Tag Archives: global warming

Climate-Gate: The 2011 Edition

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James Delingpole at The Daily Telegraph breaks the latest from the Climatistas:

“Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.”

Some quotes from more scrupulous researchers are cited in the article:

/// The IPCC Process ///
Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”

The email writers recognize that public perceptions about ” global freezing” might be ruining the brand value of “global warming” as a technique of social change:

Minns/Tyndall Centre:
In my experience, global freezing is already a bit of a public
relations problem with the media
Kjellen:
I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global
warming
Pierrehumbert:
What kind of circulation change could lock Europe into deadly summer heat waves
like that of last summer? That’s the sort of thing we need to think about.”

 [Some of my blogging on climate-gate can be found here and in other posts you can locate by using the Search function on this blog]

The blog Watts Up With That has links to a comprehensive timeline and graphics that display the thirty-year subversion of climate science behind climate-gate.

The Guardian suggests that the new climate emails probably date back to the first group, released in 2009, and that the motive is, again, to sabotage the Durban Climate summit, which starts on Monday:

“The emails appear to be genuine, but the University of East Anglia said the “sheer volume of material” meant it was not yet able to confirm that they were. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages. The lack of any emails post-dating the 2009 release suggests that they were obtained at the same time, but held back. Their release now suggests they are intended to cause maximum impact before the upcoming climate summit in Durban which starts on Monday.”

 There are similarities to the first release, says the Guardian:

“In the new release a 173MB zip file called “FOIA2011” containing more than 5,000 new emails, was made available to download on a Russian server called Sinwt.ru today. An anonymous entity calling themselves “FOIA” then posted a link to the file on at least four blogs popular with climate sceptics – Watts Up With That, Climate Audit, TallBloke and The Air Vent.”

But there are also differences:

“The use of points instead of commas to mark the thousands when writing a number – highly unusual in both the UK or US – is sure to lead to speculation about the nationality of those responsible.”

The Guardian also indicates that although not all the emails have been confirmed genuine, the University of East Anglia claims that they have had no recent breach of security and says that the emails were probably held back from the original batch released in 2009.

Michael Mann, Director of the Earth Sciences Institute at Pennsylvania State University, whose messages are part of the release, is quoted in the piece dismissing the emails as more of the same. He calls the anonymous FOIA “agents” of the fossil-fuel industry and “criminal” hackers.

“Scientific” Academies Need A Taste Of RICO Too

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Alan Caruba , a conservative writer and reviewer:

“Consider a letter dated October 21, 2009 and signed by the presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Association of Ecosystem Research Center, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the American Society of Agronomy, the American Statistical Association,

And the Botanical Society of America, the Crop Science Society of America, the Natural Science Collections Alliance, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Soil Science Society of America, the Ecological Society of America, the Organization of Biological Field Stations, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

Together, they asserted that “Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.” It went on to repeat all the usual scary scenarios of rising sea levels, urban heat weaves, wildfires, and other climate-related events.

In a footnote, the letter to U.S. Senators said, “The conclusions in this paragraph reflect the scientific consensus represented by, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Global Change Research Program.”

We now know that the “science” being cited by these two entities was, at least in the case of the IPCC, totally rigged, but the presidents of these alleged science-based organizations took it on face value despite ample scientific evidence it was false. The revelations of emails exchanged between the perpetrators of the hoax have demonstrated the deceptions…….

In light of this, who can trust these organizations? And who can trust the “science” produced by NASA and other U.S. agencies that have benefited from billions in grants directed at so-called climate, i.e. global warming research?”

Dan Denning On Dubai, Copenhagen, And The Stock Market

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Dan Denning, author of “Bull Hunter” (Wiley, 2005), in the Daily Reckoning (Australia):

“The S&P 500 hit a 14-month high overnight. The conventional wisdom is that two news events are responsible. This is probably wrong. But let’s look at both events anyway and see what happened.

The first is that Abu Dhabi extended a $10 billion in financing to debt-distressed Dubai. Hossanah! Remember, Dubai is not Lehman. It’s Bear Stearns. It’s merely the reminder that there are lot of leveraged investors in the world who’ve used borrowed money to buy assets that aren’t very productive. They’ll get theirs soon enough.

The second bullish item is that ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) made a US$41 billion all stock bid for Houston-based natural gas company XTO. This sent Exxon shares down 4.4%. Thus the Dow’s rally was a bit tepid (XOM is a Dow component)……

Exxon is either getting a bigger foot in the U.S. natural gas market or hedging against cap-and-trade legislation, or both. We vote for both. No one is in a better position to know about the constraints on global oil production and discovery of new reserves than a major company like Exxon. And Exxon has seen firsthand that unconventional natural gas can be a lucrative little market.

But are those two bits of news really enough to send the market higher? Probably not. Who knows why the market goes higher? It does what it does. There’s an alternative explanation.

The alternative explanation is that the Copenhagen climate talks look like they’re collapsing into confusion and President Obama’s legislative agenda is in tatters. The private sector absolutely loves this…..

