NOTE: Thread #1 (the original still available here) has gotten unwieldy due to size. Many browsers can’t complete the load now. So, I’m starting this second open thread on the issue and moving all updates here. It will remain a sticky post for a few days like the original. New posts will appear below this one – Anthony
UPDATE62: 12/6/11 12:01 AM Some results from a recent survey of IT professionals lead me to speculate on a direction for a “whodunnit” for Climategate 1 and 2.
UPDATE61: 12/5/11 9AM Mann o Mann, it seems the hockey stick was based on “questionable statistics” according to email 2383. Others discussed this.
UPDATE60: Out of context comes understanding – a collection of contextual quotes from Climategate 2.0
UPDATE59: It seems that WUWT graphics have found their way into lectures at the University of East Anglia, first alluded to in a UEA Climategate 2 email where Phil Jones got it wrong. Happy to help.
UPDATE58: 11:55PM PST 12/3 The Weekly Standard summarizes Climategate II in a cover story titled Scientists Behaving Badly Part II. WUWT is featured prominently.
UPDATE57: 8:45 AM PST 12/2 The Team makes a call to get a PhD thesis revoked of a skeptic they disagree with. Only one problem (besides the ethics) their scientific basis is bogus.
UPDATE56: 8AM PST 12/2 Climate Science and “The Cause”
UPDATE 55: 12AM PST 12/2 Dr. Kevin Trenberth can’t seem to tolerate a dissenting idea, and suggests a scientist at the National Hurricane Center be fired.
UPDATE54: 5PM PST 12/1 Steve McIntyre talks with Andrew Bolt about Climategate 2 in this video interview
UPDATE53: 9AM PST 12/1 Apparently a kid and his science fair project can invalidate the core premise of Mike Mann’s hockey stick, according to his dad, who happens to be an NCAR scientist.
UPDATE52: 11PM PST 11/30 BOMBSHELL Steve McIntyre has discovered more evidence of “hide the decline” and it’s worse than we thought.
UPDATE51: 7PM PST Tying WWF, UEA, Fenton Communications and “commissioned research” all together
UPDATE50: 1:15 PM PST 11/30 The genesis of RealClimate.org seems to have been found. Surprisingly, the BBC’s Roger Harrabin seems to have been involved in the genesis meeting.
UPDATE49: 10:00 AM PST 11/30 While not email related, just as Climategate breaks David Suzuki commits an egregious propaganda error second only to the 10:10 video where kids are blown up for not going along with carbon reduction schemes at school. He’s targeting kids and Santa Claus at Christmas – Santa’s home is melting.
UPDATE48: 9:20 AM PST 11/30 Dr. Phil Jones on the “lack of warming” -he may need a backup plan.
UPDATE47: 9AM PST 11/30 Fudge factor collection in the emails, or is climate modeling a social issue?
UPDATE46: A look at UEA/CRU’s email infrastructure and email systems in general suggests that the “deleted” emails to/from Phil Jones and others at CRU probably still exist and can be subject to FOIA.
UPDATE45: 1:30PM PST 11/29 If there was award for clueless timing, this would win it no contest: Penn State to lecture on “climate ethics”
UPDATE44: 9AM PST 11/29 Mike Mann reprises the role of Captain Queeg in The Cain Mutiny when seeing de Freitas being vindicated by the publisher of Climate Research (see the update in the article).
UPDATE43: 8AM PST 11/29 An Excel Spreadsheet with Climategate 1 and 2 emails ordered chronologically should be helpful in determining that supposedly missing”context”
UPDATE42: 7AM PST 11/29 The CRU crew says: “what we really meant was…”
UPDATE41: 4AM PST 11/29 James Padget schools Steve Zwick – Guide to Defending the Indefensible. Some people just can’t handle Climategate.
UPDATE40: 12AM PST 11/29 Penn State has the same “look the other way” problem with Climategate as they did with the Jerry Sandusky scandal.
UPDATE39: It seems “vexatious” is Dr. Phil Jones favorite new feeling word after summer 2009.
