The mainstream is getting into the meat of the CRU hack – Wall Street Journal;
A partial review of the emails shows that in many cases, climate scientists revealed that their own research wasn’t always conclusive. In others, they discussed ways to paper over differences among themselves in order to present a “unified” view on climate change. On at least one occasion, climate scientists were asked to “beef up” conclusions about climate change and extreme weather events because environmental officials in one country were planning a “big public splash.”
The release of the documents has given ammunition to many skeptics of man-made global warming, who for years have argued that the scientific “consensus” was less robust than the official IPCC summaries indicated and that climate researchers systematically ostracized other scientists who presented findings that differed from orthodox views.
Since the hacking, many Web sites catering to climate skeptics have pored over the material and concluded that it shows a concerted effort to distort climate science. Other Web sites catering to climate scientists have dismissed those claims.
The tension between those two camps is apparent in the emails. More recent messages showed climate scientists were increasingly concerned about blog postings and articles on leading skeptical Web sites. Much of the internal discussion over scientific papers centered on how to pre-empt attacks from prominent skeptics, for example.
Fellow scientists who disagreed with orthodox views on climate change were variously referred to as “prats” and “utter prats.” In other exchanges, one climate researcher said he was “very tempted” to “beat the crap out of” a prominent, skeptical U.S. climate scientist.
In several of the emails, climate researchers discussed how to arrange for favorable reviewers for papers they planned to publish in scientific journals. At the same time, climate researchers at times appeared to pressure scientific journals not to publish research by other scientists whose findings they disagreed with.
One email from 1999, titled “CENSORED!!!!!” showed one U.S.-based scientist uncomfortable with such tactics. “As for thinking that it is ‘Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us’ … as though we are the gatekeepers of all that is acceptable in the world of paleoclimatology seems amazingly arrogant. Science moves forward whether we agree with individual articles or not,” the email said.
More recent exchanges centered on requests by independent climate researchers for access to data used by British scientists for some of their papers. The hacked folder is labeled “FOIA,” a reference to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by other scientists for access to raw data used to reach conclusions about global temperatures.
Many of the email exchanges discussed ways to decline such requests for information, on the grounds that the data was confidential or was intellectual property. In other email exchanges related to the FOIA requests, some U.K. researchers asked foreign scientists to delete all emails related to their work for the upcoming IPCC summary. In others, they discussed boycotting scientific journals that require them to make their data public.
In an embarrassing blow to the movement to combat global warming, hackers have posted hundreds of e-mails from a world-renowned British institute that show researchers colluding to exaggerate warming and undermine skeptics.
The story is moving from the blogs to mainstream. Don’t be too critical of the delay – I do know that there are Canadian journalists working on this, but it takes time. Anyone who has been sifting through the database will understand why.
Ask Al Gore and David Suzuki…
As you may have heard, on Wednesday (Nov. 25) Q has the privilege hosting two of the most prominent environmental activists and spokespeople in the world: former U.S. vice-president Al Gore and scientist and broadcaster Dr. David Suzuki. They will be here together in Studio Q.
And we’d like you to get in on this unique conversation.
If you have a question for Al Gore and David Suzuki, we’d love to hear it. If you had a chance to address these two, what’s the single most pressing question that you would you ask them?
Post it here.
http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2009/11/ask_al_gore_and_david_suzuki.html
Do you think this just might get canceled?
Ask a question…………
I can’t find anything on National Post either
Just give McIntyre the Order of Canada.
Brave, Forthright and Tenacious- this Canadian took on the world and prevailed.
CBC Q blog program for Nov 25 has scheduled Al Gore and Suzuki to answer qestions about climate change. The questions closed before the hacking story became prominent. Somehow, I don’t expect any reaction from either Gore or Doc Fruit Fly.
A-M Tremonti and E Solomon are srangely silent on this story.
Maybe they should consider a change of venue for their little get together in December. Might I suggest moving it from Copenhagen to The Hague?