Good policy? Bad policy? Who knows? All we know is that the more uncertainty you introduce into the markets, the more conservative and defensive investors are going to get……

That’s not to say that a deal won’t come out of Copenhagen. Maybe the planet will be saved. Or maybe Copenhagen is the sell signal for global warming as a big idea/moral issue with which to bash the public. But either way, we reckon the stock market actually likes the idea that no climate deal is imminent and that healthcare legislation in the U.S. Senate can’t seem to get 60 votes.“

My Comment

Full disclosure: I worked for Agora two years ago. I receive no financial or other compensation ( trips, free food, passes to movies, restaurants, invites to exclusive seminars, commissions on real estate, insider deals etc. etc.) for mentioning them.  But, if you´re writing about financial contrarians, they´re the original ones ….

My own difficulties with and criticism of them do not – and should not – prevent me from correctly attributing and acknowledging their work in populariazing nearly all the main issues that are now being debated in the media. Certainly, it was through them, and through Lew Rockwell, and Mises, not through establishment media or their blogs that I received an education in Austrian economics (I should add that I was always instinctively oriented to it, from childhood on).

Having deleted my facebook account after the social media wrestling-match between the Wall Street media mob (and backers) and Deep Capture´s investigative team (and backers),  I am now content with actually writing emails or making phone calls to people I want to contact. Thankfully, there aren´t many I do.

Climate-Gate: Summary

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I found this excellent summary posted by a contributor to the New York Times blog of the evidence of manipulation of data in the outed emails:

• Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)

• Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)

• Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709).

Analysis of impact here. Wow!

• Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news“.
• Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)

• Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series “…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)

• Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)

• Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)

• Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.(1255352257)

• Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap.(1257532857)

• Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)

• Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)

• Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’. (1054736277)

• Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
• Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good” scientists condemn it.(1254756944)

• Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
• Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)

• Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)

• Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.(1106338806)

• Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)

• Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)

• Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)

• Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)

• Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)

• Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)

• Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)

• Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)

Finished in next post …

November 21st, 2009
11:29 am
Continued from previous:

• Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460)
[Note to readers – Saiers was subsequently ousted]

• Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)

• Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)

• Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)

• Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)

• Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)

• Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)

• Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)

• Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)

• Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)

• Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)

• Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)

• Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
• Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)

• Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)

• Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)

• David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)

• Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)

• Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr “I’m not entirely there in the head” will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)

• Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306

Brown Calls Climate-Skeptics Flat-Earthers; IPCC Calls Hackers Sophisticated

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Gordon Brown, Britain´s PM and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes to peevish name-calling over the growing response to Climate-gate:

“The Prime Minister launched an outspoken attack on climate-change sceptics amid growing signs of public doubts about the scientific and political consensus on the environment.”

—  Telegraph, December 6

Apparently, it´s unwashed climate-bloggers who are anti-scientific, not the agitprop team masquerading as independent scientists that got outed at East Anglia for such trivial matters as manipulating professional journals, doctoring research, defying freedom of information requests, and conspiring to destroy vital records that correctly belong to the public.

No, no, that wouldn´t be unscientific says Brown.

The real villains of the story are the people who conclude from this revealing tableau that the science of global warming may need to go a bit further before it underpins a global taxation regime likely running to billions, if not trillions.

“With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”

In short, act first, think later.

Obviously, Brown is also taking a leaf out of the book of whoever it was who said, strength lies not in defence but in attack…..

At least, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disagreed and said the matter could not be swept under the carpet; it would be investigated.

Meanwhile, some speculation here on something that at first bothered me —  whether this hack, which first showed up on Russian servers, is connected to Russian crime or even to the Russian government. The emails, posted over a 15 year period ending November 12,  were sent on October 12  to the BBC, which didn´t respond. Then,  realclimate (a pro AGW site) was hacked and the data uploaded there. But the site was quickly shut down by the owners. Then, a link was posted  via a Saudi computer on The Air Vent, a climate skeptic blog, with a link to a computer in Tomcity in Tomsky, Siberia.

“The server is used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes, according to the Mail on Sunday.”

The vice chairman of the IPCC thinks the hack shows evidence of being sophisticate and wellfunded.

But frankly, so what if the hackers were Russian? Climate science is international and cap and trade is international. If there were repeated freedom of information requests that the researchers  blocked, then it´s vital for the data to be in the public domain.

So, the speculation is interesting, but essentially irrelevant….and at this stage, suspiciously misleading.

The hackers have the last word on this:

“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

Or as someone said: NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.

If we have a global government (and we have), then everyone all over the world has a right to the information behind that government´s policies.

UN Funds Missing Billion Plus in Climate Change Donations

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The Telegraph reported a few days ago that UN Funds were missing over a billion dollars contributed to tackle climate change in developing countries:

“A total of 20 nations pledged up to 410 million dollars (£247m) a year in 2001, resulting in a pot that should be worth well over 1.6 billion dollars (£963m).
But only 260m dollars (£157m) has been paid into two United Nations funds earmarked for the purpose according to the latest figures, the BBC World Service investigation said.
The EU told the broadcaster that the money was collected in ”bilateral and multilateral deals”, but was unable to provide data to back up the claim.
The sums were pledged in the 2001 Bonn Declaration, which was signed by the 15 countries that then made up the European Union, plus Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland.

As of the end of September this year, the two UN funds – called the Least Developed Countries and Climate Change Funds – contained 155.4m dollars and 104.1m dollars respectively, the BBC said.
Boni Biagini, who runs the funds, told the broadcaster: ”These numbers don’t match the 410m per year. Otherwise, we’d be handling billions of dollars by now.”