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.
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Subject: Re: few clarifications
From: Ron Miller
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:42:09 -0400
To: Gavin Schmidt
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Gavin Schmidt wrote:
> ok this is what I wanted to send…
> You appear to be confusing me with someone with whom you have cordial
> relations. Please update your contact list accordingly.
Snarky, restrained (i.e. not obscene), and most important: funny (at least to everyone but Pielke).
Of course the issue is whether Pielke Jr. has the self-awareness to recognize this as an earned rebuke. Since his ‘central technique is to misinterpret others’ work and take umbrage, it seems unlikely.
I guess whether you send it or not depends on whether you want to respond to his follow-up.
But I laughed.
Ron.
> but you spoilt all my fun…. 🙂
> gavin
>
>
> ———- Forwarded message ———-
> From: “Roger Pielke, Jr.”
> To: “Gavin Schmidt”
> Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:48:52 -0600
> Subject: few clarifications
>
> Hi Gavin-
>
> Just saw your post on blogging. Overall pretty thoughtful
> thoughts:
…
Thanks for sticking with the brutal leg work !!
Good work !!
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.
——————–
But were’nt NASA saying to the public that the warming was accelerating? If they were saying that in public, whilst in private they are saying it is impossible to draw that conclusion, then that would constitute advocacy.
1. Leif Svalgaard (23:10:37) :
“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.”
2. Leif Svalgaard (22:14:26) quotes 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”
Leif replies: “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, . . . ”
Oliver replies: Running scared, Leif?
You’ve got a lot of company at NAS, NASA, DOE, etc.
The abrupt U-turn at NASA is clear by comparing David Hathaway’s comments in NASA’s latest news report with his comment that my work is “crackpot science’ in the UPI News, 17 July 2002 report by Dan Whipple,
“An Iron Sun: Groundbreaking or Cracked”, UPI News, 17 July 2002
Perhaps you and your friends could comfort each other as you prepare to change lifestyles. May I recommend the words of former President Harry Truman as a guide?
“I didn’t give’em hell. I just spoke the truth and they thought it was hell”
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
from Missouri, the home of
Former President Harry S.Truman
carrot eater (23:31:12) :
You said it yourself even better in
carrot eater (00:02:39) :
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.
Yes, that is where the holes are.
Robert hissed, ‘Good luck with your witch hunt. Meanwhile, science goes on.’
When I was blaguing more frequently, I came to recognize blagueurs whose signature ‘contribution’ to the discussion was to inject a nasal snarkiness. I fancy utterances such as these as being spoken in the voice of Peter Lorre.
‘You despise me, don’t you Rick?’
‘If I thought about you, Ugati, I probably would.’
Peter Lorre would have been a great Gollum, come to think.
I apologize for the O/T levity.
Wrong guy, or rather not the right right guy but every little bit helps I guess . . .
http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/92KH5M/F75PO/VA5HP/UCATI2/JNF3N/82/t
carrot eater (23:31:12) :
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.
The 30 year trend is called the PDO cycle, and I think we need at least 4-5 PDO cycles to see a long term, or ‘climate’, trend, ie. 120-150 years.
“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.
If you visit Neutralpedia and become curious, what this is, read this article”
LUCY: We have a climate A – Z here: http://www.hidethedecline.eu
You are very welcome to use anything (perhaps (with a little ref).
When making this site, I was actually thinking if there could be some kind of coorporation: Mail FEL@NNIT.COM
Not fully topic, but concerning GISTEMP January anomalies published recently. GISTEMP claims that arctic area 80N-90N was only about 0.7 degrees C colder than January 2009. But according to DMI data, January 2010 is at least 5 degrees C below January 2010! That is quite a big difference, and certainly needs further investigations.
A major problem with the world temperature stations is that they were never established to calculate a world temperage average. Temperature is of utmost importance at airports because temperature affects the density of the air and therefore the lift on the wings. A pilot needs this information to determine his speed and length of runway needed to take off. People in cities are interested in just how hot or cold it is where they are, not at some location miles away. When people at CRU, GISS and NCDC started calculating a global temperature, it does not appear that they were selective in what stations they used. Instead, they tried to overcome the problem with bad data with statistical majic. One method was to calculate an anomaly at each station relative to an average over a time period. They can show statistically how this gets rid of some of the station quality problems. It would be much better to select stations based on quality of the station itself and then not have to worry about all of the data manipulation. To restore confidence in the temperature system they need to provide the following:
1. Description of each station used similar to the surfacestations.org documentation.
2. Raw temperature data.
3. File of data with missing temperatures filled in.
4. Documentation of how missing temperatures are calculated.
5. File of adjusted data and documentation of how adjustments are made.
I have put up a copy of the IPCC AR4 Chapter 3, section 3.2 on temperatures along with links to the supporting peer-reviewed papers on my website:
http://www.socratesparadox.com.
I have not read all of the papers yet, but what I have not found so far is any quality control or auditing of the actual measurment and collection process. All of the peer-review is of the theory.