As Kate pointed out – not to worry about MSM jumping right on it – there’s fair bit of evidence appearing that they’re slowly starting to get the big picture. This story will be the latest hockey stick – starting slowly and growing exponentially. The spectre of civil damages in US federal courts to companies and industries by agw policies based on faulty and conspiratorial manipulation of data is being raised…
NP on Sat carried the story by Andrew Revkin. Typically, their sister paper Ottawa Citizen did not.
“Maybe they should consider a change of venue for their little get together in December. Might I suggest moving it from Copenhagen to The Hague?”
oooh, good one, Sylia. QOTD!
I somewhat disagree with Kate about the acceptability and, more to the point, the significance of the delay in the mainstream media’s coverage. I fully acknowledge and understand that the leaked information is a huge database, and that to render a full and comprehensive analysis one would need to be aware of the various players and their professional/governmental/IPCC associations of the players involved in the email exchanges, but, as Colin mentioned further up this thread, mainstream journalists didn’t refrain from covering the Ft. Hood massacre, for example, in the interests of waiting for all the facts to come in; a delay of even two or three days covering the enormous significance the Hadley story not only ensures that – by definition – it won’t be hard “news” (it will certainly be an “issue” discussed by opinion journalists) but it also pretty much obviates the possibility the story will ever be considered a bombshell in the way that – you’d think – it should be when you consider the unprecedented, government and world-changing scope of (ongoing) proposed actions to combat AGW.
“Bombshell” stories like the Ft. Hood Massacre or the death of Michael Jackson carpet the media within hours, and the increasingly commutative nature of news coverage is such that news outlets – in effect – determine the significance and newsworthiness of any given story based on how many other news outlets are covering it. The more a story is covered by the rest of the media, the more professionally-obligated outlets on *other* political sides are to also cover it. In this case, readers of the WSJ or viewers of FOX will probably aware of this story, but if outlets whose readers support both the AGW theory and the necessity of action being taken now bury and/or elide the story and its significance it’s not going to have the effect we’d hope for. AGW has always been in its essence a political, and not a science, story.
Since the Hadley emails expose the fraudulent nature of the putative “science” behind the AGW promoters, in a way that extends all the way up to the IPCC and various national governments and involves untold billions of dollars, this story should have been a dead-to-rights bombshell, but – I’m repeating myself, I know – it can no longer be a bombshell *because of* that very delay.
(I’m making an optimistic and not necessarily well-grounded assumption here that the story is merely being delayed, as opposed to elided or buried.)
This story undoubtedly has legs, but it’s got a million little ones. I believe that was uncovered in the Hadley emails isn’t necessarily the game-changer it appeared to be when the story first broke on the blogosphere. I hope I’m wrong.
Quick, somebody have David Suzuki put on suicide watch.
Quick, somebody have David Suzuki put on suicide watch.
Posted by: bryceman at November 22, 2009 5:04 PM
Mrs. Fruitfly: Dave, you’ve been in the bathroom an awful long time.
{silence}
Mrs. Fruitfly: Dave, is everything alright in there?
{silence}
Mrs. Fruitfly: Dave? Dave?!
{cue slow creaking of weighted rope}
~~~~~~~~~~~
The above is black humor, and is not intended to be taken seriously, or literally. Anybody offended by the foregoing can go f*ck themselves.
a dog named Kyoto was just killed by a hacker!!!!
EBD, I think you have to acknowledge the MSM sources – for this story it will be mostly the AGW supporters, Real Climate etc., and of course they’re all saying “no big deal”. Don’t forget, most these guys are warmers. The head of CP thinks of McIntyre as “that stock trader”, so it may not even be up on CP yet.
Also, many of them take their feeds from the US and its just slowly coming up.
Then you have the problem of practically no Cdn MSM understanding what they are talking about. They’ll be spending half their time googling the big words just to see what they might mean. Then there’s problem of how to find, download and unzip a 62meg file. Then there’s the denial, the incredulity, further denial, outright sobbing and crying, more denial, and for some transient and maybe even permanent catatonia.
