“Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020”
Question: If warming really threatens to destroy human civilization, why was Jones hoping for warming?
And if the world was still warming in 2009, why did Jones refer to “lack of warming”?
Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020.
…
I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying where’s the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.
Maybe he needs a backup plan:
MacCracken suggests that Phil Jones start working on a “backup” in case Jones’ prediction of warming is wrong
In any case, if the sulfate hypothesis is right, then your prediction of warming might end up being wrong. I think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past decade as a result of variability–that explanation is wearing thin. I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the prediction is wrong. Otherwise, the Skeptics will be all over us–the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc. And all this just as the US is about ready to get serious on the issue.
We all, and you all in particular, need to be prepared.
Best, Mike MacCracken [Note that Obama’s chief science advisor, John Holdren, is copied on this email]
Thanks to Tom Nelson for spotting these
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Over at RC I’ve heard Gavin and Eric play down the image of a “Team”. Does anyone know who coined the term “Team”?
I think this is one of the most damning e-mails of all. CanSpeccy would do well to read Richard Feynman’s ‘Cargo Cult Science’ if he thinks this is how science should be conducted. (I’m not disputing that many who pass themselves off as scientists might behave in this way, but they are deserving of our condemnation, not our praise). Feynman is correct is stating that when inconvenient results are found, real scientists publish them. Cargo cult scientists (or vodoo scientists in Park’s words) try to explain away inconvenient results by constructing rationalisations that try to account for the failure of their predictions. The sulphate hypothesis (for which we have no reliable data for the key period 1940-1980) is the fall-back fudge factor. Where did that warming go? Sulphate aerosols! Where has the warming gone over the past decade? Sulphate aerosols? Much more convenient than: we don’t know and our models are unreliable — but go ahead and commit to policies on the basis of them (and we’ll keep providing you with The Science to justify them).
The back up plan to the back up plan is to start attributing all “extreme weather” to CO2.
I just want Dr. Jones to explain to me how a COLDER atmosphere can radiate heat and warm the surface. It goes fundamentally against the laws of physics. In order for there to be surface heating caused by AGW, there must be atmospheric heating as the source of the re-radiated heat. The atmosphere is cold. Colder than it has been in a while. How does a colder atmosphere heat the surface? I would want him to explain that phenomenon first before he explains anything else.
Dr Jones…
[“I know the warming is on the decadal scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.”]
.
There is so much in this one small sentence.
1. You ‘know’ the warming is on the decadal scale. This will be the ‘warming’ that you ‘know’ will happen due to anthropogenic emissions of CO2, right?
2. How come no-one (in the Team) spoke about ‘decadal scale warming’ when the MBH98 Hockey Stick graph was sold to Joe Public as ‘proof’ of cAGW?
3. (Just as an aside, when you climb up a hill, reach a plateau and then walk along the top for a while, you will be ‘higher’ than you were when you started the climb. Being ‘higher’ is not the same as ‘climbing’.)
4. I do not feel smug! I feel an entire suite of emotions including, but not exclusively, depression, resignation, intellectual fatigue, frustration, vexation and irritation at the way you so-called ‘scientists’ have repeatedly and deviously tried to peddle your unscientific dogma as some form of authoritarian ‘truth’. This has gone way past ‘smug’.
.
Do yourself a favour. Grow a set and admit that your precious radiative forcing theory has failed to be supported by observed data. Revisit the theory.
@R. Gates says:
November 30, 2011 at 12:05 pm
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Nice to see you back.
Your explanation is possible, and indeed, if it were not for all the other examples of advocacy/activism over science seen in the many other e-mails, in isolation, I could even accept your explanation as reasonable. However, there are now too many examples of Jones’ partiality and desire to promote ‘the cause’ to render your explanation not particularly plausible.
A scientist should always be more interested in the science than in anything else. The lack of warming should have excited the scientist in him and encouraged him to strive to find out what may be the cause of the lack of warming and what that may inform as to how the climate system works. In other words, he should have welcomed it.
CanSpeccy,
You have set up a strawman. I said there is no evidence that CO2 causes climate change. However, as I’ve said countless times here over the past several years, I think that 2xCO2 would probably result in a ≈1°C rise in temperature, ±0.5°C, based on radiative physics. But there is no evidence that CO2 causes “climate change” and “climate disruption” as the alarmist crowd has constantly predicted. The fact is that the global temperature has risen from 288K to 288.7K in a century and a half – an amazingly unchanging temperature that is very unusual in geologic terms – while CO2 has risen ≈40%. And the rise in temperature is along the same trend line from the LIA; there has been no acceleration in warming. None.
