It has started – the infighting begins in the court of public opinion.
Climategate: Phil Jones accused of making error of judgment by colleague
Here’s an excerpt:
One of the scientists to whom the emails were addressed, Professor Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University has moved to distance himself from some of the comments in the emails that suggest scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view global warming was genuine and man-made.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, Prof Mann said: “I can’t put myself in the mind of the person who wrote that email and sent it. I in no way endorse what was in that email.”
Prof Mann also said he could not “justify” a request from Prof Jones that he should delete some of his own emails to prevent them from being seen by outsiders.
“I can’t justify the action, I can only speculate that he was feeling so under attack that he made some poor decisions frankly and I think that’s clear.”
Prof Mann then argued however that there was “absolutely no evidence” that he too had manipulated data, while he also said “I don’t believe that any of my colleagues have done that”.
Complete story here at the Telegraph:
Climategate: Phil Jones accused of making error of judgment by colleague
h/t to Kate at SDA
A very bad Mann from Penn State
Made his colleagues exceedingly irate
He said “It’s them and not me
It’s plain, can’t you see!”
And abandoned them all to their fate.
BBC’s Richard Black is presenting us with a CO2 hockey stick, the last trend in AGW propaganda. Visitors will easily see it as a temperature graph (“Earth’s Climate history”). The choice of the last 800k yrs hides periods of greater concentrations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2009/copenhagen/8386319.stm
Credits go to…
“Temperature for the last 1,500 years is taken from Mann, M.E., Zhang, Z., Hughes, M.K., Bradley, R.S., Miller, S.K., Rutherford, S., Proxy-Based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations over the Past Two Millennia, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 105, 13252-13257, 2008.
For the final time period covered, the temperature data is sourced to the Met Office Hadley Centre and Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.”
The rift between these two goes back a ways:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=108&filename=926026654.txt
1) Keith didn’t mention in his Science piece but both of us
think that you’re on very dodgy ground with this long-term
decline in temperatures on the 1000 year timescale.
[REPLY – Sorry, we’re out of extra copies of Bold Fresh. ~ Evan]
You’ll have to explain that one Evan, this Brit is not up to speed.
Re: he says “discovered THE problem”, not “discovered A problem”. Given the context, it’s a curious way to phrase an outsider’s claim
Unless of course THE problem was discovered by someone else (not McIntyre.) It also implies that they view McIntyre as a publicity hound with connections at WSJ. Honestly, it’s not that hard to read that from this email.
Re: sounds good Phil, I agree on the forecast. I think its at least
‘plausible’ ;)”
I think this was a wink, wink, nudge, nudge inside joke between two colleagues. If every time you put a forecast out, and you knew that certain people were going to say it was not even in the realm of possibility (whether it is or not) this type of joke would develop with a colleague that holds the same view point as you. Just because they don’t work together on a daily basis, doesn’t mean this type of relationship could not form.
I am not a Mann/Jones/etc… apologist. I don’t believe in CAGW, and I’m not really all that sold on AGW either. All I would ask is who here has not written an email that would look damning to people that are not privy to the rest of the conversation or inside jokes between colleagues? I know for a fact that I am guilty of this from time to time (I’m a very sarcastic person.) I guess what I’m saying is that the remarks may be about what others are going to say and their motivations rather that commenting on real actions or malfeasance on their part.
By way of a reminder: Who’s “nature trick” was it to “hide the decline”?
“Taken out of context:” After reading the emails, the context is implicit. Its a series of propositions clearly bound to its context.
matt (15:17:32)
Oh… Its a frame up to be sure. Commit the misdeed, inspire others to follow, then blame one’s followers as culprits when it goes public.
tallbloke (15:00:44)
Oh… Its a frame up to be sure. Commit the misdeed, inspire others to follow, then blame one’s followers as culprits when it goes public.
There once was two men from Nantucket
Who put all their data in a bucket
Said one “it was him”
the other just grinned
“When they come looking ’round we’ll just chuck it”
It’s all about the popcorn.
Yertizz (13:45:06) :
Thank You. A letter will be in the post to Thompson in the morning.
Can we have our lightbulbs and Freon back now?
We see “Mann Bites Jones”. Can the reciprocal be far behind?
From: Ben Santer <sant…@llnl.gov
Date: Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 4:58 PM
Subject: Open letter to the climate science community
Dear colleagues and friends,
I am sure that by now, all of you are aware of the hacking incident which
recently took place at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research
Unit (CRU). This was a criminal act. Over 3,000 emails and documents were
stolen. The identity of the hacker or hackers is still unknown.
The emails represented private correspondence between CRU scientists and
scientists at climate research centers around the world. Dozens of the
stolen emails are from over a decade of my own personal correspondence with
Professor Phil Jones, the Director of CRU.
I obtained my Ph.D. at the Climatic Research Unit. I went to CRU in 1983
because it was – and remains – one of the world's premier institutions for
studying the nature and causes of climate change. During the course of my
Ph.D., I was privileged to work together with exceptional scientists – with
people like Tom Wigley, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, and Sarah Raper.