Plus half of them are so broke, they can’t afford to turn the hydro until Monday.
Sylvia, you get the prize today with the comment that the venue should be changed from Copenhagen to the Hague.
“Now excuse me for a few moments while I disassemble, clean, and conceal this fragrantly smoking .50-calibre rifle I’ve just noticed lying at my feet.” Mrs Deeyawn
She doesn’t say who she shot – Iggy, Martin, Kinsella …
Oh!! I get it – a dog named Kyoto !!
As I expected, Lorne Gunter has reported on the emails:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/technology/Good+climate+news+alarmists/2252439/story.html
Kate, if you could put this on your blog, that would be great. Thanks!
Lorne Gunter has reported on the emails:
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/technology/Good+climate+news+alarmists/2252439/story.html
Stock analyst is getting cold feet(sic) on AGW fraud.
Remember the old adage: Money is panic.
These words tell us that the AGW fraud is a false religion, in particular the word “sacrilege”:
“What I am writing here may be sacrilege to some people.”
More: “but what happens if Mr. Market decides to price in the possibility of global cooling?”
…-
“Global Cooling?
I woke up on Saturday to see the New York Times headline Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute. The New York Times headline editor was restrained while others were far more outraged. As an example, Mish’s blog stated the story as:
It’s now official. Much of the hype about global warming is nothing but a complete scam.
Thanks to hackers (or an insider) who broke into The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and downloaded 156 megaybytes of data including extremely damaging emails, we now know that data supporting the global warming thesis was completely fabricated.
He went on to detail some of the incriminating emails in his blog post about the alleged conspiracy to fudge the data. You can also see the emails here.
Sunspots and global cooling
Before the news of this hacker break-in, there had already been skepticism about the global warming thesis. I had previously speculated on this topic in a post:
What I am writing here may be sacrilege to some people. The popular consensus about Global Warming is that the Earth is undergoing a warming period caused by the effects of industrialization. However, there is another view that global warming is caused by solar activity – sunspots and solar winds.
Currently, the forecast for the latest solar cycle is that it’s late. Such extended cycles have been associated with cooling periods such as the Little Ice Age experienced a few hundred years ago. Indeed, there have been reports that there is more ice in the Arctic (yes – it’s only one data point) and there has been some hand wringing among the scientists about the timing of the solar cycle.”
“I am not investing based on global cooling as my base case, but what happens if Mr. Market decides to price in the possibility of global cooling?
What do you think that would do to energy demand if the Earth were to undergo a period of global cooling?
What are the possible effects on food production and commodity prices?
Just thinking out loud…”
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewarticle/articleid/3656847
100 companies seem to want on the great GW gravy train heading to Copenhagen.
Makes me want to stop purchasing pop.
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=116310
Perfect timing – right before Copenhagen. What have I heard? 20-30 thousand people from all over the world attending??? Excue me, can the ‘one world’ group say ‘global recession’? And – hey – how ’bout that outside thermometer as you all fly, drive (alot), stay, eat, etc while you’re there. Meanwhile countries are declaring vigorously that they’ll attend but have no intention of doing anything. Cancel the whole thing – sorry Copenhagen tourism….
Sure hope all this checks out
ldd: truth be told I have never in my wildest dreams thought that I should be saving links to trolls, rightwing or not. Seems about as nonsensical as saving spam, as valuable as they can be. But I will try to facilitate your request, although as some may recognize; I’ve been getting slow at this sort of thing /:
In the meanwhile I’ve been soaking up this CRU debate all evening (I’m pretty far into the pro-science camp, so all the details in this case seem to be pretty important).
As far as deleting views go, I hear similar stories from my leftist friends all the damn time — there’s deletion of comments on both sides.
Also; what backdoor?
As far as what kate allows or does not, that is clearly offtopic and I’m not going to touch on it as it’s liable to get me banned from this site anyway; as I am kind of a socialist hippie I walk a fine line being here to begin with and no sense treading across the line.