From his web page: Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process
by Eduardo Zorita, Scientist at the Institute for Coastal Research, specialist in Paleoclimatology, Review Editor of Climate Research and IPCC co-author.
Short answer: because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore.
A longer answer: My voice is not very important. I belong to the climate-research infantry, publishing a few papers per year, reviewing a few manuscript per year and participating in a few research projects. I do not form part of important committees, nor I pursue a public awareness of my activities. My very minor task in the public arena was to participate as a contributing author in the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC.
By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication. My area of research happens to be the climate of the past millennia, where I think I am appreciated by other climate-research ‘soldiers’. And it happens that some of my mail exchange with Keith Briffa and Timothy Osborn can be found in the CRU-files made public recently on the internet.
To the question of legality or ethicalness of reading those files I will write a couple of words later.
I may confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU-files. They depict a realistic, I would say even harmless, picture of what the real research in the area of the climate of the past millennium has been in the last years. The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas.
These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere -and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now- editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations,even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the ‘politically correct picture’. Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had the ‘pleasure’ to experience all this in my area of research.
I thank explicitely Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn for their work in the formulation of one Chapter of the IPCC report. As it destills from these emails, they withstood the evident pressure of other IPCC authors, not experts in this area of research, to convey a distorted picture of our knowledge of the hockey-stick graph.
Is legal or ethical to read the CRU files? I am not a lawyer. It seems that if the files had been hacked this would constitute an illegal act. If they have been leaked it could be a whistle blower action protected by law. I think it is not unethical to read them. Once published, I feel myself entitled to read how some researchers tried to influence reviewers to scupper the publication of our work on the ‘hockey stick graph’ or to read how some IPCC authors tried to exclude this work from the IPCC Report on very dubious reasons. Also, these mails do not contain any personal information at all. They are an account of many dull daily activities of typical climatologists, together with a realistic account of very troubling professional behavior.
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Methow Ken (20:51:57) :
Yes; Google is ”back again” on climategate now, BUT:
There was something very odd for some hours today:
After getting to 8660K hits on ”climategate” at 17:15 US PST yesterday, for many attempts during a good part of today the EXACT same string only returned 2800K hits. But now same string returns 10,900K Google hits. . . . Almost like some data was temporarily ”deliberately hidden” (sorry; couldn’t resist).
Meanwhile, ”global warming” only returns 9510K Google hits.
Like I said in prior post:
When ”climategate” hits pass ”global warming” hits:
Raise your glasses, one and all. . . . .
At this rate ”climategate” will pass ”climage change” (21,000K) on Google in about one more week.
Can anyone say ”tipping point” ?? . . . .
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I’ve seen the same wild variations in result counts. I’ve been watching the exponential growth from the beginning. It was going 1000, 2000, 10,000, 100,000, 1 million … pretty much doubling about every 12 hours or so. Then it would suddenly drop by a factor of ten, and then go back up. I don’t know if this means anything. I suspect it reflects some “artificial adjustment” by Google. And there are also ridiculously low results for the Google News section.
More on topic – the specific keyword “climategate” and it’s associated two word pair “climate gate” have both been CENSORED by Google from their autocomplete suggestion list. This is extremely significant because every person typing in “climate” would be confronted with “climategate” as the first suggestion. That’s how it was working yesterday. Clearly, this is not something Google/Gore was willing to allow. Remember, Al Goe is a SENIOR ADVISOR to Google! It’s in his official bio:
http://www.algore.com/about.html
PS: Could someone post the formatting codes, e.g. for bold, indent, etc? I’ve looked around and could not find any info. I thought tags in square brackets might work, but no … maybe standard html? Test
“post normal” science raises memories of an outbreak of “post normal” history here in Australia a couple of years back.
That epidemic was successfully contained by a blogger “mate” Anthony has.
Take it away, Mr Watts…
“Harmless??
Machination, conspiracies, and collusion are not at all harmless.”
The author is German, I think, so he didn’t choose the mot juste. What he meant, I think, was “understated.” IOW, he was saying that the reality of the cliques misbehavior is worse than what the CRUtape letters indicate.
