For those of you who don’t know of the blog Bishop Hill, let me say that he is a succinct and careful writer who has earned praise from many (including myself and Steve McIntyre) in taking a difficult niche subject such as the Hockey Stick and paleoclimatology and condensed into into a readable form for the layman. He’s also writing a book about it called: The Hockey Stick Illusion
In his latest post, Climate Cuttings 33, he gives a list of interesting issues he’s identified. I’ve reproduced it below for WUWT readers to consider. Be sure to visit his blog and have a look and drop an encouraging word. – Anthony
If you are interested in more on global warming material, check out Caspar and the Jesus Paper and The Yamal Implosion, or check out the forthcoming book.
General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.
In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I’ll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number.
- Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
- Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
- Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!
- Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news”.(1075403821)
- Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
- Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series”…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
- Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
- Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
- Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.(1255352257)
- Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap.(1257532857)
- Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
- Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)
- Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’. (1054736277)
- Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
- Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good” scientists condemn it.(1254756944)
- Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
- Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)
- Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
- Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.(1106338806)
- Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)
- Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)
- Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)
- Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)
- Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)
- Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)
- Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)
- Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)
- Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers – Saiers was subsequently ousted]
- Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
- Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)
- Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)
- Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)
- Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)
- Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)
- Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)
- Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)
- Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)
- Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)
- Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)
- Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
- Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)
- Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)
- Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)
- David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)
- Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)
- Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr “I’m not entirely there in the head” will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)
- Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306)
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The CRUtape Letters.
As steven mosher has named them.
REPLY: Too late. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climategate
-A
Geoff Sherrington (01:43:33) :
The one of most concern to me is the above 1228330629.txt
————–
Here they are also conspiring to fake the true author(s) of a comment to a major journal to avoid obvious conflict of interest.
What I am truly amazed with is that fact that their institutions appear to be supporting them in these conspiratorial acts which will not only drag them into it if civil suits for damages are filed, but will provide bigger targets for class action lawsuits. I wonder what kind of litigation and Directors and Officers insurance these institutions have??
Good post.
A particular email I’d like to highlight is from Briffa discussing how statistically derived uncertainty swamps the delta Ts associated with long term global changes. Its one of many emails that show efforts to make the pictures show the message they want to give. I realize its ok to show data in ways that are clear to a broader audience, but it can be a fine line between that and data manipulation. I think a conclusion one can make from the below email is that the temperature estimations based on tree rings and other methods they used are not accurate enough to make any conclusion about global temperature trends.
From: Keith Briffa
To: Jonathan Overpeck ,Eystein.Jansen@xxxx
Subject: Fwd: new fig
Date: Fri Feb 3 14:31:09 2006
Peck and Eystein
we are having trouble to express the real message of the reconstructions – being scientifically sound in representing uncertainty , while still getting the crux of the information across clearly. It is not right to ignore uncertainty, but expressing this merely in an arbitrary way (and as a total range as before) allows the uncertainty to swamp the magnitude of the changes through time . We have settled on this version (attached) of the Figure which we hoe you will agree gets the message over but with the rigor required for such an important document. We have added a box to show the “probability surface” for the most likely estimate of past temperatures based on all published data. By overlapping all reconstructions and giving a score of 2 to all areas within the 1 standard error range of the estimates for each reconstruction , and a score of 1 for the area between 1 and 2 standard errors, you build up a composite picture of the most likely or “concensus” path that temperatures took over the last 1200 years (note – now with a linear time axis). This still shows the outlier ranges , preserving all the information, but you see the central most likely area well , and the comparison of past and recent temperature levels is not as influenced by the outlier estimates. What do you think? We have experimented with different versions of the shading and this one shows up quite well – but we may have to use some all grey version as the background to the overlay of the model results. We have also experimented with changing the normalisation base for the model/reconstruction Figure , but using the same short modern period as for the first Figure is not satisfactory
– more on this later. We have added in Oerlemans curve as many insisted – but we only have the GLOBAL curve – can you get the separate North and Southern Hemisphere curves (with uncertainty) . I do not see that the new model runs from Germany/Switzerland will fit easily in the existing Figure and need to be separate! I am really struggling with the text also – really need more time!!!! More later
Keith
Some overall observations from someone who has watched this phenomenom since the early 1980s — the emails don’t surprise me at all. In fact, given that near the present there are requests to start deleting emails, I’d speculate that some or even most of the damning ones were already deleted and the mole/hacker was aware of this and had to act before they were all gone, therefore the timing.
The emails just confirm what was already obvious — the “team” members have considerable if not complete control of a number of publishers, and used the usual post-modern strong-arm tactics to quell dissenters — blackmail, blacklisting, firing, character-asassination, etc, etc (in the Soviet days they would just be sent off to the “gulag”, or disappear). Of course they have the complete cooperation of the MSM, the new form of the old Soviet Pravda, which was just another arm of the ruling elites.
