From Andrew Bolt, my “mate” down under at the Herald Sun, comes this surprise. I’ll have to say, it is to George Monbiot’s credit to do this. I embrace his first statement, because it succinctly sums up the situation:
It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
– George Monbiot on his personal blog
George seems to realize that, “it’s worse than we thought”.
From Andrew Bolt:
Even George Monbiot, one of the fiercest media propagandists of the warming faith, admits he should have been more sceptical and says the science now needs to be rechecked:
It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.
Sure, Monbiot claims the fudging of what he extremely optimistically puts as just “three or four” scientists doesn’t knock over the whole global warming edifice, yet…
If even Monbiot, an extremist, can say that much, why cannot the Liberals say far more? And will now the legion of warmist journalists in our own media dare say as Monbiot has so belatedly:
I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.
Scepticism is the essential disposition of our craft, yet too many journalists have abandoned it. Remember: the opposite of sceptical is gullible.
UPDATE: Here’s the screencap from Monbiot’s blog on the Guardian:
Click to see the original.
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bill hughes (04:06:31) :
” It doesn’t matter how good the ends might be, that is no justification for perverting the means.”
True, but in this case the ends were not only not good, they were even much fouler than the means.
Jeez, some folks are dense.
Monbiot is taking the piss out of all AGW deniers in this article. Try reading it, if folks can concentrate that long.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/11/23/the-knights-carbonic/
WattsUp totally fell for it by quoting bits of Monbiot’s article out of context.
Seriously, everyone that bought WattsUp’s line here is a luzr.
REPLY: Two things happened that are noteworthy and hard news:
1) Monbiot apologized for being a poor journalist in the climate change issue
2) Monbiot called for Dr. Jones to resign, this has been covered in the British press as we did on WUWT.
The rest I agree is noise, but these two facts are immutable, which is why it was covered here. – Anthony
BobR (11:35:14) :
Re Anthony’s response.
When a serial liar is lionized by the very people (some of us) whom he has hated and attacked for years, it’s a sad commentary on our collective state of mind.
We keep reminding Anthony and others who swallowed Monbiot’s bait that his “apology” is worthless, because he still hates us, and still believes in AGW. In Monbiot’s own words:
I don’t take issue with Anthony for posting on it, because it is news. But what’s newsworthy isn’t the meaningless posturing, which is like the abusive spouse agreeing that in general abuse is wrong, and he should probably have been “better,” all the while having no intention of changing himself He merely wants to slither out of any consequences of his previous actions.
What’s newsworthy is the fact that he has to tell such extraordinary lies to avoid the culpability he shares with the pirates at CRU. Not dealing with that aspect of the issue interferes with holding him accountable for his part in the AGW fraud, and is almost certainly exactly what he intended for his “apology” to accomplish.
Monbiot, Part Deux: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov/25/monbiot-climate-leak-crisis-response
Ummm, why should we think George Monbiot is actually sincere in his mea culpa? After his initial admission that the hacked e-mails are genuine, Monbiot then uses the rest of his article for an obviously bogus satirical e-mail from a Professor Ernst Kattweigel of the U. of Redcar, neither of which is real. Google it for yourself!
@ur momisugly DaveE
was it YOU who sendt the “Knight Carbonic” to Gerorg M.?
And also you are the one, exposing their “elec-trickery”
Chris McDaniel here in the States. I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you, not that a journalist didn’t do his job, but that he would admit that he had not done his job. We in the States are very used to journalists not doing their jobs, which is how we ended up with the most massive con-job in history–Barack Obama–never being vetted by the so called journalists. However, we are not used to journalists fessing up to their lies. Here in the States, they just reinvent and redefine the history, the science, the quotes and the morality to make their journalism appear to be truthful, such as the rubbish espousing man-made global warming. You who claim to speak truth while knowing otherwise will be damned. The lives and souls you have ruined will haunt you for eternity, as well they should.
Chris McDaniel
Baton Rouge, LA
Chris McDaniel (07:10:48) :
Yep, “shocked, shocked I tell ya.” Indeed!
The email below is from Monbiot to Prof. Ian Plimer an extremely well respected Australian scientist.