UPDATE38: Severinghaus says Mike Mann didn’t give a straight answer regarding why trees don’t work as thermometers after 1950
UPDATE37: Climate sensitivity can’t be quantified with the current data according to NCAR’s Wigley, with paleo data – even less so.
UPDATE36: Dr. Chris de Freitas responds to the ugly attempt by The Team at getting him fired.
UPDATE 35: “Stroppy” Dr Roger Pielke Sr. shows just how much a “old boys network” the peer review process is.
UPDATE34: More internal dissent of the hockey stick. Mann tries to beat down the concern over “hide the decline” while not letting the dissenting scientist know there was a decline.
UPDATE33: Gobsmacking! Rob Wilson proves McIntyre and McKittrick correct in an email to colleagues at CRU, showing that when random noise time series are fed into Mike Mann’s procedure, it makes “hockey sticks”. The confirmation that M&M is right never leaves the walls of CRU.
UPDATE32: 9:30PM PST 11/27 BREAKING – Canada to pull out of Kyoto protocol. Another Climategate fallout ?
UPDATE31: 4:30PM PST 11/27 BOMBSHELL An absolutely disgusting string of communications that shows the tribal attempt at getting an editor of a journal fired on made up issues – all because he allowed a publication that didn’t agree with “the Team”. This is ugly, disturbing, and wrong on every level.
UPDATE30: 9:45 AM PST 11/27 Newsbytes. Major crack in the warming wall at the UK prime minister’s office. BBC in collusion with Climategate scientists.
UPDATE29: 9AM PST 11/27 The saga of the missing station data at CRU and the “pants on fire” defense of it as told by Willis Eschenbach. Dr. Phil Jones is between a rock and a hard place, quite.
UPDATE 28: 1:30PM PST 11/26 An email shows the UNFCCC considers activists an essential tool saying “…organized and deeply committed environmental activism has long been an important part of the UNFCCC process…”
UPDATE27: 7AM PST 11/26 Climategate 2 features prominently in WUWT’s newest feature “Hits and Misses”
UPDATE26: 2:50 PM 11/25 Two separate examples show obstruction and collusion by members of “The Team” to prevent any dissenting science from being properly considered by the NRC in 2007.
UPDATE25: 2PM 11/25 Keith Briffa asks another colleague to delete email to avoid FOIA
UPDATE24: 1:30PM 11/25 New Climategate 1/2 combined search engine here
UPDATE23: 9AM PST 11/25 via bishop-hill, strange infighting:
#4101 – Edward Cook tells Phil Jones that Mike Mann is “serious enemy” and “vindictive”. Mike Mann had criticized his work.
Apparently Mann went “a little crazy” over a paper showing the MWP exists.
Details here
UPDATE22: 11AM PST 11/24 Am unsurprising admission from a BBC environmental reporter to Dr. Phil Jones that they really have no impartiality at all (ho ho) when it comes to climate issues.
UPDATE21: 9:50AM PST 11/24 “FOIA2011″ and Climategate – A Chinese-POTUS connection?
UPDATE20: 9:30AM PST 11/24 World renowned climatologist Phil Jones can’t even plot a temperature trend line in Excel. I’ve offered a solution that WUWT readers can help with.
UPDATE19: 9AM PST 11/24 Gail Combs finds some disturbing connections between the Team and The World Bank
UPDATE18: 1:45PM Scott Mandia, aka “Supermandia” wins the award for the silliest climategate rebuttal, ever. It’s like stupid on steroids.
UPDATE17: 12:55PM PST 11/23 Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has an excellent piece on “Gatekeeping” related to Trenberth and the Pielke-Landsea hurricane paper and the IPCC. You may recall Landsea resigned from the IPCC over this. Pielke says: “The gatekeeping of the IPCC process is abundantly clear, and the shadowy suggestion that they can find out who the reviewers are from another colleague is a bit unsettling as well.” Trenberth looks particularly bad here.
