Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit has written another essay on the poor way that CRU/UEA and NOAA have dealt with FOIA requests. To say “poor”, that means in some cases “not at all”. He makes this salient point:
…if the climate community wants to get the Climategate affair behind them, the best course of action for them is to voluntarily get any and all documents pertaining to the events on the public record, rather than contesting the production of each and every document. If a NOAA scientist is in possession of documents that have been destroyed by CRU scientists, NOAA should find out precisely what their employees have and voluntarily put it in the public domain.
Indeed. Eventually all of this will come out. You may as well get it out now and get it over with. Full essay here at ClimateAudit
No FOIA compliance, no more big govt. paychecks for NOAA.
The GOP will continue to chop away the disfunctional dead branches of NOAA.
Still think that this summed things up nicely, and it came from a rather unexpected source:
“I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/07/climategate-and-the-big-green-lie/59709
P.S. vindsavfuktare (March 13, 2011 at 10:18 am) quotes:
“Some islands affected by climate change have been hit.”
Sigh… it never ends.
onion2 says: “Well take the GISTEMP Y2K error for example. Or the error where GISTEMP got November wrong because the data had carried over from October. In both cases the errors and correction had insignificant impact on global temperature. In other sciences these errors would have corrected and work goes on.”
Red herring. Fail.
onion2 says: “… the scientists were smeared … That would never happen for another science. And that’s why one reason why scientists are reluctant to be open …”
Wrong in so many ways.
The researchers were enjoying an unusual level of public attention and influence. It was their job to do everything necessary to maintain their own credibility. As much as anybody else in observational science, they needed good design, solid procedure, and rigorous quality control.
Lack of openness was already a festering sore when quality issues surfaced. It was outsiders who spotted errors, and mention of 1/2 a man-day per month quality control did nothing to build credibility.
The threat of a good public bashing should have been their incentive to ensure their work was up to scratch. And when they got things wrong, the bashing that was duly delivered should have reminded them of what they needed to do all along.
Now you want to trot out lame old excuses. Justify an emotional response, rather than a rational rsponse. Kinda suggests you’re not interested in learning and improvement.
Put in another context: What to do if a restaurant serves sub-standard food? Do we pay-up and then protect the proprietor to avoid hurt feelings? Shelter the kitchen from further quality inspections? Somebody’s gonna get salmonella.
Al Gored says:
March 13, 2011 at 12:22 pm
You might even say, in a political sense, that they have retreated into a bunker mentality.
Re: The poll Oakden offers.
I notice that the question is about trusting “scientists”, not climate scientists who are promoting catastrophic global warming and I also notice that another question addresses “warming” not man-made warming due to CO2 with almost certain catastrophic consequences.
Hardly an objective poll.
A fellow van-pooler, who works for the federal government as a contracting officer once received a FOIA request. Complying with the requirements was such a PIA that he told them he would send the requested information immediately, if they withdrew their FOIA request. And he did.
The thing about Climategate was that the evidence of scientific chicanery and control by a small group of scientists, central to the IPCC, could not, and cannot be ignored. The various whitewashes are merely whitewishes; no one is listening to them any more; except the politicians who feed money into the self-serving bureaucracy of man made climate change.
Get rid of the politicians who promote this BS.
I remain enthralled by the patient and courteous persistence of Mr McIntyre (and, for that matter, David Holland) in pursuing their requests.
Eventually, one hopes that it will dawn on the clowns at UEA and elsewhere that these people are not going to go away without legitimate answers to their questions.
The pseudo-scientists hoped to make it into the history books, and I daresay they will, but not for the reasons they wanted.
Doug Allen says:
March 13, 2011 at 6:25 am
There has only been 20 years of warming, 1978-1998, in the past 63 years
==========
Doug, even that is in dispute, because UAH, satellites, show no warming between 1978-1998.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1978/to:1997
just oscillations from Nino(a)
Then after the 1998 super El Nino, temps stepped up about .3C and have remained there.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1990
RIP the mainstream media. Dealt a fatal blow by their handling of “climategate” in early part of the twenty first century.
Mike says:
March 13, 2011 at 9:39 am
May we see all you your e-mails?
You have obviously not had a government contract or research grant. When you are under such a contract EVERYTHING that is in anyway to do with that contract is ‘vested’ in the government: your notebooks, your computer and everything you do on it, your ballpoint even sometimes your desk – everything. So if those emails have anything whatsoever to do with a government contract they are public property they are not ‘your emails’ they are the governments emails. If you don’t like that then don’t take government money for contracts or research grants.
No doubt the legislative process needs to be stopped. It also includes the fallacy of smart grid and smart metering. Write your MP or representative!
Robert of Ottawa, unfortunately here I am afraid that politicians are just enablers. Those really pushing this agenda are the Rothschild and other Thomsons who will benefit the most when politicans are moving favorable legislations, when Provincial politicians are exerting no control -in fact are condoning- what utilities such as Ontario or BC Hydro are peddling. Imagine their dream: have us pay for grid, power and salaries and them having license to not deliver the product we pay for!
It was revealed that BC Hydro spent over $500 million peddling Power Smart thanks to Hoggan-Desmogblog and plan to spend another S400 million… Then another Billion bucks for the smart meters so they could implement their smart grid slavery scheme. BC Hydro salaries jumped from $336 million to almost $560million… those making over $150kper annum jumping 143%!
So I see politicians here as merely willing enforcers of bigger interests and this is why despite climategate, and I would argue even if science was debunked, the Big Green offensive is bypassing these mere bumps on their way to $ and new found control on people’s lives. A new slavery!