“Lop off some of the monster’s many heads named Mann, Hansen, Jones, et al and others will take their place, …”
Or maybe a few lopped-off heads will “encourage” les autres to watch their step. We can only hope.
That’s too little, too late, Mr. Zorita.
Camels, straws, backs, rats, sinking ships, CYA, you know the drill….
Greek Chorus:
They’re turning on each other… Yes, it’s a tragedy, but they’ve done it to themselves…and you just gotta admit, there are comedic elements to all of this.
So…popcorn, Milkduds and an extra large coke, please. This show oughta be pretty good!
Scouse Pete (19:54:02) :
Arnold: “I have tried to sent the story about the Google/Wikipedia cencoring to Foxnews, but i think other people are trying to sent news also :D”
I’m not so sure Google are censoring anything. Number of hits for “Climategate” now at 10,700,000 and probably still rising!
Im not talking about the links after the search sorry. But about searchhelper. Normaly if you start type climategate, climate emails, CRU hack. Would be number one result to come back. Now if you start typing it is not showing at all. It looks like one out of two thing.
1. The removed the number of searches for these subjects.
2. There is a overflow in the functions because of the massive amount of searches (not likely).
And wikipedia is removing and altering pages from people trying to makes pages on the subject.
Interesting that he feels Briffa and Osborn were resisting the peer pressure. Perhaps as a climate scientist, he can differentiate better than us admittedly lay folk. If that is the case, we might review Briffa and Osborn’s actions, emails, and work with that in mind.
We cannot deny that venal though the others’ actions might be, the whole lot of them are true believers.
Arnold (21:52:36) :
[blockquote]
Im not talking about the links after the search sorry. But about searchhelper. Normaly if you start type climategate, climate emails, CRU hack. Would be number one result to come back. Now if you start typing it is not showing at all. It looks like one out of two thing.
1. The removed the number of searches for these subjects.
2. There is a overflow in the functions because of the massive amount of searches (not likely).[/blockquote]
#2 is eliminated by counter-example, e.g. “climate change” returns over 33 million pages.
#1 is supported by the fact that Google has code designed to censor certain words from their autocomplete function, as documented in this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
#1 is also supported by the fact that climategate was included in the autocomplete suggestion list until today.
There evidence points to only one conclusion:
GOOGLE IS CENSORING CLIMATEGATE!
IPCC simply needs to be completely defunded and removed from the discussion. It was instituted as a political, not scientific establishment with the express intent of investigating it’s predetermined result which is that there is global warming, that it is human caused, and the only remedy is to give the United Nations authority over the energy production of every country. There is no compelling reason that it should continue and every compelling reason it should be defunct. It has politicized science and will continue to do so. Even if we can open the debate, the fact that there is a predetermined course of action which ends with U.N. control of the economies through carbon taxes makes it a mockery to even attempt to clean up the IPCC.
Richard McGough and Arnold both came back on the ”GoogleGate” off-shoot of ClimateGate; i.e.:
Not only does Google auto-complete not show ”ClimateGate” as the 1st choice, it doesn’t show it AT ALL.
This had not changed, so I did not repeat in my last.
But Richard and Arnold are absolutely right:
The fact that Google does not present ”ClimateGate” ANYWHERE in the auto-complete list after you type climate, just screams ”AGW agenda”.
OTOH:
Go to bing.com
Enter ”climate”
”climate change” comes up as 1st auto-fill; then ”climategate”.
+ BING finds 50,800K hits for climategate (why the 5:1 dif between Bing and Google is a search algorithm subject for another day).
Attaboy MSN and Microsoft.
Maybe it’s time to as much as possible say hasta la vista to Google.
So let’s recap: you’ll take Zorita’s observations that the political nature of climate change research is a cause for concern (“machinations, conspiracies, collusions” etc.) requiring the overhaul (or is that the overthrowing) of the IPCC…
BUT
you still think that climate change is a scam or a hoax? Or maybe you didn’t read what he actually wrote?
“These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax.”
Bing.com autocomplete has climategate!
And it returns 50,800,000 pages!
That’s 50 MILLION! It’s five times Google which also has CENSORED “climategate” from its autocomplete suggestion list.