One thing that should’ve been obvious to me but is still angering is the extravagent spending of public funds for traveling all over the world constantly for this or that conference. Using their own definitions, I wonder what their “carbon-footprints” are? Certainly hundreds of tons per person/yr. Hypocrites much? Don’t do what I do, do what I say.
These are not “scientists”, they’re a post-modern form of the old elitist “political officers” of the Communist nations.
Peter (06:25:12) :
Given this, the fact that the 1K record does include the MWP, as well as the the fact that they put both “contain” and “MWP” in quotes, I am left in no doubt as to the true meaning of that statement.
Well, I wish you’d say what that “true meaning” is. But you’re wrong about 1K including (or containing) the MWP. Wiki defines it as from 800-1300. Some authors set the peak in the 900’s. Mann says that he’s extending the analysis from 1000 yrs to 2000 to “contain” the “MWP”. As PC says, the obvious meaning is to make sure that the period in question is included. I can’t see your sinister version. The fact that Mann is sceptical about the MWP (as is well known) is irrelevant.
Following my earlier comment (07:17:30) about Tim Osborn’s 1960 truncation (Bishop’s item 3) – I now see that what he said was just a paraphrase of what is said in Briffa 2001:
“The period after 1960 was not used to avoid bias in the regression coefficients that could be generated by an anomalous decline in tree density measurements over recent decades that is not forced by temperature”
You don’t have to hack into emails to find that.
Cast your eyes upon P. Jones and decide if what you see is the face of an honest, straight forward, decent sort of chap, or what?
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/pjones/
[snip]
Thanks to Bishop Hill, we now have the beginnings of a Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) that we can start to believe in.
I suspect this whole story will get more coverage at:
1. Fox News / Beck / Hannity/ O’Reilly
2. WSJ
3. Talk Radio / Rush / Levin / Hannity etc.
4. Lord Monckton
5. The rest of the blogs
6. US Senators Like Inhofe
7. Congress
8. Libertarian think tanks, publications etc.
Which means there will be a lot mounting pressure to conduct an investigation.
Phil Jones has lost control of the PR, and the CRU unit. His days are numbered.
A bit OT, but have you noticed that RC are now allowing all sorts of comments in?
Are they trying to appear open and transparent, or are they trying to convey the impression that nobody seriously questioned the ‘science’ before this story broke?
Yes, knowledgable commentary is needed. For example, a new model result showing a 6C rise in temperature is getting play at Slashdot. I do hope people join me there in pointing out just how these models have little predictive power.
I also think there are a lot of scientists who can claim they’ve been unfairly damaged by the bias against them, and have had their reputations illegally riuned by the underhandedness of Jones and Co.
Lawsuits are brewing…
A few general points that occur to me here in Blighty re climate science:
1. peer review in the traditional sense has gone. The only effective peer review that takes place is on the internet at sites like this and CA
2. the traditional sources of news – the BBC, the Times and the other MSM outlets are no longer trustworthy. As the public realises this, more and more people will find their news on the web. This is bad news for MSM who (apart from the BBC) are funded by advertising and need to sell copy. When the tide turns you just watch them jump on board.
3. the CRU revelations will not of themselves stop the AGW bandwagon. One of the major weaknesses of the anti AGW camp is that it is not organised. A lot of disparate voices calling out in the wilderness. You need an international voice. This has never been about the science. It is about politics. I hate to say this but you need to be a political force.
4. there are still far too many ill-informed believers in the world. You need to find a way of getting to them in the absence of MSM coverage. Maybe email can help. Hence the need for some kind of organisation/framework
5. little point in wasting time arguing the toss with true believers. They will never be converted. The arguments should always be aimed at the floating voters.
and remember ‘in carbon we trust’
here ends this mornings sermon
Bishop Hills compendium is an excellent place to start with academic/legal sanctions against the motley criminal crew. Pierre Goslin expresses the rage I feel and am reading about on the part of others in a rational and realistic way.
P Gosselin (05:24:43) :
This is my open statement to the climate swindlers at CRUGATE:
WE’RE COMING AFTER YOU!
YOU CAN RUN, DUCK, & HIDE ALL YOU WANT.
BUT WE WILL NOT STOP. WE’RE CHARGING HARDER THAN EVER BEFORE NOW. OUR NUMBERS ARE HUGE AND THEY ARE GROWING. YOU’RE ON THE RUN, AND WE WILL DO WHAT ARMIES DO WHEN THEY HAVE THEIR OPPONENTS ON THE RUN. THAT’S RIGHT – IT’S GONNA BE REAL MESSY FOR YOU.
AND LAWSUITS ARE ON THE WAY.
