Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?

[ibis]

How about conspiracy to have scientific journal editorial staff removed, published peer reviewed research "left out" of IPCC reports, intention to destroy materials subject to a Freedom of Information request?

This is about the ethics and hence credibility of science. People should choose theirs wisely now.

Certainly the papers would want to see that that stuff is actually in there before saying it is. The blogs don't suffer from that constraint. You may find, as a result, that the blogs' version of "climategate" will be a long way from that of the mainstream media.

Have you actually read the material, or are you simply regurgitating what the blogosphere has decided? Because I have been reading it, and so far there's nothing very exciting in it, although it is interesting to read.

[sharper]

Because I have been reading it, and so far there's nothing very exciting in it, although it is interesting to read.

I've been reading the actual mails and so far the only things that stand out are:

-The guy who's basically happy someone died

-Attempts to delete emails in response to FOI requests

-The guys trying to get around Russian tax laws. Perhaps understandable considering Russia taxes grant money and they wanted to get around that to spend the money on the research not for their own gain but still it doesn't exactly look good.

All the stuff about "tricks", conspiracies to hide data etc are pure quote mining. In terms of the actual data and research there is no story and consequently no impact on AGW as a scientific theory.

However people see what they want to see. If they see a quote where someone talks about a "trick" to "hide" a trend and they want to see a conspiracy they will see a conspiracy. You can spend any amount of time explaining the context of those words and the paper they're talking about but it won't matter to them. I even see people arguing that "trick" can only ever have a negative meaning despite most people understanding things like "Here's a trick to get your computer working again" or "The trick to navigating Dell's support system is to ask for a supervisor right away".

As for why "the debate is over" people not making much of an appearance that's because those people tend to entirely focussed on evidence. A bunch of emails with people making unwise unguarded comments are not evidence of anything and have no bearing on peer reviewed research they've produced. I'm certainly not going to waste my time arguing extensively over the meaning of trick or the ethics of circumventing Russia's tax laws for research purposes.

[Polytics.Irie]

Certainly the papers would want to see that that stuff is actually in there before saying it is. The blogs don't suffer from that constraint. You may find, as a result, that the blogs' version of "climategate" will be a long way from that of the mainstream media..

I think the MSM will massage this as best they can. Can't have the global goverment pushed off the rails for something so trivial as facts.

"The conference in Copenhagen is another step towards Global Management of our planet"

That's a quote from the acceptance speech of our new dear Leader Herman Van Rompuy.

Hear him say it for himself here....@ 2.03. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXWeOa-FuyM"]YouTube- New EU president confirms New World Order desire (19Nov09)[/ame]


Perhaps it was taken out of context though, I mean, which of us can honestly say we've never said anithing like this.

[Polytics.Irie]

As for why "the debate is over" people not making much of an appearance that's because those people tend to entirely focussed on evidence.

Well, you must agree, this material is indeed evidence of something. no? Or is supporting evidence all that they are interested in?

What about surfacestations.org ? I don't hear them counter that evidence.

[ibis]

I've been reading the actual mails and so far the only things that stand out are:

-The guy who's basically happy someone died

-Attempts to delete emails in response to FOI requests

-The guys trying to get around Russian tax laws. Perhaps understandable considering Russia taxes grant money and they wanted to get around that to spend the money on the research not for their own gain but still it doesn't exactly look good.

All the stuff about "tricks", conspiracies to hide data etc are pure quote mining. In terms of the actual data and research there is no story and consequently no impact on AGW as a scientific theory.

However people see what they want to see. If they see a quote where someone talks about a "trick" to "hide" a trend and they want to see a conspiracy they will see a conspiracy. You can spend any amount of time explaining the context of those words and the paper they're talking about but it won't matter to them. I even see people arguing that "trick" can only ever have a negative meaning despite most people understanding things like "Here's a trick to get your computer working again" or "The trick to navigating Dell's support system is to ask for a supervisor right away".

As for why "the debate is over" people not making much of an appearance that's because those people tend to entirely focussed on evidence. A bunch of emails with people making unwise unguarded comments are not evidence of anything and have no bearing on peer reviewed research they've produced. I'm certainly not going to waste my time arguing extensively over the meaning of trick or the ethics of circumventing Russia's tax laws for research purposes.

That's pretty much the size of it - you've got Russian researchers back in 1998 asking to have money transferred into their personal accounts, which is hardly exciting, given the state of Russia at the time, and the likelihood that the researchers would never have seen the money again if it had gone into institutional accounts*. The blogosphere has taken that, stuck it together with the grants that UK researchers have received in/by 2009, and tried to make out that the two together mean that the whole thing is an elaborate fraud - a bit like those cut and paste pastiche Photoshop jobs celeb magazines do showing two stars "together" in a "possible reconstruction", and about as newsworthy.

There's actually a hilarious bolded and exclamation-marked shock-headline-gasp that a UK researcher has received "nearly £13m in funding!!"...between 1990 and 2009. Goodness me, the head of a research program attracting funding of £680K/year. Who knew?

Also, I love the claim that "the original data was deliberately deleted" - great blogo-cries of "storage space is cheap! nobody has to delete data!!". Data storage space is cheap now alright .

Mind you, it's interesting to see how cautiously they all have to proceed in releasing information, how everything has to be double and treble-checked, and how much damage incautious statements can do in a highly politicised area of science.

* in fact, I've just been reminded by my wife that when she was a research student she arranged to have her grant paid direct to a personal account against the wishes of one of her supervisors, whose normal practice was to hold back a portion of student's grants and apply it in other areas of the department where she felt it would do more good than "providing students with beer money".

[Polytics.Irie]

.

Mind you, it's interesting to see how cautiously they all have to proceed in releasing information, how everything has to be double and treble-checked, and how much damage incautious statements can do in a highly politicised area of science.

That's a good point in and of itself, but shouldn't the science stand on it merits alone?
If it does not stand on it's merits alone, can it be called science?

[zakalwe1]

According to media in the UK, heaviest rainfall in 1000years this week. Record flow levels in Cork, Galway and west of Ireland. Climate change is HERE, AND IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

i thought that science was in the tabernacle, not a media claim?

[imokyrok]

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

RealClimate: The CRU hack

[ibis]

That's a good point in and of itself, but shouldn't the science stand on it merits alone?
If it does not stand on it's merits alone, can it be called science?

There's two entirely separate things there - doing the science, and communicating the science. Normally, science is only communicated to other researchers in your field, so fairly little care and attention need be paid to what exactly you say, since if someone takes you up the wrong way, you just clarify and that's that. In a highly charged public debate, on the other hand, there will be people looking for anything they can use against you - which usually means taking the worst possible interpretation of what you've said and repeating it ad nauseam, ignoring any attempt to clarify.

It's a Kafkaesque situation, and not one that has any bearing on whether the science stands up on its merits.

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Yup - funnily enough, the more you read of the material released, the more it blows away much of the bull that the denialists have spouted over the years. They may have shot themselves in the foot with this one.

[H]

And tax evasion, let's not forget that.

And supporting and being financed by the Big Business efforts that promote "AGW" the sky is falling bull$hit

There is huge money riding on promoting the Global warming industry along with the utterley corrupt Carbon Trading scam that the likes of the Green/FF party promote.