I agree that we have to derail their plan and identifying who are the groups -like the Thomsons, their newspaper etc… and the politicians that they support- and vote against them, expose them as much as possible.
Scientists lie? Never. Just look the integrity displayed in the Piltdown Man discovery.
Steven McIntyre, not only are you a hot, hot, hot, hot, hot Irishman (compliments to your wife), you have, it seems to me, burned the midnight oil to bring Science back to its hayday, when men and women sat at their lab stools and hovered over an observation plot for the benefit of all. They received scant pay and little recognition for their efforts but nonetheless, brought us all a greater standard of health and livelihood the world had ever known. If we survive this sullied attempt to sheeple the people, we will have few to thank, but you would number among those we thank.
Vindsavuktare said
” The earthquake and tsunami will clearly have a severe impact on the economic and social activities of the region. Some islands affected by climate change have been hit. Has not the time come to demonstrate on solidarity – not least solidarity in combating and adapting to climate change and global warming? Mother Nature has again given us a sign that that is what we need to do.”
* * *
Actually, I think it was ghosts.
Somebody better call the Ghostbusters.
Another excellent post by Mcyintyre and Watts.
The Team obviously never heard of the saying
” When stuck in a hole, it is best to stop digging.”
Get the message to Congress, quickly. The House has voted to remove EPA’s power to regulate CO2 and voted to defund EPA. The House and the Senate told “Cap’n Trade” to take a walk last year.
This was going to happen Climategate or not when the new crop of GOP representatives got into Congress. As soon as the election happened, the Senate stonewalled any agenda on climate change because they knew economic issues would prevent it from going forward. The effectiveness of the climate change-skeptical campaign in reaching conservative politicians is very obvious, and Climategate was just another log on their bonfire, but not necessary to keep the signal fires burning.
The problem is, combining climate change uncertainties with the recent nuclear plant problems after the Japanese earthquake is going to be another roadblock in the way of accelerated nuclear energization of the United States; just when things were starting to ramp up. Great, just great. We have to decarbonize this economy for reasons of national security, long-term energy stabilization, AND the environment. Maybe you clan that think nothing is happening ought read Paul Solotaroff’s article about Yellowstone in this month’s Men’s Journal. After you do that would you please tell the bark beetles that climate change isn’t happening so they will stop ruining the forests for the rest of us?
Doug Allen on 13 March 2011 at 6:25 am says: There has only been 20 years of warming, 1978-1998, in the past 63 years- nothing unprecedented- just a continuation of the trend since the LIA. Scientific studies and arguments about climate forcings and sensitivity are important and should be the main thrust of climate science, but are not germane to whether or not we have CAGW. What matters is the data…The above is an example of the KISS principle. It is data-based and avoids all the haranguing about theory and disputed claims.
Doug,
You are so right to concentrate on the simple reality of the temperature record. This is exactly what I have been banging on about for the past several years both here and in other blog trails. Very few people understand that the real-world temperature evidence for man-induced climate change is extremely flimsy.
My analysis is summed up in the following chart, the data for which, ironically, I took straight from the official UAE HadCRUT3 land/sea world temperature data series:
http://www.thetruthaboutclimatechange.org/temps.html
I think this chart helps to concentrate the mind wonderfully. I am confirmed in this opinion by the fact that, when in blog trails I challenge warmists with it, they hardly ever address the issues represented by it directly, almost always steering the argument off at a tangent to such things as: computer models, sea ice extent, floods, hurricanes, species extinction, coral reef damage, ocean acidification…in other words anything other than face up to the fact that the official temperature data shows that:
(a) Between 1850 and 2010 (a 161 year timespan that that includes 120 years prior to the sharp post-World War 2 sharp increase in man-made atmospheric CO2) the Earth warmed at an average long term rate of only 0.4degC per century. (See the blue linear regression line.)
(b) Superimposed on this utterly unremarkable temperature increase, there is a clearly visible ~67 year temperature cycle of about plus or minus 0.25degC. (See the red 11-year average curve.) This cycle also long pre-dates the post-World War II increase in man-made atmospheric CO2 and is commonly attributed to natural ocean temperature oscillations that have been going on for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.
(c) The latest upswing of this ~67 year cycle, between around 1970 and 2000, has a slope (as upswings always will have!) that is between 4 and 5 times steeper than the long term average of 0.4degC/century.
I believe that point (c) is the key to understanding climate alarmism. It is no coincidence that warmists grew more and more excited through the last 30 years of the 20th century.
As the temperature “soared” they became more and more convinced that they had found the real-world experimental evidence they needed to demonstrate convincingly
that “alarming man-made CO2 warming was now occurring”.
My conclusion? The simple test to decide between warmist and skeptical hypotheses is what happens to the temperature curve over the next decade or two. If, as I and many other skeptics suspect, it continues to wiggle around, broadly within plus or minus 0.25degC of the long term 0.4degC/century steady rise (i.e. within the red dotted “tunnel” shown in the above chart) all will turn out well for the world and the enthusiasm for the man-made CO2 warming hypothesis will slowly wither away. Alternatively, if the temperature curve soon resumes the heady upward trend that it was exhibiting between 1970 and 2000, it will be game, set and match to the warmists. Time will tell one way or the other.
In the meanwhile, I think that the best thing that all data-realists can do is to publish as much real-world climate-related data as we can find. So Doug, do get in touch (and anybody else who feels the same way) at: davidsocrates2010@gmail.com to assist my cause.