Ecotretas (05:15:23) and Plato Says (5:52:56) have both linked to a list of the 619 contributing authors of Working Group I of the IPCC Fourth assessment Report, Annex 2 (from 2007) compiled by Jim Prall, who though not an academic considers himself “scientifically literate” — minored in math; read the Sci Am cover to cover. He is on the computer support staff at University of Toronto.
Mr. Prall who is aggressively GREEN might just have given real scientists and fellow sceptics an excellent list for investigation of use of fraudulent data in their research and whether or not they provided their data and mehods in their cited research papers. Prall gives year of Ph.D. and how many citations in so-called-climate-science they have.
What might happen to these pseudo-scientists (religiously green)? Someone suggested their Ph.D.s could be withdrawn by their academic institutions? Financial penalties perhaps — returning all that grant money used to falsify science while becoming part of the jet set (wow! pseudo-scientists with money to jet around the world to fantastic tourist places in style, with a retinue and warm-welcoming colleages)? A little time in jail so they can do penance for committing crimes while confusing green-climate-change-CO-evil-AGW-religion with science?
BRING IT ON!
these so called awg scientists sound like the german doctors writing research papers about the how healthy diets in concentration camps are reducing the rate of heart attacks and obesity.
It goes on, the Copenhagen shebang.
Merkel and Sarkozy still pushing for binding agreement, blah blah.
Heads in the sand, singing lalala.
But then again it was never about real science was it?
Realists/Deniers are supposed to be backed by big oil………..AGW mongers get real big government grants – so we can put that argument to bed.
It was never about a grown up attitude, cos if you were grown up, then you can suffer criticism and still smile, content in the knowledge that your data is sound and tested, open to public scrutiny……….or not it seems.
Post similar updates to your local blogs. Ask your local media to cover this story. Call your reps and senators, etc. This is the opportunity to spread the story of bias and lack of science behind AGW, far and wide.
Let’s stop this agenda driven cadre before they do any more economic damage.
***********
geronimo (04:39:16) :
The politicians, with the exception of Inhofe, and Smokin’ Joe Barton in the US will remain silent because they are all now on board the AGW train and plans are being made to spend the carbon taxes.
*************
It is not correct that all US politicians are “on board.” I have already sent this information to my Congressmen. The sooner we start and the more persistent we are, the better.
We all know the MSM won’t get the word out – not anytime soon. But there is greater power to disseminate info on the internet than the MSM. Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc…
There are also still active university online communities using other types of feeds – anyone using these get this on the feeds. The wider this gets using networking techniques, the sooner the MSM won;t be able to ignore it any longer. How many university scientists are really going to defend the kinds of behavior in this?
Anyone who has accounts on any of the social networking sites – get the word out there. I have posted the link to this articles summarizing Bishop Hill’s compendium with a comment about the incredible dishonesty involved.
Anyone who follows the link will see the quite compelling summary sentences in this article – and that will prompt them to want to read more (unfortunately, sizzle sells – and those summary lines definitely sizzle.)
I believe that honesty and transparency are important. Accordingly, I must reveal that I have sent a letter to various Federal agencies charged with investigating drug abuse to determine if the leaders and commenters on this blog are consuming illegal psychotropic drugs. There is clearly no other explanation for the elaborate and quite fanciful alternative realities that you continue to construct here.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but how do we fix this? You know that come Monday Jones, Mann, and compatriots will be in the office preparing their next doctored climate series, plotting retribution, smooth talking the FOI people, and generally whining they look bad. Meanwhile they show commercials in Britain that scare the H**l out of children. Any Idea how to reform the ssystem so that the conversation that is science can resume?
Patrick Davis (01:15:43) :
Still no MSM coverage here in Australia.
I think one reason this story isn’t all across the mainstream media is because they don’t understand what has happened. We who understand the global warming issue know how unbelievable this story is. But everyone else can’t see it.
What the media needs is someone to break it down in to such simple terms that even a 3rd grader would easily understand.
Then the MSM will be just as amazed as we are.
WaPo!
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/11/22/wapo-reports-on-hadley-e-mails-global-warming-controversy/
This story is growing legs.
The media tried to ignore Acorn-prostitute story, and looked stupid not doing so.
They aint gonna repeat that mistake.
Thomas J Arnold
They can’t keep that up without soon looking stupid and dettached.
The German public media is criminal in its refusal to cover this story. They’ve shirked their responsibility to cover the story in a balanced manner. It’s BBC / NYT.
Yet, it would be hard to imagine modern day Germany without the saintly endeavour and mission of protecting the climate.
The German media and politics run a big risk of looking totally foolish.
“Still no MSM coverage here in Australia.”
Is the new australian climate sceptic party aware of this???????/
http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/
A goldmine for them.