Here’s a recent story from the Associated Press:
By Seth Borenstein, Raphael Satter and Malcolm Ritter, Dec 12, 2009
“E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.”
Look in the mirror, fools. It’s right there in the CRU emails:
On Jul 23, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Borenstein, Seth wrote:
Kevin, Gavin, Mike,
It’s Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that
Marc Morano is hyping wildly. It’s in a legit journal. Whatchya think?
Seth
Seth Borenstein
Associated Press Science Writer
[7]sborenstein@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
The Associated Press, 1100 13th St. NW, Suite 700,
Washington, DC
20005-4076
202-641-9454
Now, I’m going to bring to your attention, this entry from THE ASSOCIATED PRESS STATEMENT OF NEWS VALUES AND PRINCIPLES
For more than a century and a half, men and women of The Associated Press have had the privilege of bringing truth to the world. They have gone to great lengths, overcome great obstacles – and, too often, made great and horrific sacrifices – to ensure that the news was reported quickly, accurately and honestly. Our efforts have been rewarded with trust: More people in more places get their news from the AP than from any other source.In the 21st century, that news is transmitted in more ways than ever before – in print, on the air and on the Web, with words, images, graphics, sounds and video. But always and in all media, we insist on the highest standards of integrity and ethical behavior when we gather and deliver the news.
That means we abhor inaccuracies, carelessness, bias or distortions. It means we will not knowingly introduce false information into material intended for publication or broadcast; nor will we alter photo or image content. Quotations must be accurate, and precise.
It means we always strive to identify all the sources of our information, shielding them with anonymity only when they insist upon it and when they provide vital information – not opinion or speculation; when there is no other way to obtain that information; and when we know the source is knowledgeable and reliable.
It means we don’t plagiarize.
It means we avoid behavior or activities that create a conflict of interest and compromise our ability to report the news fairly and accurately, uninfluenced by any person or action.
It means we don’t misidentify or misrepresent ourselves to get a story. When we seek an interview, we identify ourselves as AP journalists.
It means we don’t pay newsmakers for interviews, to take their photographs or to film or record them.
It means we must be fair. Whenever we portray someone in a negative light, we must make a real effort to obtain a response from that person. When mistakes are made, they must be corrected – fully, quickly and ungrudgingly.
And ultimately, it means it is the responsibility of every one of us to ensure that these standards are upheld. Any time a question is raised about any aspect of our work, it should be taken seriously.
“I have no thought of saying The Associated Press is perfect. The frailties of human nature attach to it,” wrote Melville Stone, the great general manager of the AP. But he went on to say that “the thing it is striving for is a truthful, unbiased report of the world’s happenings … ethical in the highest degree.”
He wrote those words in 1914. They are true today.
…
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The AP respects and encourages the rights of its employees to participate actively in civic, charitable, religious, public, social or residential organizations.
However, AP employees must avoid behavior or activities – political, social or financial – that create a conflict of interest or compromise our ability to report the news fairly and accurately, uninfluenced by any person or action. Nothing in this policy is intended to abridge any rights provided by the National Labor Relations Act.
Here is a sampler of AP practices on questions involving possible conflict of interest. It is not all-inclusive; if you are unsure whether an activity may constitute a conflict or the appearance of a conflict, consult your manager at the onset.
EXPRESSIONS OF OPINION:
Anyone who works for the AP must be mindful that opinions they express may damage the AP’s reputation as an unbiased source of news. They must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum, whether in Web logs, chat rooms, letters to the editor, petitions, bumper stickers or lapel buttons, and must not take part in demonstrations in support of causes or movements.
When a reporter get’s too cozy with sources, calling them by their first names, with no hint of professional formality, it raises questions of integrity.
When a reporter is part of an email thread where one of the respondents says:
On Jul 23, 2009, at 9:05 PM, Jim Salinger wrote:
Hi All
Thanks for the pro-activeness. Is there an opportunity to write a
letter to JGR pointing out the junk science in this??….if
it is not rebutted, then all sceptics will use this to justify their
position.
Jim
It gives the appearance that he is not interested in reporting the other side of the story, especially when he is the instigator of the email thread by saying:
Marc Morano is hyping wildly. It’s in a legit journal. Whatchya think?
So, how then would the AP trust Seth Borenstein to do an “exhaustive inquiry” when he is part of the issue?
Perhaps further FOIA documents will tell us just how cozy Mr. Borenstein is with the people he reports on.
Now consider what other members of the media people write about him. From the Tacoma News-Tribune
Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein has a terrible reputation as a runaway alarmist. Even global warming enthusiasts and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are embarrassed by his over-the-top prognostications of doom and selective use of data to support his fading dream that mankind can actually control climate.
