introduction). Rather than release his data and methods for independent verification, Mann had his buddies “verify his results” and “interpret” his work for the rest of the scientific community. But this is “Pal Review” on steroids, not independent verification. It is however, part of what Phil Jones meant when he said he and Kevin Trenberth would “redefine the peer review process.”
Wahl and Ammann’s paper, (like MBH 98 and others that want to convince us that natural variation plays no significant role in temperature fluctuations in the last half of the 20th century), embodies the phrase “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with bullshit:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/refs/Wahl_ClimChange2007.pdf
I recommend reading it, but be warned: it’s clear as mud, filled with mind numbing obfuscation, and its utter lack of clarity makes it painful to read.
The point is that over a decade later, Mann continues to refuse to turn over taxpayer funded work. And from the sidelines, his supporters continue to try to confound, confuse, and misdirect us away from the point. Mann’s e-mails may show he committed financial fraud, they may show he committed scientific fraud, or they may show he did nothing wrong at all. In the end, his legacy won’t be his climate research, it will be his steadfast refusal to follow the scientific method. At this point, only complete disclosure of his data, methods, and e-mails can salvage his reputation.
D. Patterson says:
November 8, 2011 at 1:33 am
time scale or the last one hunded year time scale.
Phil. says:
November 7, 2011 at 4:55 pm
[….]
“You mean like McKittrick who hides behind Canadian exceptions to their FOI law to keep his emails secret and has bragged about in blogs!”
So, now you choosee to argue that e-mail which is lawfully entitiled to be held private must instead be released to the public, while e-mail which is lawfully required to be released to the public who funded their production must instead be kept private in the hands of public employees who conspired to unlawfully convert the e-mails to their own private use.
That is the argument being used by most here, UVA has released the emails which it is lawfully required to and is submitting those which it believes are entitled to be held private to adjudication by the court.