You can thank Chris Horner of CEI for making this happen.
In August 2007, I submitted two Freedom of Information Act requests to NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), headed by long-time Gore advisor James Hansen and his right-hand man Gavin Schmidt (and RealClimate.org co-founder).
I did this because Canadian businessman Steve McIntyre — a man with professional experience investigating suspect statistical claims in the mining industry and elsewhere, including his exposure of the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph — noticed something unusual with NASA’s claims of an ever-warming first decade of this century. NASA appeared to have inflated its U.S. temperatures beginning in the year 2000. My FOIA request asked NASA about their internal discussions regarding whether and how to correct the temperature error caught by McIntyre.
NASA stonewalled my request for more than two years, until Climategate prompted me to offer notice of intent to sue if NASA did not comply immediately.
On New Year’s Eve, NASA finally provided the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) with the documents I requested in August 2007.
…
Regarding U.S. temperatures, Ruedy confessed to Hansen on August 23, 2007 to say:
I got a copy from a journalist in Brazil, we don’t save the data.
——————————————–
The Ruedy relationship with a Brazilian journalist raises the matter of the incestuous relationship between NASA’s GISS and like-minded environmental reporters. One can’t help but recall how, recently, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim of glacier shrinkage in the Himalayas was discredited when found to be the work of a single speculative journalist at a popular magazine, and not strict peer-reviewed scientific data. The emails we obtained include several instances of very close ties and sympathetic relationships with journalists covering them.
…
In an August 15, 2007, email from Ruedy to Brazilian journalist Leticia Francisco Sorg, responding to Sorg’s request for Ruedy to say if warming is accelerating, Ruedy replied:
“To observe that the warming accelerates would take even longer observation times” than the past 25 years. In fact, it would take “another 50-100 years.”
This is a damning admission that NASA has been complicit in UN alarmism. This is not science. It is debunked advocacy. The impropriety of such policy advocacy, let alone allowing unsubstantial scientific claims to become part of a media campaign, is self-evident.
More here.
================
Climategate 2.0: The NASA Files
In August 2007, Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) submitted two Freedom of Information Act requests to NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), headed by long-time Gore advisor James Hansen and his right-hand man Gavin Schmidt (and RealClimate.org co-founder).
Canadian businessman Steve McIntyre — a man with professional experience investigating suspect statistical claims in the mining industry and elsewhere, including his exposure of the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph — noticed something unusual with NASA’s claims of an ever-warming first decade of this century. NASA appeared to have inflated its U.S. temperatures beginning in the year 2000.
The FOIA request asked NASA about their internal discussions regarding whether and how to correct the temperature error caught by McIntyre.
NASA stonewalled for more than two years.
Quietly — on New Year’s Eve 2009 — NASA finally provided the documents:
Read Christopher Horner’s analysis of the documents here.
The sticking parts, as I see it, are the 50-100 years to see the trend confirmed, the .5C/.9F error margin, and the fact that it is regions which count. These regions have real people in them, and the climate history is very important to us. When the globe changes .7C , your region changes 3C and the next one changes -3C, it’s everything.
There’s a lot of attitude in those emails reminiscent of others we’ve seen.
I didn’t get the feeling that they were being scientists, but more like keepers of secrets, and expressing revulsion that thier assertions about climate were being challenged.
Advocacy? Yes.
The Red Herring is the assumption that if the whole globe changes by .7C, all regions will act in unison. Ain’t the way it works.
How much longer can they keep up the pretense that AGW is valid? I’d say approximately – forever, because AGW is not a science, it’s a religion. And religions aren’t upset by mere facts. For example: lack of snow proves AGW, just as too much snow does, lack of hurricanes proves AGW, just as too many hurricanes do, and lack of fog proves AGW, just as to much Fog does. It’s simply, whatever happens is proof enough for the pure of heart.
Robert, 21:08
“So . . . not data.
Not models.
E-mails of internal discussions, hoping to find something embarrassing.
Good luck with your witch hunt. Meanwhile, science goes on.”
What a pathetic statement. Your data has been distorted and machinized through adjustments that make no sense and then lost. The models are inaccurate and inappropriately made to reproduce a preconceived notion of AGW that can’t be found. What science are you talking about? Science is skeptical, yet you apparently think that a joke.
Please consult your diety for fresh instructions. These limpish statements about “science” going on only accrue to the continued discredit of your assertions, implied or expressed.
Now I understand why such folk are known here as trolls.
