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.
Policyguy (22:08:11) : (to Robert, 21:08) Now I understand why such folk are known here as trolls.
Thanks for that post, Policyguy; I have been trying to figure some way to say all that to Robert on a couple of threads now, but couldn’t get it right. You have.
Lucy Skywalker (23:57:36) :
It does not look look like it is all at the Neutralpedia link.
Are the emails in order there?
If they are in numeric-date order he last emil at that site was sent:
(NASA FOIA Email 70)
Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2007 12:02:10 -0500
The last email in the last of the four pdfs (417760main_part4.pdf) was sent
Date: 14 Oct 2009 18:21:07 -0400
Is there another page?
suggestion to global warming scientists who have been pushing this fraud get out while you can because the lawyers may in fact come after you for lost money
Hello;
When Gavin Schmidt say something like this:
“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. ”
Is this type of statement ‘significant’?
PS.
It makes me think that ‘climatology’ as some kind of spice to warm up a meal,
or a trick for adding a warm bias to data?
Am I mistaken?
Kate (00:15:29) :
“As always, “adjustments” go only one way.”
You could actually look at all of the stations, and see whether that’s true or not.
http://www.gilestro.tk/2009/lots-of-smoke-hardly-any-gun-do-climatologists-falsify-data/
So Gavin Schmidt ‘assumes’ much and he is ‘pretty sure’ of a ‘fluke’ when calculating an annual temperature using only 7 months.
Seriously, is this normal?
Do all of you climate people work like this?
—-
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: Your Reply to: GISS Temperature Correction Problem?]
From: Gavin Schmidt
Date: 20 Feb 2008 15:01:26 -0500
To: rruedy
That works.
That implies that the missing months are assumed to have the same mean anomaly as the other two months, and that the missing seasons are assumed to have the same mean anomaly as the seasons present. Hence, one strong anomaly in a couple of months (ie. Sept and Nov 2005) can have a large impact on the annual mean.
I’m pretty sure that the Lampasas spike is just a fluke of the annual average construction. There are only eight months – of which only 7 are used to calculate the annual mean. The missing month (May) has the smallest anomaly, and so including it would bring down the annual mean by about 0.4 deg C.
There may be some improvements that could be made here. i.e. annual means could use as many months as there are available (rather than just whether the seasons are available), and it should be made clearer that this is a Dec-Nov mean, not the calendar year mean, Somewhere it should also be stated that the seas/ann values in the printout and figures are not used in the gridded data.
Thanks
Gavin
Mike McMillan (00:02:57) :
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.
Maybe someone needs to run the images past some Optical Character Recognition software.
It’s annoying that the FOI legislation doesn’t stipulate that material be provided in a sensible format. Clearly, it would have been easier for NASA to simply paste the text of the emails into whichever document format they want to use, so they are just being bloody minded in trying to obstruct the disclosure and assessment process.
But that’s OK, we won’t forget.
Ah, I see Lucy is one step ahead of me as usual.
Lucy Skywalker (23:57:36) :
These emails have been out for a little while. They are on Neutralpedia, having been put back into text files with OCR.
http://www.neutralpedia.com/wiki/NASA_FOIA_Emails
””””Policyguy (22:08:11) : (to Robert, 21:08) Now I understand why such folk are known here as trolls.””’
””””Roger Carr (00:23:10) : Thanks for that post, Policyguy; I have been trying to figure some way to say all that to Robert on a couple of threads now, but couldn’t get it right. You have.”””’
Policyguy/Roger,
Regarding troll phenomena, is it the intent-to-troll or the actual acts-of-trolling that you find to be the most entertaining aspect?
I would go with intent-to-troll as the most entertaining aspect. The actual acts-of-trolling are a very difficult art form that most trolls don’t pull off well, so usually disappointing.
John
I don’t think Michael Mann intended this to be read by Sen. James Inhofe.
Does Michael Mann thinks that he is the ‘cheif disinformer’?
—–
On Thu, 2009-01-22 at 12:17, Michael Mann wrote:
| in case you guys didn’t see, we’ve made the radar screen of the chief
| disinformer himself
|
| m
|
| Begin forwarded message:
|| From “Morano, Marc (EPW)”
|| Date: Januarry 22, 2009 10:55:35 AM EST
|| To: “Morano, Marc (EPW)”
|| Subject: Alert: Scientists, Data Challenge New Antarctic ‘Warming’
|| Study – Debunks Temp ‘Estimates’ & Comprehensive Data Round Up
||
|| Excerpt: The media, led by Newsweek’s woeful Sharon Begley,
|| were downright gleeful about the new Antarctic study. [..] The
|| supposed cooling has delighted climate contrarians, such as the
|| prolific Senate staffer (to ‘global warming is the biggest hoax’
|| Sen. James Inhofe) Marc Morano, who has written, ‘Contrary to media
|| hype, the vast majority of Antarctica has cooled over the past 50 years.’”
.
carrot eater (21:47:10) :
““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.””
How is that statement alarmist or advocacy? Somebody asked if warming was accelerating, and he replied, no, you’d have to wait several more decades before you could observe acceleration. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how Horner is interpreting that statement to see alarmism or advocacy
I think the point is that that particular statement, was neither alarmist nor advocacy, yet NASA on the whole at the time of such a statement was at the forefront of alarmist AGW, lending more than a little hypocracy to the point being made! Horner is vindicated!
