Guest post by Christopher Horner, Planet Gore at National Review Online
One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.
That is the data that scientists have for years been seeking from Jones under the UK’s freedom of information law. Against numerous such requests he offered equally numerous excuses for refusing access culminating with the September 2009 claim — when it looked like he’d been cornered and had no excuses not to provide it to Prof. Ross McKitrick who met all of his long-stated qualifications — that in fact he’d lost it.
First, it does seem odd that Jones would so firmly and crisply articulate his many, very specific excuses for so many years about why he could not provide something that in fact they had, as he now tells it, lost. His refusals all clearly imply that a belief that he had it.
But where are the emails putting out the word, oh, snap, you guys aren’t gonna believe this?
Among all that has been revealed, there does not appear to be one. Let alone a chain discussing the importance of not at long last actually having the raw, how this loss might relate to the scores of emails they wrote about whether to release the data and how to avoid releasing the data and how they’d rather destroy it (I don’t know, “pretend to have lost it”) than give it to the folks who seem to be on to them.
This seems like a big email, and a chain of discussions that would pervade that which has been revealed. It doesn’t.
To the contrary, we have numerous emails from Jones explaining how turning over the raw data is one option, but he’d much rather destroy it than let the intrepid start pawing over it which could only lead, as he admits in one email, to figuring out what CRU et al did to said raw data in order to come up with their alarming claims.
So there is a reasonable conclusion, and it is not that the data was lost or destroyed twenty years ago.
But who knows, maybe Jones wrote James Hansen at NASA, or Gavin Schmidt — for so long a taxpayer-funded activist for Environmental Media Services’ RealClimate.blog and now implicated as a major player in these emails (Capo number 6 according to this analysis). Those should turn up when the courts help NASA figure out how to come into compliance with their legal obligations and provide me similar data and correspondence that they have been, similarly and by chance, refusing me for over two years.
Christopher C. Horner Senior Fellow Competitive Enterprise Institute 1899 L. St, NW 12th Floor Washington, DC, 20036 +1.202.331.2260 (O)
Author of the newly released: Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed http://www.amazon.com/Red-Hot-Lies-Alarmists-Misinformed/dp/1596985380/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231180047&sr=8-1
Author of The New York Times Bestselling The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Global-Warming-Environmentalism/dp/1596985011
Syl (14:07:32) : Okay, what bothers *me* is the use of the word ‘data’ without any analysis of what that data may contain.
Well, what bothers me is calling it “data” when as close as you can get is the GHCN product from NCDC / NOAA that is already partly cooked… The “raw” data is nowhere to be found… Maybe the raw dailies are on line somewhere? But Iv’e not found them yet… I suspect they reside at the individual country BOM departments.
For example, we all know there are weather stations throughout the world, run by various countries, that were/are accessible to both CRU and NASA. Did they both start with the same base data, did they share both data and basic techniques for adjustments, only varying re UHI for example?
OK, NOAA via NCDC, publish the GHCN data set. This is available in “adjusted” and “unadjusted” forms, but even the unadjusted (that is often called “raw” but is not…) has had some infill, QA “screening”, and limited homginizing done on it.
I’ve got a whole series of articles looking at various ways the GHCN data are “cooked” via thermometer deletions. It’s hideous. About 90% of the thermometers were taken out back and shot in about 1990. (The individual country BOMs may still have the data, but it does not make it into GHCN…) The deletions focus excessively on cold region thermometers.
Why does this matter? The “CRU email” says they could “recreate the data” from GHCN as it was substantially identicle. OK, so HadCRUt is just GHCN repackaged and we know that GHCN is cooked via deletions.
So what about GIStemp? It takes in GHCN.
Hmm…. the three agree and all are based on GHCN with cold thermometers removed recently but left in the respective products baseline time periods…
What a surprise…
So these three all agree because they all have the same biased input.
Per SST: Since GIStemp looks to Hadley CRUt for that, it’s all on them.
One hopes their data center has a paranoid admin who keeps a ‘decade ending’ set of tapes forever…
Copenhagen summit: Denmark rushes in laws to stop carbon trading scam
Climate change summit host embarrassed as criminals make most of lax laws to pocket VAT on emissions trading
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/03/copenhagen-summit-carbon-trading-scam
The AGW crowd says the Medieval Warmth Period was local,
Hockey Sticks and Hidden Data:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/fraudulent-hockey-sticks-and-hidden-data/
Idiots guide to ClimateGate:
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/12/idiots-guide-to-climategate.html
I still think they might have bundled these specific incriminating emails themselves and got them out of sight, deleted from local computers, in case the FOI actually demanded them. Afraid to destroy them entirely, loaded them somewhere the mole could access.
