Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released

MR IPAC AND THE VILLAGE WATER TOWER
An allegory for the era of Climate Change
Mr Ipac had the latest computer. It was very fast. One day it came into its own.
The problem began in the large structure in the centre of the village. On top was a water tank providing water to the entire village through a network of clay pipes embedded in the building and the ground. Beneath was a large granary, holding most of the village’s food supplies.
A patch of damp appeared in the store. It soon spread to become a full-scale leak. The logical suspect was the water tank and an expert was called in. He examined the system thoroughly, took measurements and then brought his report to the elders.
To understand what is happening, he advised, we need to grasp the Claypipe Water Theory. This is established science and tells us that a clay pipe is semi-porous, meaning that it can carry water without leaking but that when under the pressure of a water pump will lose a measurable amount of water. You are today pumping just over 3,000 gallons of water a day into and out of the tank, and measurements show that you must expect to lose about a cupful or 20 centilitres daily. You need to work out what that will do to your food store over the next ten years and decide if you need to take action.
So it was the Mr Ipac was asked to program his computer with the equations of the Claypipe Water Theory, add in the data and produce the forecast. To do this he had also to get the results of measuring the actual amount of water accumulating in the store. This yielded an answer that was at first surprising. For every cupful known to be leaking from the pipes, three cupfuls were to be found in the store.
The expert again consulted said that he could define the result but that there was no theory comparable with the Claypipe Water Theory to provide a reliable explanation. Observations indicated that there was ‘positive feedback’, meaning that the leakage of a cupful of water then went on to have a secondary effect that added another two cupfuls. A possible explanation, though one not yet demonstrated, might be that the initial leakage changed the porosity of the masonry allowing the ingress of water from the heavy rainfall of the monsoon. In any case the existence and volume of this addition to leakage to the store was not in doubt and needed to be programmed into the computer.
The result was alarming. In ten years the store might expect to be flooded to the depth of three feet. The depth could be as high as five feet and was most unlikely to be less than two. Action was imperative if disaster was to be avoided. The only feasible action to address the primary cause had to be a reduction in the number of gallons pumped each day. In other words water rationing was unavoidable.
The elders knew this would be difficult to agree, as water was not just necessary for washing and drinking but for the livelihoods of most of the villagers. It was disturbing therefore to find there was opposition in the shape of ‘deniers’ who disputed the cause of the leakage and sought to refute the evidence that it was the villagers’ consumption of water that was responsible. So strong was the feeling that this was a moral and not merely a scientific aberration that throwing such people out of the village was contemplated.
Plans therefore progressed for a major meeting of the elders to resolve the matter and bring in rationing. This was accompanied by intensive publicity and the date was set for an event towards the end of the third year of the crisis.
In the meantime however there was an unexpected development. The ingress into the store abated to a trickle, no longer yielding three cups for each pipe leakage of one, but instead barely a third of a cup. The evidence of positive feedback had reversed to become one of negative feedback.
The expert was again consulted. He pointed out that the original estimation of the feedback leakage was not based on an established scientific principle, as was the primary leakage attributable to the Claypipe Water Theory, but depended for its explanation on guesswork. The evidence on which that was based was solid but the science was not. Again he could only offer an opinion as to possible causation, not any scientific certainty. The most likely reason for the current reduced level of leakage to the store lay in the combination of a greater incidence of sunshine and a change in wind direction causing a drying out of the masonry rather than the previous addition to its moisture content. What was however certain was that the view that positive feedback would triple the ultimate effect of claypipe leakage was no longer supported by the evidence.
The elders in the meantime, having validated that the computer hardware was fault free, asserted that, irrespective of any new evidence, the tenets of the Claypipe Water Theory MUST apply and that the three foot water level forecast remained the basis for their deliberations.
At the meeting villagers were permitted to attend but not to speak. Despite this however, one villager, who in the past had nearly earned himself banishment as a denier, insisted on being heard. What he had to say was heard in dumbfounded silence.
The computer program upon which so much reliance is placed produces the result it does solely because it has been programmed to do so. Examination of the code will show that the assumption of high levels of positive feedback have been embedded in the code thus predetermining the outcome irrespective of the data fed to the system. Since that section of code is entirely evidence based, and in no way depends on the Claypipe Water Theory for support, it must be rewritten to reflect new evidence. If that is not done the conclusions drawn from it will be nonsense.
