Spiegel does 8 part series on current state of climate research

The interesting thing about it being Der Spiegel, is that as far as I can recall, the players in Clmategate were British and US. I’ve no doubt that if the CRU had been in Germany and it was Miquel Mann who invented the hockey stick, then the reaction of the US and British press to climategate would have taken an altogether different tone.
It also highlights the subtle differences in scientific culture between the various countries. The attitude of “science knows best” could only have come from the US and UK – and I doubt you’d ever catch a German ignoring simple engineering principles like trying to “average out the errors” from using the wrong instrumentation for the wrong job.
Fundamentally, I think the balanced approach in Germany and the UK parliament’s hostility to engineering and love-in with science (typified by the way the “science and engineering committee” became “science and technology”) is the reason why the UK has the third-rate climategate “scientists” who easily pull the wool over our scientific/engineering illiterate politicians who are so economically incompetent they then get us to pay out billions for bird-mincers made in Germany/Denmark.
vorsprung durch technik
Which I think is translated as: “invented here made elsewhere!”

“Despite the enormous uncertainties, there is agreement on at least one issue: Global warming can no longer be stopped.”
So if temperatures decline even with statistical manipulation, they’re going to have some explaining to do.

“The myth of the monster storm”
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/
Link from Florida state university – Shows cyclone energy and hurricane activity. We seem to be at th 30 year low.

These journalists don’t seem to understand.
If, in a particular field of science, scientists have found it necessary to cook the books to prove their point, it can be safely assumed there is no point to prove.

Despite many criticisms made of the article here, I’m encouraged. At last the main-stream media are addressing the matter of the uncertainties which for too long they’ve seen fit to over-look.
While there may be errors or at least statements which people here question, we cannot expect such a complex subject to be easily reduced into a digestible form for the lay-reader (of which I’m one).
I would caution critics of the article against falling into the trap of claiming that AGW is not happening at all (RobertM (20:43:40) :). It seems to me that the objections to the alarmist and IPCC claims rest on arguments that “the data doesn’t support those claims”.
To claim that the data “proves” that AGW isn’t happening at some level or that there isn’t an anthropogenic component to global temperatures seems just as specious as the alarmist claims. The point of the argument (as expressed on this and other well considered blogs) is that the current measurements and known processes are insufficient to decide convincingly in favour or against any putative AGW.

?Invented in the US and UK?
That Means -in the ‘Game of Nations’- anyone except the Yanks and Brits who are ‘claiming’ to support AGW and Copenhagen are doing so for ulterior motives. Is it possible they see a way to put these two ‘Super Bozos’ in the poor house? Based on events of the last few years, I believe that’s exactly what they thought and intend. Let’s see, how many ways are there to bankrupt your enemy? Ah… Total War, nah.. too messy! Ah… Cold War, nah.. too long! Ah… Climate Change and The Copenhagen Accord, oh yes..just right!
Everyone who can speak Ho”ch Chinese raise your right arm, click your heels together real fast, and shout “Seig Heil Peking!” three times, as loud as you can.
History is like a beach! Always changing1 Always the same!

Mike Haseler
I think your german is a little rusty.” vorsprung durch technik” actually translates as follows:-
vorsprung = forward ejecting
durch = duck specifically, but can mean just bird in common parlance.
Technik = engineering method
Thus ” forward ejecting bird engineering method”, or idiomatically, “bird murdering machine”, which reduces ultimately to the well known phrase “wind turbine”. Q.E.D.

I suspect the middle age hippies (flower Krauts) will discover it is the Greenie weenie gubments that are the ones pushing control and authority.
Several million more will want to not say “Seig Heil Peking” as noted above.

The description of Jones seems tailor-made to inspire sympathy:
“Life has become “awful” for Phil Jones”, he “…needs medication to fall sleep. He feels a constant tightness in his chest. He takes beta-blockers to help him get through the day. He is gaunt and his skin is pallid. He is 57, but he looks much older. He was at the center of a research scandal that hit him as unexpectedly as a rear-end collision on the highway.” He sits on his chair at the hearings, looking miserable, sometimes even trembling. The Internet is full of derisive remarks about him, as well as insults and death threats. “We know where you live,” his detractors taunt.
Jones is finished: emotionally, physically and professionally. He has contemplated suicide several times recently, and he says that one of the only things that have kept him from doing it is the desire to watch his five-year-old granddaughter grow up.”
Nope, no sympathy here. He made his bed. Sooner or later, dishonesty takes its toll. As a matter of fact, I suspect the “suicide attempts” are ploys on his part to try to garner sympathy, and keep attention focused away from what he and his cohorts have done.
That is no “baby” in the climatologists’ bathwater, but a hideous Hydra. The IPCC has to go, and investigations of possible malfeasance begun. The corruption is deep-seated, and “climate science” is rotten to the core.

pyromancer76 : John Wright 20:39:16 (4/2) quotes Der speigel and comments: “German climatologist Hans von Storch now wants to see an independent institution recalculate the temperature curve, … TWO (2) YEARS — NONSENSE
pyromancer76, two years is very optimistic and in my opinion such a slap dash job won’t be much more believable than the present rubbish. The problem is not taking a load of readings and averaging. It is trying to realistically quantify such effects as urban heating and the affect of automation and other changes to instrumentation on the historic global temperature curve. We can’t replay history, all we can do is try to estimate how historic measurements may have been affected by a host of as yet unquantified changes.
If I were in charge, I personally would require a site visit to each and every station both present and historic! At each site I would require staff to collect of as much information as is available on the changes to the environment around the sites since 1850. As there are thousands of sites, and as assembly the information, doing the site visits and appraising the results on each and every site would take a minimum of a few months, we are talking something like 100-1000 person years of work. Even recruiting and training the people to undertake this appraisal is likely going to take a year – let alone getting the sceptics like us to agree to the huge funding necessary to do the job properly.
Then you need time to run some scientific trials to see how certain changes affect temperature. Quite literally you are talking about taking many sections of e.g. virgin forest characterising them before urbanisation and then building small towns to carry out a real scientific characterisation of urban heating. You also need to set up field trials to compare human and automated measurements in organisational control structures allowing the typical behaviour you would have found in historic sites. (That’s a whole department!)
It’s easily going to have a yearly budget in the hundreds of millions, it will have the energy footprint of several towns and the total cost will be over $1billion and a minimum of a decade to really get to grips with urban heating effects so that we can tease out of the historic data that change which is natural and that which is human.

Interesting poll though:
http://climategate.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/spiegelsurvey.jpg