UPDATE16: 11:30AM PST 11/23 Insider scientist at CRU says our “reaction to Mike Mann’s errors was not particularly honest” – story here
UPDATE15: 7:50AM 11/23 Ric Werme found an email from the late John L. Daly to Mike Mann and the team – it is well worth a read here
UPDATE14: 2:45 AM PST 11/23 Willis Eschenbach offers a guest post here explaining how his FOIA requests went astray. Mr. David Palmer was the Freedom of Information Officer for the CRU at the time. In the newly released emails, he expresses his frustration with the whole procedure.
UPDATE13: 12:05AM 11/23 Craig Stone writes:
I have published a searchable database of the emails at http://foia2011.org
All email addresses and phone numbers are automatically redacted. It’s extremely rudimentary right now, but I’ll be refining the functionality and improving the search capabilities and navigation over the course of the next week.
UPDATE 12: 9:30 PM PST We’ve known for some time that Al Gore made up a bunch of claims in his AIT movie that simply weren’t true. Now this revelation in the new email batch shows that in the case of Kilimanjaro’s disappearing snows, even Phil Jones and Dr. Lonnie Thompson don’t believe global warming is the cause, even though Thompson put out a press release nearly a year ago saying just that. Told ya so. Pants on fire and all that. Anything for “the cause” right?
UPDATE11: 4:45PM PST Kevin Trenberth gets all misty eyed and sing-songy at Christmas here
UPDATE10: 4:30PM PST Some thoughts on cracking the big remaining all.7z file here
UPDATE9: 2:25PM PST Josh weighs in with the first satirical cartoon here
UPDATE8: 140PM PST Mike Mann shows his true colors:
email 1680.txt
date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:03:05 -0400
from: “Michael E. Mann”..
subject: Re: Something not to pass on
to: Phil Jones
Phil,
I would not respond to this. They will misrepresent and take out of context anything you give them. This is a set up. They will certainly publish this, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary that you provide. s They are going after Wei-Chyung because he’s U.S. and there is a higher threshold for establishing libel. Nonetheless, he should
consider filing a defamation lawsuit, perhaps you too.
I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.
I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and discrediting them….
UPDATE7: 1:20 PM PST Phil Jones and Tom Wigley calls another scientist (The former state climatologist of California) a “jerk” for publishing his UHI results.
UPDATE6: 12:08PM PST Here’s an email that collaborates a radio interview I did in Seattle with Thomas Peterson in summer 2007, yes these are 100% real emails, no doubt whatsoever now. More here: Climategate 2.0 – NCDC: “Mr. Watts gave a well reasoned position”
UPDATE 5: 11:00AM PST In a statement, UEA doesn’t deny these emails, but posts about the whitewash investigations of the past, like they matter now.
UPDATE4: 9:45 AM PST I’ve changed the headline from Climategate 2.0 to Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular! with a hat tip to Jerry Seinfeld. The relevance of that headline is particularly interesting in the context of where Dr. James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has his office in NYC.
UPDATE3: 9:25 AM PST – Having read a number of emails, and seeing this quote from Mike Mann in the Guardian:
When asked if they were genuine, he said: “Well, they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad.”
I’m going to conclude they are the real deal. I’ve posted a BitTorrent link to the file below. One big difference between Climategate 1 and 2 is that in 1, it took days for the MSM to catch on, now they are on top of it.
UPDATE2: 8:45AM PST The Guardian has a story up by Leo Hickman, and this excerpt suggests they may be the real deal:
Norfolk police have said the new set of emails is “of interest” to their investigation to find the perpetrator of the initial email release who has not yet been identified.
The emails appear to be genuine, but this has yet to be confirmed by the University of East Anglia. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages.
UPDATE1: 8:20 AM PST These emails have not been verified yet, and this story was posted by one of my moderating staff while I was asleep. Until such time they are verified, tread lightly because without knowing what is behind the rest of the zip file, for all we know it’s a bunch of recipes and collection of lorem ipsum text files. I’m working to authenticate these now and will report when I know more – Anthony Watts
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dear A physicist,
Your attempt to bring reason and nuance to a feeding frenzy of cherry picking and wild speculation are unappreciated. Please go back to whatever boring world of rational thinking you came from.
