This is pretty ugly. In 2007 the NRC was setup to review the state of climate science. The usual players were involved. Today we have two separate examples of inappropriate behavior designed to squash any scientific dissent.
First from Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. in this essay:
Excerpt:
date: Mon Feb 28 08:58:57 2005
from: Phil Jones <REDACTED>
subject: Re: CCSP report review period
to: Ben Santer <REDACTED>
Ben,
Good to see you if briefly last Wednesday ! The rest of the meeting was rather odd. Some very odd things said by a few people – clearly irked by not having got a couple of proposals recently ! I’m not supposed to be contacting you ! I would urge you to write up what you presented on the day and in the report. It was the most convincing presentation and chapter of the report. You should have less to do than the other chapters. Not yet sure how the summary will fare.
We didn’t discuss the email evidence (as you put it) nor Pielke’s dissent. We shouldn’t and we won’t if the NRC people have their way.
I was never really sure what the point of the review was.
Cheers
Phil
This is a remarkable e-mail since it indicates that the NRC was in collusion with Phil Jones to suppress issues that I brought up as lead author on the CCSP chapter 6. Chapter 6 was tasked to focus on what further research issues need to be explored to reconcile surface and tropospheric temperature trends. Chapter 6, as it was on August 11 2005, is given in Appendix B of my Public Comment.
The e-mail also documents an inappropriate communication between a member of the CCSP committee (Ben Santer) and a member of the NRC review committee (Phil Jones).
That’s email 3614.txt which you can read here
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Next we have this new essay from Steve Milloy
Climategate 2.0: Shocker — 2007 NRC review of hokey stick rigged by alarmists
The panel is solid. Gerry North should do a good job in chairing this, and the other members are all solid. Chris[t]y is the token skeptic, but there are many others to keep him in check:
That’s email 4498.txt which you can read here
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Anthony – I think you have grounds for a defamation action against Tamino: “fake” sceptic! As opposed to a “real” sceptic? What a moron! Is he something other than someone who runs a poor and rarely-visited blog?
I supported an NRC committee about six years ago and my experience is that it too was stacked with “unbiased experts” that led to an entirely predictable outcome. I really hope that the evidence clearly shown in these emails galvanizes two people to action… Issa and Inhofe.
November 26, 2011 at 6:56 am
[SNIP: You come by offering nothing and do it with a fake -email address. Brave, bright lad. -REP]
You mean, come by offering a counter view to your Group Think here? Of course, all the other other comments are filled with scientific wisdom and insight?
You guys take yourselves a little too seriously – sadly nobody else does.
Fake email address? Just an excuse for you to snip those that disagree with you.
[REPLY: You will note that we publish many comments that disagree. Some of those commenters, like Joel Shore, for example, have the courage to put their names to their opinions. WUWT policy requires a valid e-mail address. You can check the policy here. Last warning. -REP]
Here’s t summary provided by the popular late-night talk-show Coast-to-Coast AM about its broadcast of Friday, Nov. 25:
As I said here, that is a semi-facetious list of all the things Our Side would be doing if indeed it were well-organized and well-funded. I didn’t mean to propose it en bloc as a current plan of action. My 3rd item parallels yours:
Ok, here’s the thing:
I don’t think ANYONE in their right mind disagrees that climate has warmed. THAT is not the issue. It would have been expected to warm coming out of the Little Ice Age. The warming progresses fairly steadily up to about the 1930’s. Then temperatures begin to cool a bit as we go through a cool Pacific Ocean cycle until the middle 1970’s and then warm up, basically to close to where temps were in the 1930’s. We don’t see any “global warming” after the 1998 “mother of all el ninos” event.
I think everyone agrees that climate changes. The question is “to what degree are humans having any influence”. I believe Pielke has the right answer in that we can change climate but it is probably an aggregation of local land use changes and not a global atmospheric change that we are measuring. We are measuring the temperature and precipitation changes from local deforestation, converting of land to farmland, irrigation, creation of huge lakes where there weren’t any before, UHI impacts, the impacts of poorly sited measuring stations, the impacts of defective electronic measuring devices (which often get left in the record), and the impacts of changing which ground stations are used in creating these data.
Heck, I can remember a time (early 1980’s) when Santa Clara County, CA was quite different. The Great America amusement park was in the middle of nowhere surrounded by fields. You could actually TELL when you left Santa Clara and entered Sunnyvale because there was open space between the towns. The Santa Clara valley is now completely built up. That is BOUND to change thermometer readings without any associated change in Earth’s climate system. Many other areas of the country have gone through the same process. I remember when the city of Moreno Valley, California was the Riverside Raceway, some melon and bean fields, and March AFB. The city was created basically out of whole cloth in 1984 and currently has a population of 193,365 (2010).