He now proposed a motion to throw out Mr Ipac’s computer and revert to the application of common sense.
The motion was carried. Water is not subject to rationing and the village continues to flourish. There is however now an advertisement on the village notice board for a computer being sold very cheap. For scrap.
David Fairbairn 8th December 2009

It’s incredible how the ‘deniers’ in these posts show such glee over this. It’s like they finally have a chance to say ‘global warming is nothing to do with me’ as they look in their childrens and grandchildrens eyes. Man, I would love to think it isn’t real myself…but I am not convinced 100% either way because there are so many vested interests on both sides, although on balance the greater benefit is to the business lobby. Also, it seems there is at least there is some wider consensus that there is global warming of some description, so it’s not like the issue has suddenly gone away and we can sit back and relax. The reality of global warming by whatever means is not good news and will lead to all manner of misery. We need to have honesty about whether it is a reality or not, regardless of the cause.
Having read through alot of the emails, including those that all the fuss is over, I still don’t think there is much evidence of conspiracy. People in the US certainly would miss alot of the obvious irony and (black) humour in these emails. Talk of blocking FOIA requests looks to be just people expressing exasperation at the interruption and hassle it involves, and the intrusion into something they’ve devoted years on. Also the data manipulation is something many people would be familiar with and it doesn’t mean it is done with any mal-intent. I have had situations where reporting figures have to be manipulated because for some unforeseen reason one of the inputs is unavailable or corrupted, so you just fudge it based on the historical trend, otherwise the report would be nonsense, and you’d face endless questioning over something you know is not really an issue. The effect of that fudged data doesn’t negate the whole data in anyway.
Note that I am just as skeptical about any massive global issue like this. It is the classic way of introducing unwelcome change by making it ‘inevitable’. Now the question becomes ‘who would benefit?’. The deniers seem convinced that it is a conspiracy to increase taxes. This could well be true, and there’s nothing new in the way governments can get creative around ways to increase the tax base, often (usually?) in league with large corporates who outsource the business. The cap and trade business is certainly a huge potential generator of money, and the oil companies are going to be big players in that as a way of offsetting their loss in profits from the decline in oil and gas supplies. Both the government and corporations are going to have to find new ways of funding further exploration for oil and gas and new alternatives somehow now that they’ve blown a couple of generations worth of tax on bank and auto industry bailouts. And if oil and gas is as close to or has reached the decline stage, then reality is that industrial society will have to be massively down-sized. It may just be that the climate change issue is being used to prepare us for this.
In any case, the next decade or two will see a totally different world emerge. What shape it will take is what matters, and whether it will be introduced democratically or not. Can’t say I’m optimistic on that note.

The forecast of global warming of 3 degrees or more rests entirely on the acceptance of two propositions. The first is that there is an initial injection of heat from the doubling of CO2 of about 1 degree. The Greenhouse Gas axiom asserts that this MUST occur, and that if it occurs it MUST be down to CO2.
The second is that this gets amplified by ‘positive feedback’ and that the impact is a further 2 degrees of warming.
It is necessary to accept BOTH these propositions to support the forecast. BOTH have been the subject of trickery that can be and should be exposed.
The meaning of ‘global temperature’ has been flipped when quoting the Greenhouse Gas axiom. When the same meaning is used in the axiom and the conclusion it is no longer true at all that CO2 MUST be responsible.
In the second case it has been stated that there is ‘CO2 feedback’ that is positive. It is demonstrably NOT CO2 feedback but heat feedback and that has been shown beyond doubt to have been negative over many millenia.
Check the words. Check the logic. You will see this is right.
David Fairbairn
CLIMATE AND WORDS
In a 100 years it will be 3 degrees C warmer. At least. That is what the IPCC tells us. There is a machine, a model, in fact several versions of it to give us the answer.
I am no engineer. I rely on the engineers to tell me. But I look at the machine and know it is wrong. Not wrong in the sense that the engineers would find it wrong. I don’t know enough engineering to do that. But I do know it is missing the front wheels. Both of them. It cannot work. Maybe I should tell someone.
I do know something about one part of the machine. It is the computer part. In fact I am a bit of an expert and that made me look closely.
Some time back the government asked me to take a look at why these computers fail. Especially the big ones. It made sense to ask me then as I was Director of the National Computer Centre. I headed up the work. It was though some real experts on the team who did the work and came up with the answer. That answer was at the time perhaps a little surprising. Not any more.