My central point was that excusing wrongdoing by pointing to wrongdoing in the past is unacceptable. The alarmist crowd has no morals or ethics, and this time around $billions of our money is being taken every year based on runaway global warming nonsense. And if there is “relentless vituperation”, it is well deserved, as anyone reading these emails can see. These scoundrels fight tooth and nail in every underhanded way they can to keep scientific skeptics from expressing their views. They pimp the climate peer review process, and do their utmost to get perceived enemies fired. Excusing their actions is like petting a dog that’s going to bite you in return. They need to be called on the carpet, not given a pass.
http://drtimball.com/2009/john-holdren/
Peter Taylor says:
November 30, 2011 at 11:30 am
“Incidently, all the current climate models were supposedly validated by replicating the 1950-1980 dip in warming using models of sulphate aerosol – and not one has owned up to the error. maybe they quietly redid the parameters hoping no one would spill the beans. I give chapter and verse of this in my book ‘Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory’.”
There was a recent piece, for which I unfortunately failed to grab a link, which discussed how these models produce very similar backcasts even though, or more accurately because, they all include very different values for the aerosol component. It is fairly obvious that they view aerosols as a nicely malleable fudge factor to create the illusion of validity where none exists.
The previous release of emails contains this little treasure from Phil Jones in 2005.
: “As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.”
………regardless of the consequences……….WHAT?????!!!!!!
Are these the words of someone in full possession of his mental faculties? This is not a nice man. Is he a fan of Dr Strangelove? I can almost see him riding that atom bomb.
Gates says:
“This alternative explanation will of course upset skeptics who’d rather paint Dr. Jones as a money-grubbing tool of the political power elite, rather than a truly concerned scientist. The explanation you choose to accept for the motivations behind his comments, will, like most things in life, depend on what you want to see.”
Jones wrote his emails, so we’re past speculating on his motivations, his dishonesty, or his lack of ethics. They are right there for everyone to see.
I believe that came out of discussions over at Climate Audit and had to do with the whole “hockey stick” thing. They were first the “hockey team” and then just “the team”. Now I think “the cause” fits them better as strictly speaking “the team” were the people responsible for authoring, reviewing, and publishing the MBH “hockey stick” paper. “The Cause” has wider scope.
I believe this whole thread is illustrative of what these people are attempting to do.
The key in all of this is to first attempt to show that climate prior to recent times was very stable. In order to do that you need the long, flat handle of the Hockey Stick. One needs to moderate the MWP and the LIA to show temperatures being quite stable over the past 1000 years and then you show all this modern variability. If temperatures rise, it is because humans are emitting CO2. If temperatures fall, it is because humans are emitting sulfates from burning coal. In other words, the key is the notion that left alone, climate is stable, an only humans cause variation of it.
If a human caused warming doesn’t happen, they need to scramble for a human caused reason for cooling because the entire crux of this issue is supporting the creation of government policies that “manage” climate. It is sheer nonsense.
R. Gates says:
November 30, 2011 at 12:05 pm
“Of course there is an alternative and equally plausible explanation.” …
You are painting Jones into a corner as a publicly funded scientist who holds his own bias and belief over what the actual science and the scientific method tells him, er… well, it shows and I’m surprised that you admitted it as such.
Didn’t you take part in defending this so-called “Back up plan” of sulfates being the cause of the lack of global warming awhile back here on this very site, it was around the time Richard Black was getting a beat down for his article.
I wont bother looking for the page and a link to your comments, because we both know that I’m telling the truth.
BTW, all these excuses are wearing thin don’t ya think?
Ken Hall says:
November 30, 2011 at 10:40 am
“the Skeptics will be all over us–the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc. And all this just as the US is about ready to get serious on the issue.”
Well that is telling…
No concern there for the world’s second biggest and fastest growing emitter of CO2 at that time, China? Now the world’s biggest.
McCracken has more to say about China and India in email #1752
Worth a read, but see also Peter Taylor’s comment above on Sulfates.
That last email says it all … it really is all political, else why keep that sulfate deal in the back pocket just in case it’s needed to explain away cooling. Seems to give plenty of context.