I say it’s time to push BING.COM in a big way. We need to reward MS for not being part of the climategate coverup. I don’t normally “like” MS that much because they have such a monopoly, but this is enough to make me switch permanently.
Maybe we should al start making press-release over the world that google is censoring this. That would be a nice incentive for papers to start writing. Am i not right ?
My initial reaction was: climategate will not become a big story in the major media because the most damaging stuff in the e-mails should have been known by the press … stiff like…
· foot-dragging on requests for data … that is bad science even if freedom of information laws did not apply
· attempting to lock out opposing views … charges made by Dr. Lindzen of MIT and Dr. Happer of Princeton years ago and repeated by many
· bad (or manipulated data) … a focus of this site
· Government-funded science risks being driven by political objectives (not facts) of researchers and the fed can identify a common goal … predicted by Eisenhower in his farewell speech
But now I think the climategate will, eventually, get major coverage by the mainstream media (not just WSJ and the right wing of the mainstream) because the e-mails make this a 1st person story and:
1. Some major media AGW proponents have already called for the resignation of Phil Jones and others. Avoiding FOI requests is something reporters don’t like even if they like the idea of AGW.
2. Some scientists within the IPCC community (Zorita) have called for barring biased proponents of AWG (Phil Jones, Michael Mann, etc.) from the IPCC process.
3. Not just e-mail but also software (the model itself) has become public and there is no way for the IPCC to spin the code or comments in the software.
4. Climategate is being treated as a joke http://www.minnesotansforglobalwarming.com/m4gw/ Once that happens, it is impossible to ignore the charges by creating diversions.
5. To date it was a good career move for both reporters and researchers to support AWG. Looking forward it may be smarter to back down from an uncritical AGW position.
6. Government inquires (both in the US and the UK) appear certain.
Zeke the Sneak (19:36:30) :
He is just saying it is far worse than it looks. The careful reader will be rewarded with light.
“The CRU-files… depict a realistic, I would say even harmless, picture of what the real research in the area of the climate of the past millennium has been in the last years.”
…..
I find most disturbing the stories of Ph D candidacies and papers being politically tampered with. That is the heartbreaker for me. I strongly suspect this goes on across all of the disciplines.
It depends on what “political” means.
Scientists are people and have the same herd behavior as all people when in groups. A group will have a “policy” and “politics” once it reaches a number over 7 ( arbitrarily chosen, as it is the number after which we have to start counting)
The smallest group I have worked with consisted of 5 people. There seniority was enough to assure a group policy. The largest consists of over 1000 and most of my publications consist with an author group of from 50 to 300.
Yes, there was scientific politics, that sometimes was incorrect. Seniors with a lot of weight, Nobel prizes for example, affected how graduate students treated the data and whether anomalies were pointed out or not. It is human nature to wear different glasses and believe in the view seen from them.
I remind particle physicists of the time of “alternating neutral currents” as an example. Now you see them, now you don’t, with fierce advocates on both sides.
BUT the process is self correcting if all involved are seriously committed to exploring the the truth in the data. Glasses will finally synchronize with the data and new policies will arise. It is a self correcting process.
The unfortunate situation with climate science arises from, in my opinion, two things:
1)Experiments cannot be run, and there was a enthusiastic assumption that models could replace experiments.
2)The results attracted the larger body of politicians and buck seekers, before the process could self correct.
Unfortunately for the world and the scientists involved in this climategate.
“editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations,even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed.”
“Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture.”
Re: my comment to RealClimate. Need I say that it was blocked?
Arnold (19:35:23) :
The following story is about a french scientist who also reconstructed mean tempratures for europ and america. No warming since the 40’s. Read also the second comment about a scientist that was threatened with his job. The scientist are comming out of hiding!
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/11/26/skewed-science.aspx
Courtillot was attacked and smeared in the most vile fashion by Raymond ‘raypierre’ Pierrehumbert, a realclimatescientist. There was even an orchestrated surface mail campaign against Courtillot circulated to all the universities and journals.
Shameful, and probably illegal deformation of character.