It wasn’t the data that went into the computers. People are not that stupid. Nor are those feeding in climate data. It wasn’t the machinery of the computers. When it comes to adding up they don’t get it wrong. It wasn’t the processes or rules put in to the programs. Scientists don’t get natural laws and axioms of physics wrong.
It was the logic. Logic means words. Especially in Greek. Computers are fed a diet of words. Numbers are identified and given a meaning by words. Words set out the rules that link one word with another.
If you suspect a computer system has got it wrong, look hard at the words. Nearly always that will lead you to the nonsense. All that is necessary to trash a system is to confuse the words. Use the same words to label what is different and the computer, being a dumb sort of beast, will give you a wrong answer.
In London at a restaurant we get the bill and may pay with a cheque. In New York you get the check and pay with a bill. Feed that to a computer and watch your accounting system collapse.
So I look for words. I may not be very clever as an engineer but I just listen to those who are and take their word for it on the engineering bit.
That is what I bring to the party. I took a good look at the IPCC climate system, checked the words and the front wheels fell off.
The first wheel was fairly easy. It was obvious. The second more difficult.
There are only three bits we need to look at. Two nouns and one verb. The verb is a process or scientific theory.
Word one describes the warming itself. Global temperature. It is the first noun in what the IPCC says about climate change. It is clear what it is. It is the readings from a lot of thermometers placed in the atmosphere close to the surface. They add these up in East Anglia and give us the result. It is about 14.5 degrees C. It has gone up half a degree. Not much doubt what we are talking about.
Word two, the next noun, is not so easy. ‘Anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations’. However with the aid of a dictionary we can get that too. They mean CO2, and especially the stuff we emit. It has gone up in the air from about 285 parts per million to 385. Clear enough.
And then there is the verb. The Greenhouse Gas Theory. That connects these two nouns, or says it does. It goes like this. We have a hot sun over there radiating energy. We have the globe, which is us, over here receiving it. In between we put some CO2 . This has the effect of keeping some of that energy from getting away again. The globe gets hotter. That is what the engineers tell us. So in my book it is true.
However, having a bit of a thing about words, which is what I do, I ask the silly question. What gets hotter? The globe of course. What goes up? Global temperature. So that’s what you feed into your computer. Yes, of course.
Got it! Same words, different things. The temperature the guys in East Anglia are carefully adding up to put into the computer is not the temperature of this large, spherical globe at all. That globe is at least 100 times hotter and in any case the word describes something with 1.2 million times the mass of the atmosphere on the surface.
The crisp £10 note has gone into our computer labelled as an invoice, and the annual accounts are up the creek.
Does it matter? Well the engineers can tell us that, but it looks to me as though our car has a problem with one wheel missing. For a start the idea that it has got to be noun2 bringing about a change in noun1 goes by the board. There are a whole lot of other nouns in the dictionary.
However I didn’t stop there. Looking at words gets addictive. Moreover there was another wheel looking a little wobbly.
So lets ask about this addition of heat. We know how it gets there. It is this Greenhouse Gas effect. The CO2 up there effectively delivers a belt of heat. Let’s label it with the words CO2 Direct. Is that the lot? No, there is another belt to come, in fact a succession of them. That is CO2 Feedback.
How does that work? I am not an engineer but it would be as well to understand what is happening. It goes like this. Some more CO2 gets into the atmosphere. We put it there. The CO2, being a greenhouse gas, makes heat. It sends the heat to the oceans. The oceans get warmer. The ocean sends out greenhouse gas (mostly water vapour but some CO2). This gets added into the atmosphere. And so it happens again. And again and again and again. No wonder the engineers want us to be worried.
So that is CO2 Feedback. But do we know that this is what actually happens? Can we work that out from what happened in the past? Can we put it to the test?
The answer is unfortunately not. Or perhaps only maybe. Having CO2 go shooting up like that is not something we have been able to see and measure. It is ‘unprecedented’. Just look at the hockey stick. Or perhaps better not as that is a bit over the top. But its true anyway. So we are stuck with it. CO2 Feedback happens.
Time to look at the words. We have to accept it happens because it is a feedback of CO2 increase and that is something new. So can’t deny it or prove that it doesn’t. But is that right? Are those the right words. Another stupid question.