When other reporters people can see the bias, AP, you have a problem.
A few days later, spurred on by Borenstein’s initial letter, we see this one:
From: Kevin Trenberth <trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Michael Mann <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: ENSO blamed over warming – paper in JGR
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:23:09 -0600
Cc: Grant Foster <tamino_9@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, “J. Salinger” <j.salinger@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, j.renwick@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, b.mullan@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, James Annan <jdannan@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Hi all
Wow this is a nice analysis by Grant et al. What we should do is turn this into a learning
experience for everyone: there is often misuse of filtering. Obviously the editor and
reviewers need to to also be taken to task here. I agree with Mike Mann that a couple of
other key points deserve to be made wrt this paper. Making sure that the important
relationships and role of ENSO on interannual variability of global temperatures should
also be pointed out with some select references (as in recent emails and the refs
therein). In terms of the paper, I recommend consolidating the figures to keep them fewer
in number if this is a comment: combine Figs 3 with 4 , and 6 with 7. Make sure the plots
of spectra have period prominently displayed as well as frequency and maybe even highlight
with stipple some bands like >10 years. Glad to sign on: I would need an acknowledgment
that NCAR is sponsored by NSF.
Regards
Kevin
More instances of scientists acting like bullies to pressure editors and reviewers to accept the view they hold dear. Notice blogger “Tamino” aka Grant Foster is part of the gang.
Does Seth Borenstein ever report anything about undue pressure on journals exercised by his circle of climate coziness? No.
But to have Mr. Borenstein report upon the investigation of the leaked East Anglia emails, when he himself is part of the emails, is certainly a conflict of interest.
In that story today about the investigation, written in part by Borenstein it says:
The archive also includes a request from an AP reporter, one of the writers of this story, for reaction to a study, a standard step for journalists seeking quotes for their stories.
When the AP allows reporters to report on stories they are involved in, and for them to be able to dance around their own involvement in the same story, it clearly becomes a conflict of interest.
It is, in my opinion, time for AP to remove Seth Borenstein as “science reporter”. I believe he can no longer be trusted to report climate science without bias, due to this clear conflict of interest.
The Associated Press
Headquarters
450 W. 33rd St.
New York, NY 10001
Main Number
+1-212-621-1500
Paul Colford
Director of Media Relations
Jack Stokes
Manager of Media Relations
NOTE: I misidentified the article in Tacoma News Tribune as being from the reporter, when it was a letter reaction. In the right side is a “Share this story” bar, which aided in my misidentification. I regret the error. Thankfully, our large group of reviewers here caught this error on my part and it is corrected in the story above. – Anthony
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Dear Anthony,
Suggestion for new thread “Argo raw data – hidden due to cooling?”
Best Regards,
Invariant
http://denver.craigslist.org/pol/1507633812.html
The Argo data is extraordinarily difficult to find on the Internet. There is no official or unofficial website showing the latest ocean temperature. Basically the only way to get the data is to ask Josh Willis (above). The graph above come from Craig Loehle, who got the data from Willis, analysed it, and put the results in a peer reviewed paper available on the Internet. Given the importance of the ocean temperatures, don’t you think this is extraordinary?
If the Argo data showed a warming trend, don’t you suppose it would be publicised endlessly?
So what’s going on? Our best data, from satellites and Argo, says that both the air and oceans have not warmed for at least five years now. In the short term, some cooling force is overpowering the warming due to human emissions.
Prof. Mark Maslin in that video is hopelessly lost in both delusion and dishonesty.
This is what it has come to. A mixture of various afflictions and mushrooming dishonesty in a panic to preserve the agenda with these fresh embellishments of pretentious caring and commitment to saving the masses.
Even before ClimateGate lefty talk show host Thom Hartman embellished nearly every aspect of the movement including his warnings about total ice cap loss and a BILLION climate refugees.
The AP and the NYT defend the awards and citations of Lt. for life John F. Kerry to this very hour. The AP, MSM etal have an over load of lies to defend.
They now drown in their on lies and fraud.
Some one step on their head, they have gone under two times, cry out
THIRDS AND STEP ON THEM.
_Jim (08:30:50) :
[snip]
Control; Teachers do it . Bosses do it. Girlfriends do it. Wives do it. City Councils do it. Professional societies do it. ‘Standards’ bodies do it. Law enforcement types of many persuasions (including code enforcement etc.) do it.
But of course, Jim. The HUGE difference is when folks use government guns, tassers, prisons or fines to control others. I will never get over that.
a rule of thumb:
1. Good ideas do not have to be forced on others.
2. Bad ideas should not be forced on others.
Marc Morano hardly got a word in with that “professor” interrupting him constantly. Still, he reeled off an impressive array of facts about the ice extent recovery and reacted strongly to the claim that 5,000 scientists are supposed to be supporting the science. This is a myth ripe to be deconstructed. It wouldn’t take a lot of effort to start with the imagined 5,000 and finish with the actual number – about 50.