AND back to the Sun again, deja vu. If we don’t know what full effect element ‘A’ (the Sun) has on element ‘B’ (the Earth), how the friggin heck can anybody claim with any degree of certainty, that element ‘C’ (GHGs) overpowers element ‘A’? By their own damming admission, UNIPCC TAR 2001 SPM, Solar forcing, “VERY low level of scientific understanding”, to UNIPCC AR4 2007 SPM, Solar forcing, “low level of scientific understanding”, apparently gives enough confidence to halve its contribution to climate????? WOW! How does anyone know that the dropping of VERY wasn’t just another little “trick of the trade” in IPCC reporting? Had the scientific understanding of the Sun improved that much over 6 years, yet they didn’t even get the Solar Cycle 24 start & intensity close? Impressive me thinks – not! They remind me of the “end of the world” brigade, so that when the “end of the world” doesn’t happen, they come up with an excuse as to why their calculations went wrong & set a new date for it, therefore always being right!
John Whitman (01:19:13) : I would go with intent-to-troll as the most entertaining aspect. The actual acts-of-trolling are a very difficult art form that most trolls don’t pull off well, so usually disappointing.
Sweet, John!
A little OT and probably linked by others but . . .
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_agw_smoking_gun.html
If you scroll down a short distance at
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/
you’ll find some shocking “news” from NASA.
@tallbloke
“Ah, I see Lucy is one step ahead of me as usual.”
This doesn’t seem to be the case. I just checked the neutralpedia site and I cannot find any of the emails from the 4th PDF file in the series. The 4th PDF file is ginormous (nearly 5 times as large as the other 3 PDF’s combined) and is loaded with interesting emails.
You can verify that these are not in neutralpedia because the 4th PDF has emails from 2009 and these do not show up in a simple search on the neutralpedia web site:
http://www.neutralpedia.com/w/index.php?search=NASA+2009
The search terms “NASA” and “2009” only returns 8 records and they all come from the Climategate CRU zip, not the latest NASA 4th PDF file.
I just finished cranking all 618 pages of the 4th PDF through an OCR scan. Lots of fun stuff… like this one from page 283:
Subject: Re: [Fwd: RE: GISS Raw Data]
From: Gavin Schmidt
Date: 16 Aug 2007 21: 19:46 -0400
To: rruedy@giss.nasa.gov
McIntyre is an ass – almost goes without saying. But be careful not to start to take this personally. While it is clear that the most appropriate thing for him to do would be to code the methodology himself from the descriptions in the papers, he is unlikely to do so while he gets so much attention with the ‘NASA secret code’ meme. You are also correct in thinking that he will not be satisfied with the gridding code or the raw data set, and so inevitably a line needs to be drawn. However, where that line should be is debatable.
Did you examine what differences you get if you download the very latest USHCN dataset and use that instead of the one we got in 2000? If he does end up coding things himself he’ll see those differences easily, and it’s best if we know what they are first.
Gavin
Yvo de Boer, the UN’s top climate change official, says he will resign after nearly four years in the post.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8521821.stm
Hi!
Me being a Swede, could someone explain to me the meaning of a mail from “Gavin” to “Rruedy” date 16 aug 2007, time 18:16:22
..It may still be worth putting a clean version of the adjustment program on the website in order to have something to point to..
Should there be a dirty version??
Anthony
Ivo ( Yvo) de boer the UN climate bos resignes !
Kate (00:15:29)
“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.”
It may well be the case that for this particular station ‘cooling has been turned into warming’ by virtue of the adjustments, but I’m afraid your statement that ‘As always, “adjustments” go only one way.”‘ is just plain wrong and is tanatmount to the sort of cherry picking advocacy statement that gives real skeptics who actually practice the scientific method (i.e seek to refute claims rather than re-enforce them) a bad name.
There are in fact several hundred stations in which the ‘cooling is turned to warming’ and conversely ‘warming is turned into cooling’ courtesy of the adjustments NOAA and GISS make to the raw data.
If you want to see the the full lists (for NOAA) go to the following thread on ‘Digging in the Clay’ and you can download the lists for yourself and then go and look where ever you want (href=”http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/”>GISS web site, Appinsys or use the interactive maps I’ve provided to confirm the absurdity of some of these adjustments.
Physically unjustifiable NOAA GHCN adjustments
Note the above thread is about the NOAA adjustments and not the GISS adjustments (which are not quite as bad as the NOAA adjustments). I’ll be putting up an equivalent thread showing the ‘cooling turned to warming’ and ‘warming turned to cooling’ because of the GISS adjustments shortly.
Carrot eater-
Yes, I can download all the data and then spend alot of time trying to back calculate exactly what they did, instead of them telling me what they did – you know, showing your work like peer review requires.
Carrot eater-
Also, I do not know if you have done an FOIA, but for those I have done the data have always been provided in exactly the same obtuse scanned PDF way.
Leif Svalgaard (23:10:37) :
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.
Bets that SDO finds at least one new discovery that results in a change, big or small, to the current standard solar model? Come on Leif, lighten up. If we never challenged existing dogma we would never learn anything new. The scientific method explains how we should all play nicely on the playground. It is when people violate the scientific method, like when Gavin and James used selection bias to fudge the GHCN temperature data, that the wheels fall off the cart.
Mike Ramsey
“Robert (21:08:30) :
[…]
Meanwhile, science goes on.”
Isn’t that a little bit unsettling to you? 😉
I took the 4 PDF’s and ran them through Adobe OCR and saved them back. So What you get are the same 4 PDF files with everything in it but searchable and copyable.
You can get the file from here:
http://fichierforum.iservio.ca/NASA_GISS_FOIA/
Hopefully it will not kill my bandwidth