Who would miss these letters and files in the masses they must have. That’s why whole threads are included.
I’d like to see what’s left.
When this all started I imagine they never dreamed this was going to become such a runaway train. Possibly the backup tapes and papers were so unwieldy they did just toss them, thinking they would never need them. Such outdated technology is a nightmare to deal with.
Like trying to turn a hobby into a business and realizing you have no records of your expenditures over 15 years.
It wouldn’t even surprise me if someone besides Hansen was so against the Copenhagen plan that they threw themselves in front of the train to stop it.
“Postmodernism has crossed into the hard sciences”
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/12/postmodernism-has-crossed-into-hard.html
One of the clearest emails on what is going on with adjusting the records is the exchange between Tom Wigley and Phil Jones about adjusting the upcoming HadSST3 record by 0.15C to get rid of the pesky rise in sea surface temperatures up until 1944 and then the decline afterward (HadSST3 will replace the currently used HadSST2).
http://www.di2.nu/foia/1254147614.txt
This email was dated Sept. 28th, 2009. The email mentions John (J.J.) Kennedy who is the lead author on the revised HadSST3 (used to work at CRU and is now at the UK Met Office).
Well it seems the fix was already in. Not only are they adjusting the post-1944 SSTs by (looks like more than) 0.15C but they are are also adjusting down the pre-1944 data (1935 to 1944) by about 0.1C.
This is important because 70% of the Earth’ surface is ocean and if they adjusting the 1940s warm period away, it will start to look like a climate model output now rather than natural variability that the 1940s El Ninos caused. They are also adjusting SSTs up starting in about 2000.
Here is the draft chart of HadSST3 – the top chart – the green line – while the old HadSST2 is the red line.
http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/1205/hadsst3.png
And this was found in this draft paper from the WHO from September 2009.
https://abstracts.congrex.com/scripts/jmevent/abstracts/FCXNL-09A02a-1662927-1-Rayneretal_OceanObs09_draft4.pdf
12 Days, 3 Networks and No Mention of ClimateGate Scandal
http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2009/20091202135822.aspx
Tony B (another one) (14:22:03) :
Surely even if (big if) the CRU has “lost the data”, the originators of the data (all the contributing stations around the world) would have records of what they supplied to the CRU? They could not all have lost their data too.
While one would hope, there was recently news that the Australian BOM was re-imagining it’s data records to be more in compliance with the AGW thesis. (No, I don’t remember the link or exact wordings, but it made my blood cold. One need not “improve” data. The data just are. )
Could they? There must be some professional organisations involved somewhere rather than just this bunch of spin doctors.
Climate Professional Organizations. Now there’s an oxymoron for you…
We know that CRU are toast. We know that Hansen is an AGW zealous advocate and that GIStemp is toast. We know that NCDC produces a strongly biased data set in GHCN.
So exactly what “global organization” are you thinking of?
Is it not possible to reverse engineer the data from the code which has been used to “add value” to the original raw data?
No.
Take 10 numbers. Average them. Now recreate the original numbers from that average.
The process is not exactly the same for doing ofsets and adjustements, but this illustrates the point that there are many ‘one way functions’ in math…
You can only be a virgin once.
The Wall Street Journal:
Climategate: Science Is Dying
Science is on the credibility bubble.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574572091993737848.html
Holdren convicts us of planeticide
The IPCC is what, only 90%, 95% certain in their AGW belief? Well, Obama’s science advisor John Holdren has that beat:
“Human activity is “beyond any reasonable doubt” the primary cause of warming temperatures, Mr. Holdren said.”
“Obama Science Adviser Urges Climate Action Amid Uproar”
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/12/holdren-convicts-us-of-planeticide.html
Ron de Haan (17:13:12) :
“Postmodernism has crossed into the hard sciences”
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
After reading this “climate science” seems more based on a common misconception than science.
It isn’t a hard science at all, it’s the equivalent of Chemistry for Nurses.
Can’t believe I’m about to try to explain this as my first ever wuwt post, but here goes:
This is what is important about the CRU “original data”
Although the real original data came from other sources (which undoubtedly have it archived), it’s mere existence elsewhere isn’t much help for reconstructing the CRU global temperature.