Andrew Revkin, fearless AGW proponent from the NY Times, writes to Hansen, “i never, till today, visited http://www.surfacestations.org and found it quite amazing. if our stations are that shoddy, what’s it like in Mongolia?”
Don’t worry, Andy my boy. Surface Stations ain’t peer reviewed. Because you really need peer review to tell you that jamming a thermometer up the ass end of a ’44 Mercury coupe might affect the readings.
thethinkingman (02:51:07) :
A little OT and probably linked by others but . . .
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_agw_smoking_gun.html
———
Reply:
Ah, thinkingman, you’ve hit upon perhaps the actual bullet that kills AGW. From your referenced article they convincingly conclude:
“So the results of three different peer-reviewed papers show that over a period of 36 years, there is no reduction of OLR emissions in wavelengths that CO2 absorb. Therefore, the AGW hypothesis is disproven.”
In other words, AGW is dead. DEAD, I TELL YOU!
I strongly suggest everybody read and digest that article and see how and why they’ve come to their conclusion.
Alan the Brit (01:53:45) :
“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!”
Come again? The statement is neither alarmist nor advocacy, OK. I don’t follow where you go from there.
Henry (03:39:16) :
They (GISS) do tell you what they did. It’s described quite clearly in the publications. And if you don’t like that, they made the code public, too. What more do you need?
Do you at least acknowledge that the FOI was indeed asking for emails?
In the 4th PDF… Page 40. The smoking gun for the global data is exposed.
Reudy, says plainly.
“Without cleaning” There would be a decline in the data.
Nothing new under the sun… Not even tempertures.
Leif Svalgaard (22:14:26) :
“……………… 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%].”
Dr. Svalgaard
Money allocated for research, be it NASA or some other taxpayers financed institution, may or may not be plentiful, the science credentials of an applicant may or may not merit such grants, but in certain cases may be other non-financial, not scientific constraints for a grant allocation. It is not the God given right of anyone on the public purse, so past recipients should be grateful for funds already received !
Vincent (04:07:25) :
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.
——————–
But were’nt NASA saying to the public that the warming was accelerating? If they were saying that in public, whilst in private they are saying it is impossible to draw that conclusion, then that would constitute advocacy.
Thank you, Vincent, you put it better than I did.
AtB
@Simon Filiatrault (03:47:07) :
“You can get the file from here:
http://fichierforum.iservio.ca/NASA_GISS_FOIA/”
Many thanks for this Simon.
“Hopefully it will not kill my bandwidth”
Fingers crossed!
Mike Ramsey (03:41:07) :
If we never challenged existing dogma we would never learn anything new.
There is a big difference between dogma and a good scientific theory. The latter is good because of its explanatory power, but is always susceptible to improvement, as SDO will undoubtedly bring.
Oliver K. Manuel (04:09:05) :
The abrupt U-turn at NASA is clear by comparing David Hathaway’s comments in NASA’s latest news report with his comment that my work is “crackpot science’
I’m sure that Hathaway and NASA and just about everybody else still categorize your work as crackpottery.
vukcevic (06:15:16) :
the science credentials of an applicant may or may not merit such grants
Grants are usually not given based on credentials [although it helps to have some], but on the scientific merit of the specific proposal [as judged by other scientists – with all the problems inherent in that].
Anthony/Charles:
I assume from some of the posts that there is new information in this cache of documents compared to the documents obtained by JudicialWatch? It would be great if these could be archived in accessible forms at appropriate locations.
Leif Svalgaard (06:53:10) :
“Grants are usually not given based on credentials [although it helps to have some], but on the scientific merit of the specific proposal…”
May be so, wouldn’t know, never applied for public money, but I am sure some of my hard earned cash went to some grants somewhere, I hope to deserving people, and I mean it in the widest sense of the word.
Vincent (04:07:25) :
“But were’nt NASA saying to the public that the warming was accelerating? If they were saying that in public, whilst in private they are saying it is impossible to draw that conclusion, then that would constitute advocacy.”
This also isn’t making sense. They were speaking to a journalist, and telling that journalist you couldn’t observe acceleration yet. With the full knowledge that this was going to be the basis for the article she was writing. If they wanted the public message to be “yes, there is currently acceleration”, then they would have told the journalist to publish that.
Anyway, I do *not* think they were saying to the public that acceleration in temperature change was currently observable. They may have said it was possible by the end of the century, but that would be entirely consistent with what they told the journalist.
If you think they have publicly said anything otherwise, please provide a reference. Otherwise, I am left befuddled as to why this email shows alarmism, advocacy, or anything inappropriate.
Just to underline these words:
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 – Earth’s ultimate source of heat.,
If revealed this will be a big step ahead for humanity.
@Robert (21:08:30) :
““My FOIA request asked NASA about their internal discussions regarding whether and how to correct the temperature error caught by McIntyre.””
“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.”
I see you have a problem with reading comprehension. He submitted two FOIA requests. This discussion is part one of two-parts. Can you guess what part two will be about?
Typical of AGW proponents to ignore what suits them.