The fundamental problem with GISS and CRU and the rest are their reliance on surface station measurements. They are seeing an aggregate of thousands of local changes and attempting to come up with a global atmospheric change that will account for that aggregate change. This is directly in the face of data from places that HAVEN’T seen any significant surrounding land use changes showing no significant “warming” but these places are actually rather difficult to find these days and get swamped out of the record because so many other places HAVE experienced dramatic surrounding changes. Note how reluctant they are to use the satellite data.
And as for climate, there has been no steady gradual rise that would would expect from steady gradually increasing CO2. Judith Curry shows it most clearly on a fairly recent article on her blog. It is a series of step changes. Bob Tisdale shows the same thing with ocean temperatures on his blog. Temperatures go along ranging around a fairly flat median for several years and suddenly the median temperature takes an abrupt step up and then goes along for another 10-20 years about that median. You can sort of visualize it looking at this graph:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_October_2011.png
Imagine a line from 1979 to 1997 at about -0.1. That would be the pre-1998 median (roughly, just eyballing). Now in 1998, you step that line up to +0.2 and take it across. So it looks like we had a step change in about 1998 (there was another that this graph doesn’t show because we didn’t have satellite measurements in 1976, but there was another step up in ’76 or so) What this graph shows is basically one single step change up in 1998, not a gradually rising temperature due to rising CO2.
The funny thing is that aggregate land use changes WOULD be expected to produce a gradually rising signal as more and more areas experience changes. That would be until the impact from those changes is fully established and then those stations no longer rise because the land around them is now fully built up. At that point the stations are likely to reflect changes in cloud cover from year to year. A dry summer with little cloud cover is going to bake that concrete and asphalt. A cloudy rainy summer is going to be much cooler in those areas. It will even matter what time of day it is cloudy and what time of day it rains. You could have two years with the same rainfall amounts but if it falls mainly in daylight hours one year but mainly in nighttime hours the next, the average temperatures in a town of steel and concrete are going to be very different and not really reflect “global climate” at all.
It REALLY is time for some common sense to seep in. The people at UEA are making a mistake I see people make every day when faced with troubleshooting a complicated problem. They are looking for one single cause that can create all the measurements they see. I have seen technicians pull their hair out for hours looking for what could be the cause of a problem they are seeing in a piece of equipment when there is no one single cause, there are maybe three separate issues. You take ONE problem and troubleshoot that one. Take ONE station and see if you can account for local impacts that would make the temperature change. Then attempt to quantify those local changes and remove them from that record. Now you have a meaningful “adjustment” for THAT station only. Then move to the next. Pick an array of locations where things haven’t changed much and use those stations or site new ones there. I’m willing to bet things haven’t changed much in Ellinwood, KS or Millington, MD.
Their data is “crap” so their product is “crap” and they seem to conveniently overlook the things that might cause temperatures to rise over time outside of their hypothesis because those things actually help validate the hypothesis even though they are completely unrelated.
We have a gradual increase in temperatures caused by an aggregate of global land use changes near surface stations combined with some “step” changes in climate that haven’t been explained and would not be explained by gradual rises in CO2. What changed in 1975/6 and 1997/8? Any ideas?
Roger Knights, Julian Williams;
I agree that the skeptic message suffers from a lack of packaging. I called it a lack of context in other threads, but it amounts to the same thing. Those of us who follow the climate debate in any depth hear about some e-mail that corroborates the “hide the decline” comment, and we think to ourselves AHA! MORE PROOF. The casual reader thinks “what’s hide the decline?”. The reporter trying to come up with copy for tomorrow’s paper who similarly doesn’t follow the details on a regular basis wonders the same thing. Quick google search, top ten hits are about Phil Jones explaining why it doesn’t mean what it says, and presto cutto pasto article is done.
For the casual reader, or a reporter trying to make a deadline, what stands out to us as ironclad proof is nothing but an obscure reference to another obscure reference.
crosspatch,
Excellent commentary as usual. I also recall large open farmland in the same county in the ’70’s. The small town of Milpitas was mostly corn fields [a Mexican friend calls it Milputo – ‘thousand whores’.☺]
And I’m still waiting for someone to try and falsify my hypothesis that CO2 is harmless and beneficial. I suspect the ‘crap data’ response will be the evidence-free ‘ocean acidification’ scare, which has been thoroughly debunked by Dave Middleton and Willis Eschenbach in several articles.
I don’t know what causes step changes. But they’re regional, aren’t they? Possibly the great buildup of urban temp recording stations during that time, and the subsequent removal of particular stations later on contributed.
