British Parliament Whitewashes CRU In ClimateGate

British Parliamentary committee charged with investigating the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia has issued what amounts to a whitewash.  As I expected last fall, the investigation was cursory at best, and ignores some key issues. 

...in their rush to judgment before parliament is dissolved for the general election, Phil Willis and his team avoided examining more complex charges, including those raised by the Guardian in its investigations in February.


Even so, they sometimes get confused. The MPs accept Jones’s claim that CRU’s habit of keeping secret much of its data, methodology and computer codes was “standard practice” among climate scientists. Yet they also note that Nasa scientists doing similar work are much more open. Not so standard, then.

And whatever standard practice may be, surely as one of climate science’s senior figures, Jones should take some responsibility for its misdemeanours? Jones has worked for the CRU for more than 20 years and been its director for six. The MPs found there a “culture of withholding information” in which “information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure.” It found this “unacceptable”. Doesn’t its director take responsibility?

The MPs kept their criticism for the university. Its “failure to grasp fully the potential damage [from] non-disclosure of FOIA requests was regrettable”.

Also possibly illegal, it might have added.

I suspect that the Guardian newspaper who conducted a much more thorough investigation in February will have much more to say on this in the next few weeks...after all, the Labour party, which has strongly supported "climate change" legislation has absolutely no desire for it to be shown as a hoax...or worse a boondoggle.

Physicists Ask American Physical Society To Recind Global Warming Statement

Here is the request in full, all emphasis is mine:

Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society:

This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on.

By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled “The Climate Science isn’t Settled,” for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice.

What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)

We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done.

None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership.

If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccallan@princeton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count.

Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil

ClimateGate: A Brief Explaination

Charles Martin on Pajamasmedia.com has an excellent point by point run down of why this issue is so disturbing. In brief, here are the three main points:

The Climategate files held many embarrassing revelations. They appear to show collusion on the part of many of the top names in climate science:

* to subvert peer review and prevent publication of papers that didn’t completely agree with the favored theory;

*to manipulate data, and the analysis of data, to make the best case for the favored theory;

*to avoid releasing their data under the Freedom of Information laws in the U.S. and UK.

It is the last point that the various researchers have been under investigation for in both the US and the UK...as this is crime and is punishable as such. Follow the links and read the whole thing!

CRU's Andrew Watson Insults Colleague On BBC

Professor Watson gets quite agitated in this exchange.

Professor Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia, the University at the center of the Climategate controversy, has come to the defense of his colleagues this week and is claiming that the whole email and data release is much ado about nothing.

But other scientists disagree. One of Watson’s colleagues at the University of East Anglia, Professor Mike Hulme, declared Climategate reveals climate science had become ‘too partisan, too centralized.” Hulme, a climate scientist who was listed as “the 10th most cited author in the world in the field of climate change, does not mince words on the magnitude of the scandal.

Hulme has even suggested that the UN IPCC has run its course. ”

“It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures,” Hulme wrote on November 27, 2009.

“It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the [UN] I.P.C.C. has run its course. “The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production,” Hulme explained.

Climategate Documents

Hit the title for the complete list and down loadable files/data sets/emails for all the of the Climategate docs. Some of the excerpts of emails within the archives (edited for brevity, emphasis added):

From Michael E. Mann (withholding of information / data):

Dear Phil and Gabi,
I’ve attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people.

From Nick McKay (modifying data):

The Korttajarvi record was oriented in the reconstruction in the way that McIntyre said. I took a look at the original reference – the temperature proxy we looked at is x-ray density, which the author interprets to be inversely related to temperature. We had higher values as warmer in the reconstruction, so it looks to me like we got it wrong, unless we decided to reinterpret the record which I don’t remember. Darrell, does this sound right to you?

From Tom Wigley (acknowleding the urban effect):

We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.

From Phil Jones (modification of data to hide unwanted results):

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) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

From Kevin Trenberth (failure of computer models):

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

From Michael Mann (truth doesn't matter):

Perhaps we'll do a simple update to the Yamal post, e.g. linking Keith/s new page--Gavin t? As to the issues of robustness, particularly w.r.t. inclusion of the Yamal series, we actually emphasized that (including the Osborn and Briffa '06 sensitivity test) in our original post! As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.

From Phil Jones (withholding of data):

The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here! ... The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate! Cheers Phil
PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !

From Michael E. Mann (using a website to control the message, hide dissent):

Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC [RealClimate.org - A supposed neutral climate change website] Rein any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.

From Phil Jones (withholding of data):

If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them.

Seriosly, don't take my word for it. Take a look at the files themselves. They are quite damning. Even more importantly, I spent the last few days trying to make the smallest of the computer models work. I have some experience with coding using FORTRAN77. The programs are a mess and literally don't work.

Mostly, I feel very sorry for the mysterious "Harry" who spent 3 years trying to make these programs work. He must be a gibbering idiot by now. I gave up after a few days and this porr man spent over 3 years trying to make the operate in the manner CRU claimed they would. No wonder why the CRU was hiding it. They can't make their models work, much less match the historical trends. Nor can they show in their models that they can accurately predict the future, much less match the present and historical date.

Yet, we are told that the science is "settled" and if you present a countervailing view, you are a "denier" and are the equivalent of someone who denies they Holocaust took place. It certainly appears to me that not only has the science not been "settled" but they haven't reached the level of a theory, only that of a hypothesis. I always learned way back in grade school, that scientific research started with an idea, which was then built into a hypothesis:

A hypothesis (from Greek ὑπόθεσις; plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for an observable phenomenon...People refer to a trial solution to a problem as a hypothesis — often called an "educated guess"[5] — because it provides a suggested solution based on the evidence. Experimenters may test and reject several hypotheses before solving the problem.

But, if you deny any other hypothesis as invalid, without either testing, or modeling are you not creating invalid science yourself? Therein lies the problem here as I see it. These men are not only denying access to their data/models, but they are refusing to allow anyone else to test their hypothetical models, thus they don't have a theory, and the science is not only not "settle" but they are imposing a viewpoint that hasn't been proven in any manner at all.

It is upon this base that they demand that our entire civilization completely alter the way we create energy, and how we approach our daily lives. That's not science, it's politics and perhaps economics, but it's certainly not politics.