Here is the latest ARGO data… it took less then 10 seconds to find.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/argo/latest_data.html#compressed
The original hand written “raw” land records for the US are available in PDF, as has been commented about already a few times.
The minute by minute data for the airports is available for most of this decade.
The reality is that the data is “still” out there. Until lately, no one cared enough to look at the status or quality of the data. It is my personal opinion, that the data needs to downloaded, staged and made available on an open source server making it easily available for *anyone* to look at or graph the data.
A terabyte or two is nothing in todays computer hardware world.
Two weeks summer in Australia guess and what happens…
It’s snowing in Victoria!
Where is the media coverage of such a remarkable event.
They are still worried about Anthropogenic Global Warming right!
Global Cooling does not look what it is, it’s Global Warming.
I have one question. How much Government money has been paid to make them write all that Climate Rubbish.
Follow the money, connect the dots and start ordering “peck and feathers”, we will need a lot of it.
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/a-snowy-dusting-in-victorias-summer/13262
Michael (08:26:11) :
Now Mark Maslin is saying it’s 5000 scientists.
Jim 08:30:50
Get over it? How can we get over people taking our tax money and conspiring to get even more and have more control over us while pretending to be scientists and saving the world. Almost the same thing happened in the 70’s as pointed out many times here on WUWT. Anthony has shown how bad some of these temp sites are ,yet these guys use them because it just fits their schemes. Get over it?–I’ll get over it when I see some of them shamed and or prosecuted or losing their esteemed jobs.
We are also told to be nice and respectful and don’t make too many waves.Yet at the same time the anti agw folks are called deniers or other disrespectful names. I wonder how many times Thomas Paine was told to “keep it down”.Some of our Senators and Congressmen should be standing up and shouting “I OBJECT”. No,they just seem to try to get along.
Thank goodness some folks do believe in conspiracies and investigate and try to expose them when they do find them-like now.
Vincent (09:27:15) :
Marc Morano hardly got a word in with that “professor” interrupting him constantly.
The more they interrupt the more I like it. They broadcast their insecurities to the world by it!
Finally, debate!
A Robertson (02:55:22) :
Sorry but I don’t know where to post this link but I think it is worth a read. From the mainstream press in UK’s Mail on Sunday
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235395/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-Climate-change-emails-row-deepens–Russians-admit-DID-send-them.html
Yes, it is worth a read, but the headline tells us something inadvertently about the best of journalism. The story about Russians admitting that the e-mails were uploaded to their servers, is not what the headline pronounces, and is not really the subject of article at all. Even a very even-handed story like this has a misleading headline–oh truth, where art thou?
Just sent this off to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. They’ve been fairly good lately about printing minority views.
______________________________________________________________________________
“Your readers might be interested to learn that reporter Seth Borenstein (“Report: Hacked e-mails….”, p. A18 in Sunday’s paper) is himself a contributor to and recipient of the CRU correspondence. So he is investigating and reporting on his own behavior, in apparent violation of Associated Press professional standards.
“Readers who believe the data hasn’t been compromised should get on line and read for themselves, not only the e-mails, but especially the computer coding comments, which Borenstein, Satter, and Ritter have simply ignored. A fairly forceful discussion of the journalistic standards can be found at http://wattsupwiththat.com/”
John Slayton
260 Sundance Ct
Azusa CA 91702
626 969-9061
Way to go Watt!
Can you post a petition that we can all sign?
Thanks,
Hans
Snipping at ankles (ankle biting; think: small yipping dog making noise to no purpose)
At this rate the ‘NWO’ will find you (us?) an easy mark.
Curative action: Educate yourself (first and foremost, REAL education, not this conspiracy-based carp [sic]), write your congresscritters, write the AP in regards to Seth’s violation of AP’s own “STATEMENT OF NEWS VALUES AND PRINCIPLES” and become involved in the mainstream political process. This means no third parties, no appeal to lauP noR as a ‘savior’; it means hard work, it means letter writing, it means you doing legwork and campaign work for candidates in your district and, quite literally, getting the vote out for your candidate(s) …
– and turn off Alex Jones (‘Jack Blood’ et al), Joyce Riley and ‘The Power Hour’. They do nothing but cause you to burn energy and resources uselessly and will figuratively ‘suck your brains out’.
“Conspiracy theories are the tool of the weak-minded.”
.
.
Moderators, an appeal to leniency in snipping this post, pls.