Yes, Dave N (21:29:14), I was delighted by the new attitude expressed in the news of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory: The ‘Variable Sun’ Mission
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2010/05feb_sdo.htm
It includes these comments from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), NASA Headquarters, NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, and the University of Colorado.
1. From NASA Headquarters: “The sun,” explains Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters in Washington DC, “is a variable star.”
2. From NRL: “Understanding solar variability is crucial,” says space scientist Judith Lean of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC. “Our modern way of life depends upon it.”
3. From NAS: “According to a 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences, a century-class solar storm could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.”
4. From the Marshall Space Flight Center: “The depth of the solar minimum in 2008-2009 really took us by surprise,” says sunspot expert David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “It highlights how far we still have to go to successfully forecast solar activity.”
5. From Boulder, CO: “If human eyes could see EUV wavelengths, no one would doubt that the sun is a variable star,” says Tom Woods of the University of Colorado in Boulder.
6. From NRL: “‘Solar constant’ is an oxymoron,” says Judith Lean of the Naval Research Lab. “Satellite data show that the sun’s total irradiance rises and falls with the sunspot cycle by a significant amount.”
7. From NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center: “Understanding the inner workings of the solar dynamo has long been a ‘holy grail’ of solar physics,” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.
Now DOE (Department of Energy) scientists need to come clean and admit or deny that N-N repulsion is the energy source that powers the Sun and generates the cycles of solar magnetic activity that are empirically linked with changes in Earth’s climate.
May the climate scandal also encourage:
a.) Scientists at NAS, NASA, the Goddard and Marshall Space Flight Centers, and NRL to re-examine their obsolete dogma of a Hydrogen-filled Sun, and
b.) Scientists at DOE to review carefully two 2002 papers, one reporting that solar neutrinos oscillate away before traveling from the Sun to the Earth [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 (2002) 011301] and the other reporting that the neutron repulsion is the primary energy source for the Sun [Journal of Fusion Energy 19 (2002) 197-201]. http://www.springerlink.com/content/x1n87370x6685079/
With kind regards,
Oliver
As for “I got a copy from a journalist in Brazil, we don’t save the data.”:
If they just saved the GHCN and USHCN source files they used for each month, they could just recreate whichever calculation they ever did. Perhaps they should do that.
Oliver K. Manuel (21:11:10) :
There is still a lot of filth to be revealed, including the blatantly false information that NASA and DOE have promoted on the origin, chemical composition, and source of nuclear energy for the Sun
The current knowledge of how the Sun works is the result of hard work by scientists all over the world. NASA, etc, has nothing to do with this. But since NASA did not renew your grant, perhaps it is not too surprising that you are disgruntled, but your are in good company with many others who also didn’t get funded [the result rate for proposals is less than 25%].
This does not look right.
Is peer-review supposed to anonymous both ways?
Taken from the document:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/business/foia/GISS.html
417760main_part4.pdf
——————————————
—Forwarded Message—
11 June 2007 14:50:28 +0100
Dear Dr. Schmidt;
I have received three reviews of your paper “Attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect.” All three reviewers recommend that the paper be rejected”
…
From Reviewer #1
“My overall impression is that I am not reading a polished paper, but reading an early draft – an impression that certainly isn’t helped by the fact that one of the authors is acknowledged in the Acknowledgements..”
…
From Reviewer #2
“Making the argument that forcing and feedback mechanisms are inherently different, so not putting the feedbacks into Table 3 plays right into the nay-sayers hands”
——————————————
Say What!! “plays right into the nay-sayers hands”?
Who are the “nay-sayers”?
Is this what is passing for Peer-Reviewed Science?
Keep up the good fight and THANK YOU!
They better start ‘finding’ the data.
When I asked someone if the data thier partner took was in a personal copy format, they got curious. When I told that person that the data was NOT in the official NCDC or other records, they got very worried. One assumes when decades worth of data have been turned in over the years, that data is stored carefully and preserved.
The person I contacted said this scared them. No matter which way our climate changes, without a history, one does not know what to expect.
Yes, it certainly is scary.
I had my try at getting missing records out of NCDC.
The experience was less than rewarding. Got passed down the line and ended up with a “What was it you wanted now?”.
Perhaps I was an amusing Red Herring to them.
There are many station sites in my area with huge holes in them.
How’s your area doing?
@Robert
“E-mails of internal discussions, hoping to find something embarrassing.
Good luck with your witch hunt. Meanwhile, science goes on.”