Good post, Gary Crough. (I wish there were some way of highlighting best-posts).
“GOOGLE IS CENSORING CLIMATEGATE!”
“Soft-pedaling” would be a more accurate term.
Dennis Wingo (21:29:34) : Words from President Eisenhower … equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Keeps going through my mind, too, Dennis.
Must look on eBay for an old I Like Ike button…
Richard McGough (21:32:38) : …This is extremely significant because every person typing in “climate” would be confronted with “climategate” as the first suggestion.
It could also be very annoying, Richard. It seems to me quite reasonable that Google would make this move to unlink the pairing in the interests of all searching climate as surely many will be looking for this subject alone without gates or fences.
Perhaps the old never put down to conspiracy…. adage applies here.
Based on this article in particular it looks like even the wall of the BBC has been breached by climategate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8383713.stm
Assuming the enquiry’s not a complete whitewash there’s going to be a reexamination of the data, methods and researchers and not before time.
Maybe this time we’ll get answers to questions such as why Tiljander is used at all, never mnd upside down, why Graybill and not Ababneh and so on.
Perhaps we’ll even find out how (and maybe even why) this leak / hack happened.
However, given the speed with which British enquiries run I wouldn’t expect any findings for quite some time.
Might also be worth noting, as can be seen from this article, that for at least one BBC reporter and headline writer the tone has changed from the emails being “hacked” to “stolen” or “leaked”.
Also, when reading through their science and environment correspondent’s blogs it’s apparent that the initial tone of moral outrage and indignation (journalists being outraged by the release of suppressed information should appall everyone anyway) has dissipated somewhat and been replaced by some actual investigation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8377465.stm
Let’s keep an eye out for more subtle changes in tone and substance as maybe, just maybe, those in the science community previously too afraid or unsure to speak out might just now have the opportunity and confidence to start putting the record straight.
If the tone of the emails which have been released so far is anything to go by there might be a lot of pent up frustration amongst certain members of the community and we might even get to see scores being settled.
Let’s applaud Eduardo’s comments, obviously made at great risk to his future funding opportunities.
Let’s also note that he is involved in material that is part of what was released from CRU.
If my name appeared associated with the CRU posts, I would want to distinguish myself from the general thrust too.
In my opinion, it was very smart for him to make this post to Anthony to cover tracks and absolve differences. One would think that others who are mentioned in the email traffic might do the same thing. I have no idea of the sincerity of these comments, but I hope more do so to actually open a dialogue.
The current authoritatively controlled discussion through IPCC is non sensical. It discourages the voicing of contrary views and disenables true scientific discussion about the data and how to use and interpret it. The IPCC won’t let people see the base data it wants to rely upon.
So, lets go back to basics: We are in an ice age. Over the last 2.5 million years we have experienced about twenty periods of glaciation and a similar number of interglacial periods. The periods of glaciation last about 100,000 years and the interglacial periods last 15 -20,000 years. Both are stable states of climate. One (glaciation) lasts 10 times longer than the other. We are at the end of the current interglacial period (15,000-20,000 from the last glacial maximum).
We don’t know what triggers the entrance to glaciation, or to the warmth of the interglacial. But they occur with documented accuracy. As long as there is a continent on either pole, we will continue to be drawn into periods of glaciation and interglacial periods.
The CRU emails and data computer files etc. deal with the last 1000 years. How convenient and silly. Our situation is not defined by a 1000 year window. Let’s wake up.
Roger Carr (23:34:33) : to Richard McGough (21:32:38) : Perhaps the old never put down to conspiracy…. adage applies here.
Wrong. Bad line and not applicable here. I meant that we should consider it is unlikely a conspiracy, but more a move for maximum spread in searching.
“As long as there is a continent on either pole, we will continue to be drawn into periods of glaciation and interglacial periods.”
Why?
Mike H. (01:56:48) :
“As long as there is a continent on either pole, we will continue to be drawn into periods of glaciation and interglacial periods.”
Why?
Mike, I am going to post up (with Anthony’s permission) the next part(s) of a series on the PaleoClimate next week. There will be a few other parts after that as well.
That question and lots of others will be answered.