PS: Regarding item my item F above, I should have added that the NAS Committee endorsed all of Mann’s statistical criticisms of Mann’s hockey stick. WUWT commenter Allan M R MacRae wrote, “The North Committee reached strong conclusions that condemned Mann’s hockey stick, but the Committee Chairman, Dr. North, aggressively obscured those conclusions in his public statements. Dr. North displayed an appalling lack of objectivity, imo. The Wegman Committee reached similar very negative conclusions about Mann-made global warming, and were far more forthright in their comments.”
MacRae also said:
“As a result of a Material Complaint filed by Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph and Steven McIntyre, Nature issued a Corrigendum in July 2004, a correction of Mann’s hockey stick. It acknowledged extensive errors in the description of the Mann data set, and conceded that key steps in the computations were left out and conflicted with the descriptions in the original paper.”
So it was misleading of SB (in the words quoted at the start of item F) to invite the reader to come away with the inference that Mann was fully vindicated by the NAS and (by further implication) that McIntyre was a mere pest.
I decided to try a relative skill test between Altavista, Bing and Google on a search term that had no likelihood of being politically charged, by searching on a last name that I know to be a very rare spelling.
The relative results are:
Google 41,700
Altavista 21,400
Bing 5110
I then did a search on a neutral technical term that includes two words separated by a space —- heat pipe
The relative results are:
Altavista = 60,400,000
Bing = 13,000,000
Google = 11,000,000
It appears that on terms that have no political impact and only depend on the search engine indexing very obscure references like cemetery listings, birth and death listings in news papers etc. Google far out performs Bing.
On a technical term like Heat pipe google is the clear loser of the three. With out following a few million links I can’t say anything about the relevance of the hits on Altavista, but it is clear from these tests that it is bad technique to rely on only a single search engine if you are looking for best possible coverage on any topic.
The conclusion I draw from that is:
Bing is actively crawling the web and looking for links to climate gate, as it appears to not have the same index depth for obscure search terms. That Altavista is a competent search engine, but still falls short of Googles reach in some areas, but is superior in others. Google has the reach and raw data capacity to find much larger numbers of obscure references and on climate gate is limiting output for one of several reasons. It could be excluding duplicates, although that appears unlikely, since if you go to the end of listings the number of hits does not increase significantly if you select the option to not exclude duplicates “If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”.
Google search for climate gate with no restrictions = 29,200,000
Search for climate gate do not exclude duplicates = 29,300,000
For some reason Google is not indexing as many hits as Bing on a highly controversial topic. It would be interesting to see if there was some entire class of “hits” that Google is excluding that Bing is picking up. Unfortunately that would take sophisticated analysis of the actual nature of the hits indexed by each search engine and a statistical analysis of the fractions that appear from news organizations, high traffic blogs, minor news outlets etc. to see if some sub set or hits are systematically being excluded.
I am beginning to doubt that there is some “intentional” skewing of results by Google, but there are clearly differences between various search engines on their competence to find certain terms due to differences in how they index “hits”, and crawl the web.
Perhaps the only lesson here is that sole source supply on any subject or news item whether you are talking about the IPCC as a data source or a search engine can lead to biased results.
Larry
His bias affects the entire organization. When the tide turns on this issue he will be “pursuing other interests”.
Until then I have zero confidence in the AP being anything other than just another biased media outlet.
Jack in Oregon (09:29:39) : Here is the latest ARGO data… it took less then 10 seconds to find.
Thanks. Is it possible to view a curve with the global sea temperature average from ARGO online? Something like this:
http://climate4you.com/SeaTemperatures.htm
If not, why not setup a server that can automatically download, process and display the global temperature sea average according to ARGO?
Well said! It’ll be interesting to see AP’s response.
1:16pm, 20091213
CNN, Byorn Lomborg just nailed Paul Krugman.
Roger Knights (06:48:16) :
The longer the post here the more I am tempted to skim, but your long post was worth a skim, then a careful reading, and maybe a second. Thanks.
google climategate is down to 24 million today.
A couple of days ago it was 28 million. Shouldnt the number increase ???? Is it the Gorgle effect?
[2nd notice -Ron – your email is still non-functional.
Can’t let you post anymore until I get a valid email in your comments. the “2fly” domain is not even registered – Anthony]
I dunno guys. I think we should give Mr. Borenstein a break. It is my experience that if not all, then the vast majority of “science” reporters do not have sufficient cranial capacity to grasp even the slightest technical concept. And that’s not just limited to climate science. Medical, mathematical, computational, any branch of physics or chemistry, etc, etc. They’re all pretty hopeless. Borenstein was simply another of that gang in way over his head.
Do not think that Google is neutral in any way shape or form. They regularly modify their search criteria for countries who control “free internet access”. See China.
They will change things if pressured – follow the $.