Not a witch hunt, but a legitimate public concern. The US government has pumped billions of taxpayer dollars into climate change research and the public has a right to know exactly how their hard earned money is being spent. The employees at NASA (and other US government agencies) are fully aware that their internal communications are subject to review by the public. Thus, there is no reason to expect to find anything “embarrassing” in those emails unless YOU know something about “the science” that the rest of us do not.
Oliver K. Manuel (22:11:26) :
Yes, Dave N (21:29:14), I was delighted by the new attitude expressed in the news of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory: The ‘Variable Sun’ Mission
This is not a ‘new attitude’. Abbot showed a hundred years ago that the Sun was a variable star. And none of this has any bearing on your ideas, if anything SDO will provide solid refutation. We fully expect SDO to further confirm the very successful standard solar models and provide us with a detailed view of the flows of plasma inside the gaseous Hydrogen Sun to aid us in prediction of solar activity.
Subject: Re: Your Reply to: GISS Temperature Correction Problem?
From: Gavin Schmidt gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov
Date: 19 Feb 2008 14:38:47 -0500
To: rruedy@giss.nasa.gov
I had a look at the data, and this whole business seems to be related to the infilling of seasonal and annual means. There is no evidence for any step change in any of the individual months.
The only anomalous point (which matches nearby deltas) is for Set 2005. Given the large amount of missing data in lampasas this gets propagated to the annual (D-N) mean – I think – with a little more weight then in the nearby stations. The other factor might be that lampasas is overall cooling, if we use climatology to infill in recent years, that might give a warm bias. But I’m not sure on how the filling-in happens.
Gavin
Why was this provided as PDF images? To make it as hard as possible to study?
Has this data been corrected or changed since this time? What is the current data? Why isn’t it released in real time? I am a taxpayer, I PAID for it!
Robert-
The FOIA request was for the data, they released as emails with no comments, corrections, or real time data and analysis. What does that say, smart guy?
Knowing this may get snipped.
[Response: Perhaps you’d care to translate what I’ve been accused of? The worst seems to be that I know Jim Hansen and that other people I know have talked to Brazilian journalists. To both crimes I plead guilty. Indeed, I have even spoken to Brazilian journalists myself. There is nothing else there. – gavin]
rbateman (22:02:56) :
“The sticking parts, as I see it, are the 50-100 years to see the trend confirmed,”
The current trend is significant over the last 30 years, so it’s already confirmed. That statement is about observing acceleration beyond the current rate. It’d take a long while to discern any acceleration.
“When the globe changes .7C , your region changes 3C and the next one changes -3C, it’s everything.”
Sure, but how much of the earth is not showing a warming trend over the last 30 years? Parts of Antarctica, and parts of the south Pacific, maybe.
“The Red Herring is the assumption that if the whole globe changes by .7C, all regions will act in unison. ”
Who has ever made that assumption? Model results certainly do not predict uniform warming. But much of the surface has some sort of warming trend, nonetheless.
“They better start ‘finding’ the data.”
It isn’t the original station data they’re talking about. It’s the results of the GISS calculation for the US. Basically, they don’t archive old versions of a file like this, for the US. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
I didn’t realise they ever put up a table for the US, actually; I can’t find one now.
———
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: Your Reply to: GISS Temperature Correction Problem?]
From: Gavin Schmidt gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov
Date: 19 Feb 2008 16:30:18 -0500
To: rruedy@giss.nasa.gov
On Tue, 2008-02-19 at 16:10, Reto Ruedy wrote:
| If at least 2 of the 3 months of a season are known, the mean of those |
| months is the seasonal mean; after all seasonal means are found, the |
| annual means are derived from those seasonal means; If at least 3 of then |
| 4 seasons are known, their average is the annual mean |
| I think this is aperfectly legitimate to use in the urbal adjustment step |
agreed
| However, Jay also used it in an earlier step (where we combine station |
| data for the same location). In addition, it is used to create the |
| tables an annual mean plots in the “Station Data” section of our web |
| site, but those data are not used for anything. |
these are the ones that puzzle me a little. They aren’t the average of
the two months with data. Thus I think some use of climatology or recent
years must be used. Which program writes these out? I’ll have a look.
However, the annual data that comes from this is used in the figures that
Watts is so fond of.
| In these cases we deal with absolute temperatures, and the technique |
| obviously does not work well if the hottest or coldest season is |
| missing. I remember vaguely that we played with various ways of filling |
| in the missing data rather than ignoring them, but jay must have decided |
| that in the average, the result were not substantially better |
that might be worth writing up a bit more formally…
———-
These emails have been out for a little while. They are on Neutralpedia, having been put back into text files with OCR.