After completing my Ph.D. at CRU in 1987, I devoted much of my scientific
career to what is now called "climate fingerprinting", which seeks to
understand the causes of recent climate change. At its core, fingerprinting
is a form of what people now call "data mining" – an attempt to extract
information and meaning from very large, complex climate datasets. The
emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit are now being subjected to a
very different form of "data mining". This mining is taking place in the
blogosphere, in the editorial pages of various newspapers, and in radio and
television programs. This form of mining has little to do with extracting
meaning from personal email correspondence on complex scientific issues.
This form of mining seeks to find dirt – to skew true meaning, to distort,
to misrepresent, to take out of context. It seeks to destroy the reputations
of exceptional scientists – scientists like Professor Phil Jones.
I have known Phil for over 25 years. He is the antithesis of the secretive,
"data destroying" character being portrayed to the outside world by the
miners of dirt and disinformation. Phil Jones and Tom Wigley (the second
Director of the Climatic Research Unit) devoted significant portions of
their scientific careers to the construction of the land component of the
so-called "HadCRUT" dataset of land and ocean surface temperatures. The U.K.
Meteorological Office Hadley Centre (MOHC) took the lead in developing the
ocean surface temperature component of HadCRUT.
The CRU and Hadley Centre efforts to construct the HadCRUT dataset have been
open and transparent, and are documented in dozens of peer-reviewed
scientific papers. This work has been tremendously influential. In my
personal opinion, it is some of the most important scientific research ever
published. It has provided hard scientific evidence for the warming of our
planet over the past 150 years.
Phil, Tom, and their CRU and MOHC colleagues conducted this research in a
very open and transparent manner. Like good scientists, they examined the
sensitivity of their results to many different subjective choices made
during the construction of the HadCRUT dataset. These choices relate to such
issues as how to account for changes over time in the type of thermometer
used to make temperature measurements, the thermometer location, and the
immediate physical surroundings of the thermometer. They found that, no
matter what choices they made in dataset construction, their bottom-line
finding – that the surface of our planet is warming – was rock solid. This
finding was supported by many other independent lines of evidence, such as
the retreat of snow and sea-ice cover, the widespread melting and retreat of
glaciers, the rise in sea-level, and the increase in the amount of water
vapor in the atmosphere. All of these independent observations are
physically consistent with a warming planet.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. The claim that our Earth
had warmed markedly during the 20th century was extraordinary, and was
subjected to extraordinary scrutiny. Groups at the National Climatic Data
Center in North Carolina (NCDC) and at the Goddard Institute for Space
Studies in New York (GISS) independently attempted to reproduce the results
of the Climatic Research Unit and the U.K. Meteorological Office Hadley
Centre. While the NCDC and GISS groups largely relied on the same primary
temperature measurements that had been used in the development of the
HadCRUT dataset, they made very different choices in the treatment of the
raw measurements. Although there were differences in the details of the
three groups' results, the NCDC and GISS analyses broadly confirmed the
"warming Earth" findings of the CRU and MOHC scientists.
Other extraordinary claims – such as a claim by scientists at the University
of Alabama that Earth's lower atmosphere cooled since 1979, and that such
cooling contradicts "warming Earth" findings – have not withstood rigorous
scientific examination.
In summary, Phil Jones and his colleagues have done a tremendous service to
the scientific community – and to the planet – by making surface temperature
datasets publicly available for scientific research. These datasets have
facilitated climate research around the world, and have led to the
publication of literally hundreds of important scientific papers.
Phil Jones is one of the gentlemen of our field. He has given decades of his
life not only to cutting-edge scientific research on the nature and causes
of climate change, but also to a variety of difficult and time-consuming
community service activities – such as his dedicated (and repeated) service
as a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Since the theft of the CRU emails and their public dissemination, Phil has
been subjected to the vilest personal attacks. These attacks are without
justification. They are deeply disturbing. They should be of concern to all
of you. We are now faced with powerful "forces of unreason" – forces that
(at least to date) have been unsuccessful in challenging scientific findings
of a warming Earth, and a "discernible human influence" on global climate.
These forces of unreason are now shifting the focus of their attention to
the scientists themselves. They seek to discredit, to skew the truth, to
misrepresent. They seek to destroy scientific careers rather than to improve
our understanding of the nature and causes of climate change.
Yesterday, Phil temporarily stepped down as Director of the Climatic
Research Unit. Yesterday was a very sad day for climate science. When the
forces of unreason win, and force exceptional scientists like Professor Phil
Jones to leave their positions, we all lose. Climate science loses. Our
community loses. The world loses.
Now, more than at any other time in human history, we need sound scientific
information on the nature and causes of climate change. Phil Jones and his
colleagues at CRU have helped to provide such information. I hope that all
of you will join me in thanking Phil for everything he has done – and will
do in the future – for our scientific community. He and his CRU colleagues
deserve great credit.
With best regards,
Ben Santer
—————————————————————————-
Benjamin D. Santer
Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
P.O. Box 808, Mail Stop L-103
Livermore, CA 94550, U.S.A.
Tel: (925) 422-3840
FAX: (925) 422-7675
email: sant…@llnl.gov
Of course, when Michael Mann received that email, he immediately replied and expressed his concern to Jones.