I am expecting that increased atmospheric CO2 will cause some small amount of atmospheric warming. So far we are talking about warming of 1.5C since the start of the 20th century and most of that is recovery from the LIA prior to the 1930’s. Plotting linear trends is rather silly when it is obvious that the temperatures are not rising linearly.
Here is an interesting thought experiment I came up with last night in my usual wondering about things: How much fossil fuel of all types existed before we started using it for energy on a large scale (coal in the industrial revolution)? Now, do you think maybe we have burned at least half of all recoverable fossil fuel resources? If we have, then things can’t possibly get any worse going forward than they have looking back because if we have already burned half of what is available, then we can’t burn any more in the future than we already have in the past. If the past has resulted in 1.5C of temperature change (assuming for the sake of this that we attribute ALL 1.5C to CO2) then the most we can expect is a bit less than 1.5C more in the future as we burn the rest of what we have.
If you believe we have burned less than half of what is available, then what percentage of total recoverable fossil fuel to you believe we have taken so far? Multiply the 1.5C by the reciprocal and you have what we might expect to be the climate impact. And also realize that CO2 is constantly being scrubbed from the atmosphere so once fossil fuel consumption begins to fall, CO2 levels from human actions also begin to immediately fall. Left on its own without any additional sources (natural coal seam fires, for example, emit as much CO2 as all automotive traffic on the face of the earth) the atmosphere would gradually deplete itself of CO2 and all the plants and animals would die. Only as long as volcanism matches exactly the scrubbing rate does CO2 remain stable (ocean + atmosphere).
“I agree that the skeptic message suffers from a lack of packaging. I called it a lack of context in other threads, but it amounts to the same thing. Those of us who follow the climate debate in any depth hear about some e-mail that corroborates the “hide the decline” comment, and we think to ourselves AHA! MORE PROOF. The casual reader thinks “what’s hide the decline?”. The reporter trying to come up with copy for tomorrow’s paper who similarly doesn’t follow the details on a regular basis wonders the same thing. Quick google search, top ten hits are about Phil Jones explaining why it doesn’t mean what it says, and presto cutto pasto article is done.
For the casual reader, or a reporter trying to make a deadline, what stands out to us as ironclad proof is nothing but an obscure reference to another obscure reference.”
That in a nutshell is what is happening. Can we have a thread on this subject Anthony, and find out if there are a group who are willing to do this work?
davidmhoffer says:
November 25, 2011 at 5:08 pm
TAMINO
Listen up. We’ve got a shortage of trolls over hear at WUWT since CG2 hit.>>>
Tamino, I’m having second thoughts. I mean, why should I debate a tier 3 player like you in the first place? You’re just a cheer leader for the big guns of CAGW. You’re so mickey mouse that you don’t even show up in the CG2 e-mails. All that cheer leading Tamino, and they’re IGNORING you.
=====================================
TAMINO is just fluffing about. And a person fluffing about is a … ? Your friend is Google.
Streetcred;
TAMINO is just fluffing about. And a person fluffing about is a … ? Your friend is Google.>>>
Hmmmm…. there’s several meanings. The most used one has to do with spinning a story for PR purposes in order to do damage control or imply facts not in evidence. That sure sounds like Tamino.
Frankly though, I think this whole climate thing is obscene to the point of being pornographic. At days end Tamino never makes the main scenes, he’s just a wannabe with some minor off screen duties. He thinks he’s got an important job, but he’s just a tool polisher.
SO more evidence of Ben Santer behaving badly. Why an I NOT surprised…
And who can forget this from ol’ Ben???
Perhaps the folks here that want to create a AGW skeptics organization could volunteer their time and support with GWPF. They publish here regularly, you know.
“Cecil Coupe says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:41 pm
Perhaps the folks here that want to create a AGW skeptics organization could volunteer their time and support with GWPF. They publish here regularly, you know.”
Yep – I will look up GWPF, but it needs a scientist to lead this venture. A non-scientist like myself would make too many bloomers and do more damage than good.
There is a really excellent article about climategate2 and what we have learnt about thr BBC here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2066706/BBC-sought-advice-global-warming-scientists-economy-drama-music–game-shows.html#ixzz1eu0PZAeb
the author – David Rose – must be a very sympathetic journalist to have done so much research. He is just the sort that we should be feeding stories to.
Having followed the debate and controversy of Global Warming, now call Climate Change after the IPCC mandarins could not support their hypotheses for number of years, it amazes me that the fundamental function and disciplines of science is abrogated for political expediency and political correctness.
As comments presented on this thread regarding the culpability of the proponents of ‘climate change’ dogma, criminal and litigation procedures should be initiated to stop this fraudulent travesty.
Yep. “fallacies”, even! Don’t forget them!
Dave, don’t ignore those squiggly red underlines your Firefox spell-checker puts under words. Sometimes they’re important.
>:)