If you visit Neutralpedia and become curious, what this is, read this article
Mr. Horner, Anthony & mods;
Nice beginning to the dissection of the NASA/GISS FOIA emails.
How do we know if these FOIA emails provided by NASA/GISS are all the relevant emails?
I need to spend a few nights trying to determine if there are holes in the email chains and if are inferences to other not included emails.
Hope part of your future analyses also looks at whether these emails comprise the whole set or not.
John
So we can make a year out of 3 months!
——
On Wed, 200802020 at 13:49, Reto Ruedy wrote:
| Gavin
| You are right, I totally misrepresented what jay’s programs are doing
|
| It seems to me now that he computes a monthly climatology (based on all
| available months – not totally sure about that – as long as there is at
| least one month present), from that a season climatology, and from
| that finally an annual mean value.
|
| Then he finds the monthly anomaly series, from it a seasonal anomaly
| series (if at least 2 monthly anomalies were available), and from that
| an annual anomaly series (if at least 3 seasons were present).
|
| Adding anomaly and climatology, he got the final seasonal/annual series.
Henry (23:25:53) :
“The FOIA request was for the data, they released as emails”
The FOI was for emails relevant to the Y2K bug. It’s even at the top of the page.
All the data used by GISS is publicly available. GISS does not collect it themselves; they get it from NOAA, SCAR and Hadley. You can download all those files yourself.
Re: the GISS foia pdf files –
I note without comment that the emails were first printed, then scanned, apparently manually judging by their occasional misalignment. This makes the pdf’s non-searchable.
There is mention in the first pdf an article by Mark Steyn, pages 42 and 43 of –
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/pdf/415776main_NASA%20GISS%20Temperature%20Data%20%28Part%201%20of%203%29.pdf
After general kudos to fellow Canadian McIntyre, he goes on to suggest government thermometer relocation.
Climategate 2.0 is beginning to look more and more like Gavingate 1.0.
No wonder Gavin quickly posted his “Whatevergate” article on RC in a desperate last-ditch attempt to defuse the situation using a tired valley girl euphemism.
Czechgate: Climate scientists dump world’s second oldest ‘cold’ climate record
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/203117-Czechgate-Climate-scientists-dump-world-s-second-oldest-cold-climate-record
February 16, 2010
John O’Sullivan
The latest independent analysis of world climate data by acclaimed skeptic blogger ‘Chiefio’ (aka E. M. Smith) and his blog contributors confirm that the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) has cynically dumped the world’s second oldest and reliable climate record at Prague in the Czech Republic for no scientific reason.
Climate skeptics claim the censoring of the Czech’s raw data has been perpetrated by climate scientists because the Prague records prove there has been no warming in Europe for over two hundred years.
Bloggers found that GHCN, based at Arizona State University, also cut out Prague’s warm 1940’s as it would make recent warming look unexceptional. This process of adjusting raw data by climatologists (almost always upwards) is known as ‘homogenization.’ Skeptics then found that climatologists had replaced the original Prague dataset from 1949 with a homogenized warmer series from another weather station in Praha/Ruzyne even though Prague had never stopped taking temperature readings.
Skeptic analysts are outraged because, after the Central England Temperature Record, the Czech records are the second oldest continous and reliable temperature record in the world and are known as the Central European Temperature Record. The data set has been kept uninterrupted since 1775 in Praha-Klementinum (Prague). Reading the Czech data we see that for the past 200 years the temperature in this part of central Europe has warmed by a statistically insignificant 0.25° Centigrade per century.
The Prague raw temperatures correlate perfectly with those of the world’s oldest climate data set, found in the Central England Temperature Record (CET) that has been running continuously for 351 years.
Thus, the two oldest and most reliable raw thermometer records in the world are telling us there is not a shred of real world evidence to show any significant global warming. Rather, it the homogenized or faked data created artificially by climatologists in their laboratories that is consistently being shown as the source of such ‘warming.’
***************************************************************************
Is it any wonder the CRU/NASA team hs hidden (or “lost”) so much raw data and fought so hard to keep it secret?
With “adjustments” they changed a 1.18ºC cooling to a 1.01ºC warming for the last 130 years. While they’re screaming about a supposedly scary global rise of 0.6ºC (sometimes said to be 0.7ºC or 0.8ºC) in the last 100 years they “adjust” this location upward by three times as much or more. As always, “adjustments” go only one way.
Lovely jubbly!
Translation – Britspeak for excellent news!