I doubt there will ever be much concern about China. This is because China does most of their stuff “in house”. They will use their own scientists who draw their own conclusions and aren’t on the social bandwagon at the UN. They won’t be contracting with UEA or Oxford or Carnegie Mellon or Penn State for climate advice so they aren’t a potential source of income for them. In fact, they might regard China as “dangerous” to their position if Chinese scientists were to come out saying AGW is flawed. So far AGW benefits China by causing the migration of a lot of industry there on a global scale. When it no longer benefits China, you will hear their real opinion.
Question: If warming really threatens to destroy human civilization, why was Jones hoping for warming?
Well, to quote Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds: “I’ll believe there is a climate crisis when those who tell me there is a climate crisis ACT like there is a climate crisis”.
You know, like NOT flying all around the world to tell me to turn down my thermostat and take the subway more.
My take on all of this. The CAGW advocates do believe their theory; they know they can’t empirically prove it, hence all the statistical nonsense. BUT — their top priority? getting paid. That’s what we are ultimately talking about.
No doubt Pro-AGW people, will happily shrug it off, wont believe it matters or will say its out of context but there is no doubt that saying
“I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the prediction is wrong.”
Is preempting a result, cannot be science and sets the context in which these people have been working. IMO it doesn’t really get much clearer than that.
I wish i could be witty here, but i am too depressed. I do not understand why these people have gone so far down the road. Why do you need a ‘back up plan ‘ to use on skeptics? Isn’t being a scientist about gtting to the truth? When did being right become more important?
Smokey said: “I’ve said countless times here over the past several years, I think that 2xCO2 would probably result in a ≈1°C rise in temperature, ±0.5°C, based on radiative physics. But there is no evidence that CO2 causes “climate change” ”
You do rather tie yourself in knots, don’t you, Smokey: a 0.5-1.5 °C rise in mean global temperature is not “climate change”, but 2 or 3 °C, which you insist won’t happen, would be?
Is that what you are saying now, after first saying “there is no scientific evidence that CO2 causes climate change.”?
It seems to me that a good way of giving credibility to alarmist claims about AGW is to argue against them with vehement lack of of logic.
What’s most interesting, from what I’ve seen of the Climategate emails is that most prominent climate scientists do entertain doubts and uncertainty about the magnitude of AGW.
It is important to bring this fact to public attention. Skeptics should applaud such agnosticism among climate scientists, not ridicule it, although it is fair enough to criticize those who say one thing in private and another in public.
I came across a hacked voicemail trace between Dr Phil and Mr MacCracken….
“Y’all say a HUGE meteor is headed our way, Phil? And it’s gonna wipe us out unless we close down all our cheap power stations and scrap out transport systems?”
“Yes zur, Mr MacCracken. That sure iz the way of it. We in Norfolk have all these model runes that only special people can understand, and they tell us zo.”
“But Phil, what if the meteor changes course? I’ve heard there’s some kinda ‘fate’ out there that’ll mebbe make it miss us!”
“Thet can’t be Mr Mac! Nooo! Me and me Mann – I mean, ma men – have worked long and hard at the runes to prove we’re all a gonna die! We’re all doomed, I tell ya!”
“Och, Mr Phil, isn’t it a good thing that this ‘fate’ thing is going to save us?”
“No!! It can’t be, Mr Mac. I’m right! Mann is doomed! And I’d rather be proved right – and die in the attempt – than be this wrong!”
CanSpeccy, @10:38 on 11/30
I could see your point if the so-called scientists in these emails were discussing say, how best to make soap or something relatively esoteric, harmless and/or benign. But these so-called scientists have perverted peer review, tried to stack the deck on committees and panels, conspired to suppress research findings that contradicted theirs, lied about their data, and so on ad nauseum. All to promote an unproven idea/hypothesis/theory about CO2 causing climate change. Their pronouncements have resulted in draconian laws and regulations that have poor people starving and freezing and costing mankind hundreds of billions of dollars! What Mann, Jones and friends have been doing cannot be considered science, and they deserve all the invective heaped on them.
John from CA says:
November 30, 2011 at 11:13 am
“” John Holdren, is copied on this email”
That’s absolutely outrageous!!!!”
It makes it clear that all our governments used CAGW as a pretense for tax hikes and building of an alternative energy infrastructure to reduce dependency from the Middle East; and not one of them was ever dumb enough to take the catastrophic computer fantasies seriously.
It is not ClimateGate that makes CAGW, Durban, and Green jobs disappear from the MSM focus or the givernment’s focus, but the shale gas revolution.
In Germany, silently, drilling proceeds in an area half the size of North Rhine Westphalia. Greens are trying to ramp up Gasland style propaganda, but get no traction – their paymasters, the EU, have other interests.