Latest Australia November anomaly -0.08 haha
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/aus/summary.shtml
Cant wait to see Roy Spencer data bet about 0.00C
It seems these cretins at the Australian BOM are trying to avoid giving just an average temp. It gotta be maximum or minimum average idea being to show that the minimum average was above aberage but the maximum average was normal! God help Australian Science
@ur momisugly Gail Combs,
I caught this on a financial blog and thought you both would find this interesting.
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/reader-question
Global warming hype kills jobs:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=47882
And signs of Junk Science:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3974#more-3974
I’m overwhelmed by all the new names showing up in these emails. Does anone have a who’s who or some other guide? I’d love to see their relationship with the IPCC.
Bob Watson on CH4 : we are going to see temperature rise by 4 or even 5 degrees C.
(mind you, he has grown lot of facial fur in readiness for the new solar ‘grand minimum’
Thought you or your readers may be interested in what my analysis of the emails discovered:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/17684
1706.txt they discover a paper that says Greenland isn’t warming now but did warm considerably in the 1920’s!
And then they spend some effort into attempting to dig out the review notes to find stuff wrong with the paper because apparently it goes against the meme.
3499.txt in the quoted text:
When Mann says he’s made a “small” mistake, it might be a good “dig here” sign.
And who would “the wrong people” be?
A physicist says:
December 2, 2011 at 6:47 pm
Do you mean like the following…?
“We have multiple lines of evidence, i.e. sea ice melting, glaciers retreating, flora fauna migrating, stratosphere cooling, extreme weather increasing, snowfall rducing etc etc”
Congratulations, WUWT just hit 1,000,000 visits since Climategate 2 was exposed.
I was curious about the breadth of dissemination so I checked your page hits for the last twelve days. As I was checking you hit 1 million visits.
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s36wattsup&r=35
WUWT and its contributors have done a wonderful job reviewing and publicising these important glimpses into the inner machinations of the religion of “climate science.”
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0880476729.txt&search=Endorsements
“Dear Eleven,
I was very disturbed by your recent letter, and your attempt to get others to endorse it. Not only do I disagree with the content of this letter, but I also believe that you have severely distorted the
IPCC “view” when you say that “the latest IPCC assessment makes a convincing economic case for immediate control of emissions.” In contrast to the one-sided opinion expressed in your letter, IPCC WGIII SAR and TP3 review the literature and the issues in a balanced way presenting
arguments in support of both “immediate control” and the spectrum of more cost-effective options. It is not IPCC’s role to make “convincing cases” for any particular policy option; nor does it. However, most IPCC readers would draw the conclusion that the balance of economic evidence favors the emissions trajectories given in the WRE paper. This is contrary to your statement.”
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0876437553.txt&search=Endorsements
“Mike, Rob,
Sounds like you guys have been busy doing good things for the cause.
I would like to weigh in on two important questions —
Distribution for Endorsements —
I am very strongly in favor of as wide and rapid a distribution as possible for endorsements. I think the only thing that counts is numbers. The media is going to say “1000 scientists signed” or “1500
signed”. No one is going to check if it is 600 with PhDs versus 2000 without. They will mention the prominent ones, but that is a different story.
Conclusion — Forget the screening, forget asking them about their last publication (most will ignore you.) Get those names!”
Yes, that is what I mean: the point is scientific conclusions are drawn from a review of all the available information; in medicine this process is formalized as meta-analysis. In general there is no expectation that all the evidence will point in the same direction; in medicine such unity almost never occurs.
It’s worth noting too that relative to other scientific disciplines, fundamental physics at present imposes only relatively light constraints on medicine, whereas in other disciplines considerations of thermodynamics, quantum physics, celestial mechanics, stellar evolution, heat transport, etc. are very solidly grounded in fundamental physics and mathematics. Climate science is a middle-of-the-road case, in which observation and experiment are comparably important to fundamental physics and mathematics.
For the above reasons two of the weakest forms of skepticism are (1) criticism of cherry-picked observational data and (2) criticism of cherry-picked personalities — these contribute essentially nothing to scientific understanding (per the examples given earlier).
