Next time some irrationalist complains about a skeptic sponsored list, that includes scientists that are not climatologists, saying such lists are irrelevant, show them this. Show them also the unspoken pressure that some signers have worried about.
From The Times (emphasis mine):
Top scientists rally to the defence of the Met Office
The Met Office has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science after the furore over stolen e-mails.
More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the “professional integrity” of global warming research. They were responding to a round-robin request from the Met Office, which has spent four days collecting signatures. The initiative is a sign of how worried it is that e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia are fuelling scepticism about man-made global warming at a critical moment in talks on carbon emissions.
One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.
…
One scientist told The Times he felt under pressure to sign. “The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said.
…
Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which claims man-made climate change has been exaggerated, said the petition showed that the Met Office was rattled.
Complete story here at The Times: Top scientists rally to the defence of the Met Office
Geoffrey Lean writes:
“But just suppose the forecast turns out to be right. What will the sceptics do then? At the heart of their case is a claim that the world is cooling down – based on fixing the starting point in the anomalously warm 1998 and drawing a line from there, even though beginning in 1997 or 1999 would give very different results. Statisticians have condemned the practice, but they have gone on with it.”
Based on what I’ve read here on WUWT, skeptics are are almost always careful to avoid cherry picking a 1998 start date. The phrases used are these:
“In the past ten years”
“In the present century”
“After 1998”
“Since 2002”
“Since 2004”
And only a minority of skeptics here over-reach to the point of claiming the globe has been cooling during such a lengthy period. When referring to the multi-year period, skeptics generally use words like “plateaued” or “leveled off.”
It’s usually only when referring to the last three years or so do we say things like “we’re currently in a cooling trend.” If that is done, there is no reliance on a cherry-picked 1998 date to make our case.
photon without a Higgs (05:14:08) :
“The UK government is making a list. They’re checking it twice. They’re going to find out who’s naughty and nice.”
And the next UK government will have a list of persons who “will not be missed” if their “utmost confidence” turns out wrong.
Here is a listing of names and the CRU emails which include their names:
http://zztools.blogspot.com/2009/12/climategate-uk-science-community.html
One would think with the Met Office being full of scientists that the search for truth would be the primary goal. However in May 2009 they announced they had just completed the purchase of a new $50 million super computer which would help process data to fight climate change and give even better forecasts than ever before. It is my preceived opinion as an inveterate weather watcher that since May 2009 their forecasts have been less accurate than ever.
The Met Office fired up a new $50 million computer in May this year – a one petaflop beast (1000 billion operations per second). It takes 1.2 megawatts of electricity to run, contributing around 10,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum. This on top of swish new premises, a cool $120 million.
The Met office stands no chance of getting forecasts right with this, nor of being able to model climate accurately enough to make predictions into the future because it ignores several of the most important variables.
On top of which this beast produces more CO2 than ever before. Honestly you couldn’t make it up. So naturally they are closing ranks on this one because if climate gate be true (and I think it is soi) they have just effectively wasted $50 mln and if anyone finds out surely someones head would roll.
The UK media has plunged into an unusually cretinous feeding frenzy following the “news” that the Met Office headquarters complex in Devon – owing to the presence of a lot of supercomputing hardware there – is considered to lie at 103rd place in a table ranking nearly 30,000 large UK buildings by carbon-emissions footprint.
The Met Office’s high-power computing gear “has made the Met Office one of the worst public buildings in Britain for pollution”, we learn from the Telegraph. “It has now earned the Met Office’s Exeter headquarters the shame of being named as one of the most polluting buildings in Britain”, says the Times. Indeed, referring to one specific new machine, the BBC tells us that “it produces 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year” (must be one of those coal-powered computers). Most of the articles point out that the Met lads got their long-range summer forecasts wrong to boot, predicting a “barbeque summer” which has actually been rather a washout.