Since there appear to be no emails to that effect in the released files, like pretty well everyone else here, I’d suggest that perhaps he would like to release some of his own copies to prove his statements?
Anything at all that would substantiate his claims?
I wonder why this idea hasn’t occurred to the MSM interviewers?
Oh, I forgot, he gave his interview to tame interviewers.
From Ben Santer’s very first paragraph above:
Santer is presuming facts that are nowhere in evidence.
Who is this putative “hacker”? Anyone making such a definitive statement either knows the identity of said hacker, or is engaging in classic misdirection, rather than admitting that the folks receiving multi-million grants and lavish expense accounts, traveling the world, etc., were mostly winging it, if not engaging in outright scientific misconduct. Yeah, let’s discuss this mysterious hacker instead of the real crime.
Common sense tells us that the emails and code were leaked by an insider, not a hacker. But then Santer is right in the middle of it, so he’s got to spin his own tale.
The rest of his letter is just a lot of projection, whining about the “vilest personal attacks”, etc. Has he not read all the emails by the CRU clique, attacking anyone who questioned the AGW Party line?
Phil Clarke (16:50:33) :
I’d agree that Phil Jones might be a gentleman, though from this perspective:
“between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he?d been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?”
one ought to say that manners aside, this does seem to be a protection racket of a sort. Its easy to imagine the background – produce th eresults that the conclusion asks for, apply the semblence of scientific method that only a few are privy to, hide it from everyone else, and present it to the public as a fait accompli. This is the voice of unreason, or that of self interest/advocacy and the sort of bias that we’re pointing out here.
So step back and imagine if this had happeend in a field of expertise which required criically accurate and transparent science and data, such as medical, biology, or cancer research:
No one would have blackballed the questioning of techniques employed by researchers. In fact, they constantly question each other for veracity, and depend on the right results, as far as scientific limitations permit – breakthroughs aren’t expunged that throw new light on a proposition.
In “climatology” the opposite of this process is occurring, partly through its abstract and unaccountable nature, which I put down to rhetoric, and rhetoric isn’t sound science.
So my proposition is: If it was decided that illness was best dealt with by charging illness taxes, you’d be outraged: Yet this is the proposition that is being demanded by our peers regarding what they say is a more dire *future* problem than anything we’ve faced before. In that context, don’t be too splenetic if people express their doubts.
addendum
P Wilson (17:33:23: paras 1&2 .Bret Stephens – Wall Street Journal December 1, 2009
Ok this is just a *bit* rich of MANN:
One of the scientists to whom the emails were addressed, Professor Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University has moved to distance himself from some of the comments in the emails that suggest scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view global warming was genuine and man-made.
Just take a look at this 22.Sep.99 e-mail from MANN to JONES, BRIFFA and FOLLAND [938018124.txt]:
So if Chris and Tom (?) are ok with this, I would be happy to add Keith’s series. That having been said, it does raise a conundrum: We demonstrate (through comparining an exatropical averaging of our nothern hemisphere patterns with Phil’s more extratropical series) that the major discrepancies between Phil’s and our series can be explained in terms of spatial sampling/latitudinal emphasis (seasonality seems to be secondary here, but probably explains much of the residual differences). But that explanation certainly can’t rectify why Keith’s series, which has similar seasonality *and* latitudinal emphasis to Phil’s series, differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably concensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
I dout that dirt is being looked for. The only controversial *dirt* to be garnered from the emails seems to be Santer’s own desire to beat the crap” out of someone. Thats about the only slinging I can garner from the correspondences.
When one bad guy is painted with a broad brush, those close to the picture are concerned with over-spray. So more often than not, the nearby folks try to take the high road, so as not to get paint on themselves too. Pass the popcorn.
Every Mann for himself!!
My interpretation – Mann trying to get in front of the PSU investigation, possibly being guided by the investigators to issue statements they can use to mitigate their findings. They reveal a perceived weak position.
Easterling and Spanier are certainly under tremendous pressure from the alumni, including me. Let’s see the data, Graham.
“Yes Senator, it’s all Jones….”
“…..yes Senator Boxer, you are accurate in your assertion, Mr. Jones did go off the reservation….but gobal warming science is sound…..”
Climategate Forecast…
“• What is the current scientific consensus on the conclusions reached by Drs. Mann, Bradley and Hughes? [Referring to the hockey stick propagated in UN IPCC 2001 by Michael Mann.]
Ans: Based on the literature we have reviewed, there is no overarching consensus on MBH98/99. As analyzed in our social network, there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.”
AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION, also known as The Wegman report was authored by Edward J. Wegman, George Mason University, David W. Scott, Rice University, and Yasmin H. Said, The Johns Hopkins University with the contributions of John T. Rigsby, III, Naval Surface Warfare Center, and Denise M. Reeves, MITRE Corporation.
Mann threw Mann under the bus too – peer review.
Mann is probably thinking that hell will freeze over before they prove anything, but it’s ironic that he’s prepared for this eventuality because he’ll have his hockey stick when hell becomes an ice rink.