Maybe he should apologise to Prof. Plimer as well…. This guy is a propogandist and an [snip]. And he’s in it with Dr Evil… AKA GAvin Schmidt. He is running for cover. Don’t let him off.
********************************************
From: George Monbiot
Date: 8 September 2009 5:49:32 PM
To: ‘Ian Plimer’
Subject: RE: Thursday 12th November 2009
Dear Ian,
I can confirm that I have read your book from cover to cover. Now that I am back at my desk I can tell you that the edition I have read is published in the UK by Quartet books, ISBN 978 0 7043 7166 8. I gave the page and figure numbers as they appear in the text of the edition I possess, which, to judge by other people’s references, is the same text (with the same numbers) as in all other editions.
You say that the answers to your questions lie in this book. But your book answers nothing. It is incoherent, contradictory and, most importantly, plain wrong on page after page. Moreover, your questions are pure pseudoscientific gobbledegook, and designed not to be answered. As you no longer appear to wish to debate me, I will wager you £10 that you are unable to provide cogent, coherent and complete answers to your own questions, which meet the standards you have laid out in this letter. You have two weeks in which to respond.
But of course the true purpose of your questions is to provide yourself with an excuse for not answering mine. Mine are simple and direct questions based only on the statements you have made in your book. They require no more knowledge than you purport to possess. You are simply kicking up as much dust as possible because you are unable or unwilling to answer them. Gavin Schmidt remarked that yours were:
“designed to lead to an argument along the lines of ‘Monbiot can’t answer these questions and so knows nothing about the science (and by the way, please don’t notice that I can’t cite any sources for my nonsense or even acknowledge that I can’t answer these questions either)’.”
Perhaps he has prophetic powers, as this is exactly what you have done here.
I would remind you that it is not over yet. You still have three days in which to answer my questions, whereupon – once you have also agreed that we may cross-examine each other – I will be delighted to debate you on the date we have agreed. You are the one who requested this debate. If you want it to go ahead, you know what to do.
But perhaps you feel braver addressing the audience by yourself. If so, I don’t blame you. As our correspondence has shown, you seem to be incapable of meeting a direct challenge.
With my best wishes,
George [Monbiot]
There are people in the world sitting in jail for fraud much less than this ,its about time all the scaremongers were rounded up and prosecuted just like anyone else.
There’s a big article on page 13, Saturday’s (28 Nov) Sydney Morning Herald, by Monbiot supporting AGW. It seems the SMH is a bit behind the times (and Guardian). Monbiot claims “the science is in” and “the strongest sceptics are over 60” and that “there is no evidence to support sceptic arguments”.
I think the message to George is: give a sceptic a nanometre and he’ll take the proverbial mile! I’m sure mixing units is unscientific to you paragons of the method; but to those of you that can handle the maths, the conversion factor is 1 mile = 1 609 344 000 000 nanometres – so that’s some inflation! I’m sure George is regretting his hysterical loss of nerve now, but it’s too late – not for AGW – that is unaffected by this – but for Phil Jones. Jones has resigned the directorship of CRU, pending an “independent inquiry” into the theft of emails. That’s university-speak for “he got us the wrong sort of publicity, so screw the 35 years of service – let’s bury this, and him. Those of us with a sense of perspective are entitled to ask, why an inquiry and why the resignation? The wrong-doer here is the thief, at worst Jones is guilty of silly bravado, he didn’t actually do any of the things he threatened. And let’s not forget, the bravado was to friends in naive “privacy”. It’s a bit like people submitting insulting comments to a blog under a pseudonym, thinking that they’ll never be held to account. Their identity is about as secret as the Queens Official Birthday!
woodfortrees (Paul Clark) (01:53:19) : … I spent quite a long time looking into this proxy-real “splicing” issue last night, because when I thought about it more, it started to bother me. It clearly is questionable, since the trees may be “peak clipping” the signal during warmer periods – which would of course also mask earlier warmer periods, as you say. Steve McIntyre’s page on this was most helpful: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=529
But this also confirms what I had suspected; which is that all this was known and out in the open several years ago. So I’m not sure the CRU e-mails add much to this story, except that (again) they appear more concerned with image and selling the story than one might wish (more on this below).
