[Aardwolf]

Seems to me that a lot of these emails and memos and whatnot that people are citing as showing the guys are up to bad stuff lack the context to conclude that. People are just too lazy to follow the trail and find out what the guys were actually talking about, and it's easier to tell them (whether or not it's right) than to do the work.

[Janos]

Seems to me that a lot of these emails and memos and whatnot that people are citing as showing the guys are up to bad stuff lack the context to conclude that. People are just too lazy to follow the trail and find out what the guys were actually talking about, and it's easier to tell them (whether or not it's right) than to do the work.

Yes, but scientists are assholes. They're human, after all, and scientific work is more of a nightmare than an utopia people make it out to be. Humans are assholes, and scientific philosophy does promote dickness to the extreme. Extremely competitive, it is publish or die. Unless you can completely change science this is the face of things to be. Academia sucks. That's not big news to anyone involved in any empirical field of science. I would love it to change. But assholiness does not make any hypothesis more or less truthful.

The idea that humans and scientists are assholes and *****y petty ****heads isn't a new one, but the idea that such human attributes from one organization can be generalized to describe an international field of study and discredit it is both ridiculous and detrimental to scientific approach. After all, the realities of hypothesises are not determined by the general niceness of people, but by the rigour of their research. And the fact that people who criticize studies rarely have any kind of merit to do so. Statistifical analysis and measuring the truthfulness of an hypothesis is much more difficult than people think, and it is the reason why even relatively merited scientists can publish junk data.

[Aardwolf]

Odd.

Anyway, I still believe global warming is real and that the levels are not part of the naturally occurring cycle.

[Goober5000]

I haven't been keeping up with this thread since Thanksgiving happened, nor do I have much interest in continuing to do so now that so many more pages have been written, but I felt this was too incredible not to post:

Climate change data dumped

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) [aka massaged] data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. "The CRU is basically saying, 'Trust us'. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is "unequivocally" linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

Compare this to what RealClimate.org posted on Nov. 23rd:

CRU data accessibility. From the date of the first FOI request to CRU (in 2007), it has been made abundantly clear that the main impediment to releasing the whole CRU archive is the small % of it that was given to CRU on the understanding it wouldn’t be passed on to third parties. Those restrictions are in place because of the originating organisations (the various National Met. Services) around the world and are not CRU’s to break. As of Nov 13, the response to the umpteenth FOI request for the same data met with exactly the same response. This is an unfortunate situation, and pressure should be brought to bear on the National Met Services to release CRU from that obligation. It is not however the fault of CRU. The vast majority of the data in the HadCRU records is publicly available from GHCN (v2.mean.Z).

So we now know the main impediment to releasing the data wasn't the proprietary agreements, it was the fact that the data no longer existed.  Somebody is trying to cover something up here.


Feel free to regard this as a drive-by post, because it is: I don't intend to continue participating in this thread.  But if you still don't smell anything wrong with this whole affair after this post, then you must not have a functioning B.S. detector.  Or you've turned it off because you've blindly swallowed the party line of the cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

[General Battuta]

Actually, er, I must say that doesn't sound that fishy. Discarding raw data and keeping the massaged data sounds like something that might happen pretty often. It's not necessarily good science, but that doesn't mean it doesn't occur.

[Scotty]

However, when dealing with reasearch of this reach and importance, one should not simply discard any kind of data, or stuff like this (*grand gesture at entire thread*) happens.  How much easier would it be to simply avoid scrutiny like this by NOT discarding or hiding something?  The fact that this has happened at all is fishy.

[General Battuta]

I do not think the last sentence of your statement connects with the rest.

As I have said, I am generally agnostic towards manmade global warming, but viewing whatever's popped up here as evidence that it's all a fraud seems like simple confirmation bias.

[Janos]

I haven't been keeping up with this thread since Thanksgiving happened, nor do I have much interest in continuing to do so now that so many more pages have been written, but I felt this was too incredible not to post:

Climate change data dumped

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) [aka massaged] data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. "The CRU is basically saying, 'Trust us'. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is "unequivocally" linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.

Compare this to what RealClimate.org posted on Nov. 23rd:

CRU data accessibility. From the date of the first FOI request to CRU (in 2007), it has been made abundantly clear that the main impediment to releasing the whole CRU archive is the small % of it that was given to CRU on the understanding it wouldn’t be passed on to third parties. Those restrictions are in place because of the originating organisations (the various National Met. Services) around the world and are not CRU’s to break. As of Nov 13, the response to the umpteenth FOI request for the same data met with exactly the same response. This is an unfortunate situation, and pressure should be brought to bear on the National Met Services to release CRU from that obligation. It is not however the fault of CRU. The vast majority of the data in the HadCRU records is publicly available from GHCN (v2.mean.Z).

So we now know the main impediment to releasing the data wasn't the proprietary agreements, it was the fact that the data no longer existed.  Somebody is trying to cover something up here.