If you are going to give the average global temperature, it is important that your measurement locations are a sufficient and unbiased sample of the earth’s surface.
So a “grid” is drawn over the world’s surface, and where there is continuous high quality temperature data within a square of the grid, we’re rockin’. Where there is a square without a good measurement station what do you do?, well you use statistical techniques to appropriately infer what the temperature would be from adjacent or similar squares.
A lot of the sphere is covered by ocean, and for a lot of the ocean where measurements have been done they have not been at continuously fixed points, but as and when ships passed through. So the sea data and land data is not apples-to-apples, but again with appropriate statistical tools one can make them compatible.
So here’s the problem. We could get all the data from the Met office, but we don’t know which stations in that haystack make up the subset used by the CRU. And for squares where more than one station’s data might have been combined into a mean or average, we don’t know what formula they used. And for squares without a station, we don’t know what technique they used to surmise the correct value or what stations they used in the calculations.
And for some odd reason you wacky skeptics here don’t trust the statistical chops of the climate researchers, so they are very keen to double check the whole process above.
Here’s the math breakdown on the Global warming models. Maybe Anthony can get this chap to write a column.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_mathematics_of_global_warm.html
embarrassing!
Copenhagen summit: Denmark rushes in laws to stop carbon trading scamClimate change summit host embarrassed as criminals make most of lax laws to pocket VAT on emissions trading
The news is an embarrassment for the European ETS and for carbon trading generally, which is attracting a growing number of critics…..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/03/copenhagen-summit-carbon-trading-scam
Is not the ‘raw’ data still out there?…ie at the local weather stations across the planet? It can still be compiled, no? Let’s start this from scratch, and then any alteration to the data set can be more openly debated and science moves forward to try and prove the method or not….real science ya know.
meteorologist
The Constitution also says stuff about the Cabinet and how its members are subject to Senate review.
The current administration has announced that “Czars” will do the Cabinet work, and any treat the Pres. signs will be implemented without Senate review.
The Living Constitution has died (been killed).
Al Gore to you.
It is my thermostat keep your hands off it.
That is all.
Al
The is $3.4 billion we can save here immediately. Thank You Climategate.
“Rockefeller is a longtime champion of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. Earlier this year, he helped secure $3.4 billion for the Fossil Energy Research and Development programs, including CCS research, in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. ”
http://rockefeller.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=317677
The claim they not only lost the data but also the metadata which the program readme files show to be false, at least until 2004.
As a teacher, your post is a bit difficult to read without me wanting to mark it up with a red pen. It is in need of editing. Run-on and sentence fragments just about drove me crazy.
That said, I totally agree with the underlying gist of the post.
Justin (14:57:34) :…from the BBC. What is wrong with this? Am I missing something? Have the warmists been right all along? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2009/copenhagen/8386319.stm
No – that is just the same old junk sciencethat his been banded about over a million times. There is a 600 to 1000 year lag between CO2 increases and Temperature increases…and guess what…..TEMPERATURE goes up FIRST.
Most likely explanation is that warmer oceans release CO2 in to the atmosphere (although it takes a while to warm the oceans due to their colossal heat capacity)
It is obvious that the data must currently exist in CRU records (or else how did they calculate HadCRUt2 & 3?) unless they very recently deleted them.
And, yes, it’s surprising this has not been more prominently mentioned.
BTW, on Google I get:
9,800,000 for “global warming”
21,600,000 for “climate change”
28,200,000 for climategate
279,000 for “climate gate” (same for “climate-gate”)
So climategate clearly beats the main topic name.
A new BBC blog on the announcement of the Climategate inquiry. Responses aren’t blocked, amazing.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2009/12/breaking-news-cru-enquiry-anno.shtml
5. People say/write really dumb things when they think no one else will ever see it.
Yes, because when people think no-one else will see it, they tend to tell the truth. They tend to drop their political/social mask and reveal themselves more fully.
We are not talking about the normal range of “dumb things” here. Bitching about the boss, or inappropriate jokes, or gossip, or irrelevant stuff.
The e-mails show people discussing their work with other people in unguarded moments. People who do not need to be lied to. People who they need to get on-side in order to do something that might not look too good in public view.
The idea that what is discussed in the e-mails is not a look into what the warmers think is ridiculous.
Is there a single thing in the e-mails that was not alleged before the leak? They are damaging precisely because they expose what was always suspected, but too hard to prove.