Another rather obvious answer. It isn’t the CO2 that gets the oceans coughing up the feedback. It’s the heat. And then more heat so it does it again. It looks like it isn’t a CO2 Feedback after all. It’s a Heat Feedback.
There is a simple test. Simple enough for even a non-engineer to do. Get out a large hairdryer and make the original heat blast that way. Not a CO2 injection just plain hot air. Is the feedback any different or exactly the same?
We have our answer. The words are wrong. It is indeed a Heat Feedback. Moreover it matters.
It matters because we can very easily test whether Heat Feedback is positive or negative. There are plenty of examples of heat bouncing up and down between ice ages and warmings. But the message we get is clear. If there is positive feedback it doesn’t stay that way for very long. Of one thing we can be sure. It is negative feedback that wins out.
We may guess that CO2 Feedback is positive. We may claim that noone can prove otherwise. But in the case of Heat Feedback we know it proves to be negative and have the data that shows it.
But what we fed into our computer was CO2 Feedback. What we got was the wrong answer.
It doesn’t just matter. It matters a lot. CO2 Direct is responsible for only about a third of the warming. About 1 degree C out of 3. That is what the engineers tell me. The other 2 come from positive feedback. That is what the computer says. But the computer has been given the wrong word.
So I don’t really know about the science but I do know about the words. I know too about what a computer does with muddled words like that.
It is time to get to work on the vocabulary. Get the words straight. Attend to the logic. Then perhaps I can believe what the engineers, with their heads buried in their computers, are telling me.
In the meantime I can try and work it out for myself. There is a lot else besides CO2 emissions out there. There are many natural forces doing their thing to push temperature up. It hasn’t GOT to be CO2 after all. Furthermore the only bit of that we can rely on is the direct effect. That looked like being 1 degree C ten years back, but rather less on current form. The feedback of 2 degrees C, which I now see is a heat feedback, hasn’t persisted in the past and certainly isn’t doing so now.
I will buy about one tenth of what the IPCC has been saying, and maybe double that to be safe. Beyond that if I want that sort of advice I will go to a fortune-teller not an IPCC propagandist.

“Mind you…there have been big in-roads to academic institutions over recent decades by the corporates… or than most are aware of (or care about).
In the mean time I’ll maintain a level of scepticism and a distance from either persuation. Follow the money, there you’ll find the real benefactors of this intrigue.”
And far, far vaster inroads into academia by government- the 800-pound gorilla of research funding. Do you really think governments don’t have agendas, or aren’t willing to pay to get the results they want?
More to the point: the billions being spent on climate science are entirely a function of Impending DOOM! If it were ever admitted that there’s nothing catastrophic going on, then Mann, Jones & Co, can wave bye-bye to their huge grants, splashy international conferences and caviar wedges, and return to what climate science was before Rio- a sleepy, forgotten academic backwater.
It’s no longer relevant to wonder whether inducements might exist to make the CRU crew lie and fabricate: we now KNOW that they lie and fabricate.

“I suspect this climate issue could have at it’s root the need to cut back industrial society due to energy constraints. The prospect of that is just as scary as climate change once you really analyse the implications of it. It can be interpreted as a ‘doomer’ scenario and I’m sure alot of people would see it that way. Denial is a very powerful mental defense. I would like to do that, it’s easier. But I think it’s important to have a fuller mental map and respond accordingly, accepting responsibility if you like, but being aware that the ‘bogeymen’ are sometimes just shadows, other times worse in the reality.”
I have the same suspicions aswell, this is a very serious hypothesis that few people have taken into consideration.

I take your points about the World Bank and IMF, Peter, but the money was not to be as loans. It was supposed to be gifted by the rich to the poor nations because the rich are responsible for the CO2 emissions that are destroying the world, sinking the poor countries etc yawn etc.
My fear was that any money gifted would either finish up in personal Swiss or Canary Islands bank accounts in the time-honoured way of aid to poor countries. Or else it would be put to use the other way despots and dictators use aid money–to buy arms and armies to prop up their corrupt regimes.
It is a fact that many loans from the developed world to the undeveloped come with strings attached that a certain percentage of the loan must be used to buy armaments from the donor country.
I guess that’s a bit off topic. Whatever the reasons the poorer nations certainly smelled a rat and Copenhagen came to a predictable non-outcome.