Feel free to regard this as a drive-by post, because it is: I don't intend to continue participating in this thread.  But if you still don't smell anything wrong with this whole affair after this post, then you must not have a functioning B.S. detector.  Or you've turned it off because you've blindly swallowed the party line of the cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Did they lose their copies of data or is it all gone? Were they the only organization in possession of this data? When did this happen? Was this unique data?

Are people even thinking about replicating it?

edit: Nope, the original raw data is still on their original sources because hey, it wasn't CRU's (this disucssion is really disjointed):
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/11/so-was-the-data-destroyed.html
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35233_Did_Climate_Scientists_Destroy_Data_A-_No
http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2009/10/14/3

And stating that "I have no interest in this thread", then posting yet another talking point whilst apparently ignoring the previous 4 pages of discussion and ignoring a direct question aimed at you is just classy. If you have no interest in the thread then why, oh why would you post in it?

[mxlm]

As I have said, I am generally agnostic towards manmade global warming, but viewing whatever's popped up here as evidence that it's all a fraud seems like simple confirmation bias.

Indeed. Even if we were to conclude that everything CRU does am evil it am, uh, well, they're not exactly the only source

[Bobboau]

I'll have to agree with the general as well.

[TrashMan]

I just have one question - how the hell do you prove if a copied e-mail if false or true?


It's jsut a bunch of text in a digital format. Anyone can write a fake e-mail.
The only concrete evidence would be if you found incriminating evidence on a persons computer.

An alleged copy of an alleged hacker is realyl no proof of anything.

[Bobboau]

and what is an alleged copy of an alleged email that allegedly shows they have a negative view of FOI requests then. I guess that would be the the square root of the asthmatic inverse of proof then.

that's what I'm agreeing with, so I'm not sure who that's directed at.

[Janos]

So many people involved in the matter have elaborated on the emails that it doesn't seem likely that the contents are false, but there have been cases where parts of them have been... well, not fraudulent, but ignored or cut away. It is very possible that often we only see parts of emails and some entire posts have been linked away, which factually is quite similar to just making stuff up.

This doesn't mean false emails can't also emerge.

[Kosh]

After skimming through 8 pages, it seems the best the warming deniers can come up with is basically just conspiracy theories.

"They" are out to get us. "They" are out to control your life.


About 35 minutes or so into the latest skeptics guide to the universe podcast episode they discuss this. Enjoy.

[Janos]

After skimming through 8 pages, it seems the best the warming deniers can come up with is basically just conspiracy theories.

"They" are out to get us. "They" are out to control your life.

There's a big field of related ecological study that studies both the changes in northern and southern limits of distribution of organisms, and the field of phenology too. I have this nagging suspicion that all those entomologists that study the northward migration of beetles and macrolepidoptera and the ornithologists that discover that arrival of spring migrants have changed quite significantly and that it can be explained with changed temperatures and weather patterns are not actually doing it out of spite or to take away the precious liberties of Liberator and his ilk.

[Aardwolf]

So, does anybody remember that graph Al Gore made in An Inconvenient Truth, with the (millions?) of years of natural temperature oscillation, and then the GARHUGEAN spike on the right-hand (i.e. present-day) end of the graph?

[Liberator]

That was kinda the point about my rant a bit ago.

I don't have a problem with the concept that the Earth's climate is warming, it almost certainly is.

My issue with "Global Warming" is that as a concept, it's been taken over by certain individuals and organizations who would use it to further they're political goals instead of making long term plans to help humanity fulfill it's roll as caretakers of this world and adjust to the changes.

BTW, there's a image floating around that Al Gore, among others, are suggesting is representative of what the world will look like in something like 50 years or sommat.  On this photoshopped image there are 4 hurricanes, 2 of which are in locations where it is impossible for hurricanes to form, also, while the Floridian peninsula has shrunk in this image to a fraction of it's original size, Cuba is completely gone.  For Cuba to disappear from an orbital photo the sea level would have to rise something on the order of 6000+ feet, you know what else is that far above sea level?  Denver, Colorado.

So basically, you've got a guy who is trying to cash in on a hysteria that he, himself, has been manufacturing.

[Mika]

Formerly I have been of neutral opinion towards the climate science (check the last time we had an argument about climate), but came to the conclusion that it is highly likely that the IPCC is right. However, my reasoning was due to the fact that there are articles with opposing conclusions published in journals. Due to the peer-review process, I thought that there must be some validity behind them. Well, here is some explanation of that:

http://www.realclimate.org/wp-content/uploads/PETERLAUT-ANALYSIS-CLIMATE-CHANGE-CPN1.pdf

I don't think the emails are faked as any hacker would have a really hard time writing such data without revealing mistakes.

[Mika]

Oh, and anyone doubting can now check the IPCC data and models. They can be found at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

Have fun!

[Bobboau]

I don't think liberator is talking conspiracy, I think he's talking 'bunch of unrelated groups using the same thing because it can be used to further there otherwise unrelated agenda' any group that thinks that people need to be guided to the 'right' decision will use any and all events real or imagined that will allow them to enact legislation that pushes their particular slant.
that's not conspiracy, that's human nature, what liberator needs to do is provide some specific examples.