On HADCRUT3, I agree my interpretation of “unprecedented” was somewhat limited, I was indeed talking about the real temperature records, not the proxies – partly because that’s what CRU deals in, partly because (until last night, and indeed still) I didn’t know much about proxy data.
But I must just correct the assertion that HADCRUT3 has shown a higher trend than the satellite records. It is indeed higher than UAH, but almost identical to RSS and the other land/ocean series, GISTEMP:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1979/offset:-0.15/mean:12/plot/gistemp/from:1979/offset:-0.24/mean:12/plot/uah/mean:12/plot/rss/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1979/offset:-0.15/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1979/offset:-0.24/trend/plot/uah/trend/plot/rss/trend
That’s one reason why I still feel inclined to trust it; also, despite the obvious major internal difficulties in data format and change control they have had, in global monthly for it’s highly aggregated. I’m sure the data difficulties add to the error/noise, but I can’t currently see how they would change the trend to any significant degree.
Paul – I was quite surprised to learn that the trends were similar. I had a look at your graphs and then downloaded the data and tried to get the trends, but have done so only for CRU so far – then got caught up with climategate.
Re: the above – some things have sprung to my mind –
1. E.M. Smith carried out a study and found that the global warming chart pretty much follows the march of the thermometers towards the equator. He said they were defective.
2. Someone argued that the satellite temperature graphs were pretty similar to the land based ones. (Now this did strike me as strange because although satellite temperatures “measure”, or are supposed to measure, air temperatures, whereas the land based ones measure air and water temperatures and still the two match)
3. EM Smith said hey look if you know that some data is faulty, and other sets of data matches that data, then that is a reason to mistrust the other sets. I dismissed that out of hand because I had no reason to doubt the sattelite data.
4. Now I learn that satellite data do not directly measure temperatures. They derive them from a calibration of the land temperatures. Bingo – this might explain the similarity.
So I ask you – look on it with a suspicious eye. Is there anyway that satellite data might unwittingly reflect surface data? Thus if surface data is untrustworthy then the satellite data would also reflect that.
On the general question of image vs. science. It looks like (on both sides) there has sometimes been more of a concern to present a simply-understood message or advocacy than the real science; not unreasonably, since one is talking about different audiences, and some of the subtlety/uncertainty is inevitably lost at this stage.
The problem comes when it’s the same group doing both the science and the presentation, because there’s no access to the science-group’s interface, and layers get mixed internally (software types will recognise this as a classic layering problem).
It seems to me there’s also an analogy with banking here: in the same way that Glass-Steigel separated merchant and retail banking (the repeal of which is blamed by some for our current mess), perhaps we need to separate the pure data capture and processing (which should also be public) from the presentation/advocacy. I think CRU think of themselves as the former, but have clearly shaded into the latter.
For my own part, I try very hard to remain on the pure data side, and this is probably going to be my only foray into this mire!
One more thing: Both the complaints about, and attempts to avoid, the “hassle” of FOI and ‘Harry’s nightmares in data control smack to me of the same things: underfunding and haste. This stuff is so critical it should be done slowly, carefully and in public, as most science is; as it is it seems to rest on the shoulders of a very small group under almost intolerable pressure for quick results, but very aware of the global significance of what they do. Not a place I would want to be, personally…
There is no underfunding there as the emails have revealed. But I agree it is critical, and should be done slowly and carefully and in public.
I hope you will be able to see this and respond
Regards – Richard
Unless there are protests at the universities about climategate and the fraud being perpetuated, these reviews and investigations are likely to become cover-ups to save reputations and allow AGW to continue becoming the governing principle and religion of a global government.
It is clear that sunspot activity (aka solar winds, solar mass ejections) interacting with cosmic rays and the resulting cloud cover in our atmosphere are the drivers of the global temperature trends. We cannot allow a fabrication like AGW to continue suppressing and killing poor people and de-industrializing the developed world. AGW is insanity and genocide!
I still have to wonder. Were the lies perpetuated to keep the grants and awards flowing, or is this simply a far far far left bias that the truth kept getting in the way of?