Accordingly, two of the strong forms of skepticism are (1) criticism of observational data sets in their entirety and (2) criticism of the fundamental mathematics and physical theory that interprets these data sets.
Needless to say, the practice of strong climate change skepticism is at least as challenging as the practice of any other variety of climate change research. Strong skepticism is becoming harder-and-harder to practice as observational data and fundamental theory both improve; that’s why strong climate change skepticism is seldom seen nowadays.
I think that, as well as searching for e-mails that show how bad these (15-20?) guys behave and how they slag outsiders, it might be useful to expose those e-mails where they slag each other – make it easier for them to see who their real friends are,
A physicist:
You remind me of an old phonographic record being played by a well worn pick-up needle. There is information there but it is so distorted and noisy that it is useless.
To be effective, why not just publish examples of those E-mails that show science being performed competently, with a proper skeptical approach inside the scientific method. They should exude professionalism and honesty. Show us the emails you are so proud of. It would be a pleasure to read. GK
CG2 has certainly given a boost towards WUWT hitting 100 million pages views before the New Year 🙂
Another academic fraud: http://badnewsfromthenetherlands.blogspot.com/2011/11/university-hides-academic-fraud.html
It has also become known this month that a senior researcher has resigned at the medical center of the university because the collection of his data was unverifiable.
which reminds a lot about… Jones? Others?
Because of world bank (and central bank involvement), here is a little gem I picked up.
http://physicsoffinance.blogspot.com/2011/10/federal-reserve-corruption.html
Interesting links…..
There’s not much reason to think that the most recent decade of climate-change research differs significantly from the previous 18 decades. That is, the history of fallible human being slowly gaining deeper understanding of earth’s climate.
As for the CRU emails, not even the people who wrote those emails have seen them in their entirety. Only one person has seen them all: the unknown person who stole them, a person who for unknown reasons, is incrementally releasing unknown portions of them, those portions being of unknown accuracy, redacted according to unknown criteria, in service of unknown objectives.
To me, the most striking and unexpected aspect of the emails released, is how little information they convey regarding earth’s climate. A plausible hypothesis is that the main redaction criteria is simply this: release no CRU emails that convey any substantive information about earth’s climate.
As for why that would be anyone’s redaction criterion, your guess is as good as mine.
A physicist says:
“… the unknown person who stole them…”
Only a True Believer would say that. First, there is zero evidence that anything was stolen; what’s missing? When something is stolen, it’s gone. And those emails were paid for by the public. They are public property.
The emails were copied, obviously by an insider with access. If an outside hacker had copied the emails he would have simply dumped them online en mass, instead of selecting which emails to post. A lot of work went into sifting through some really huge files. What benefit would the fictional hacker get out of all that work, and waiting two years to release the second tranche?
Whoever posted the emails did it to show the rampant corruption within the climate industry. Scientific misconduct is revealed throughout. Many years of temperature data were fabricated out of thin air, and the result always showed alarming rises in temperature.
The person who put the Climategate emails online for the world to see did a great public service. We’re at the point now that the public believes by a wide margin that the climate clique is fabricating data and lying for money. For them, things can only get worse from here.
5100.txt us apparently WWF coordinating with UEA on how climate “scientists” should respond to a WWF climate statement.
john says:
December 3, 2011 at 5:22 am
@ur momisugly Gail Combs,
I caught this on a financial blog and thought you both would find this interesting.
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/reader-question
_____________________________
WEIRD, I go with the guy who said the FDA would have conniption fits.
manny says:
December 3, 2011 at 7:44 am
I’m overwhelmed by all the new names showing up in these emails. Does anone have a who’s who or some other guide? I’d love to see their relationship with the IPCC.
__________________________
Just toss their names into a search engine with climate included. That is what I do.
AJStrata says:
December 3, 2011 at 12:00 pm
Thought you or your readers may be interested in what my analysis of the emails discovered:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/17684
_________________________________
Thanks AJ, I loved you analysis of the error in the temperature data BTW and have it bookmarked.