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SDA gets results! |
The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: No U-Turns Allowed
Dear Tom,
I find it hard to believe that the British Antarctic Survey would permit the deletion of relevant files for two recent publications or that there aren’t any backups for the deleted data on institutional servers. Would you mind inquiring for me? In the mean time, would you please send me the PP format files that you refer to here for the monthly sea ice data for the 20th century models discussed in your GRL article and the 21st century models referred to in your JGR article.
Regards, Steve McIntyre
Then in July… “Unprecedented” Data Purge At CRU
On Monday, July 27, 2009, as reported in a prior thread, CRU deleted three files pertaining to station data from their public directory ftp.cru.uea.ac.uk/. The next day, on July 28, Phil Jones deleted data from his public file – see screenshot with timestemp in post here, leaving online a variety of files from the 1990s as shown in the following screenshot taken on July 28, 2009.
The Telegraph, today – Climategate: University of East Anglia U-turn in climate change row ….. Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data – dubbed Climategate – have agreed to publish their figures in full….
Now, here comes the other shoe! Hide the Decline!
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.”
[…]
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) 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.
(More to come later. I”m compiling other developments over the weekend so they’ll be top of page for Monday post-holiday traffic.)
h/t Ron in Kelowna and Maz2, and to everyone else out there keeping track.
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Original post “U-Turn Ahead” renamed and edited with update
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Reality Is Messier Than It Appears In The Books
Blake Hurst is a farmer in Missouri…
I’m dozing, as I often do on airplanes but the guy behind me has been broadcasting nonstop for nearly three hours. I finally admit defeat and start some serious eavesdropping. He’s talking about food, damning farming, particularly livestock farming, compensating for his lack of knowledge with volume.
I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food. Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is.
But now we have to listen to self-appointed experts on airplanes frightening their seatmates about the profession I have practiced for more than 30 years. I’d had enough. I turned around and politely told the lecturer that he ought not believe everything he reads. He quieted and asked me what kind of farming I do. I told him, and when he asked if I used organic farming, I said no, and left it at that. I didn’t answer with the first thought that came to mind, which is simply this: I deal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand.
Required reading for all but those who spent the last 2 weeks on a combine.
Taken By Storm
Given the events of the past few days, I emailed an old friend to ask if he’d like a free plug for his excellent book.
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You can order directly from Amazon via the Taken By Storm website, but it’s best if people go into a bookstore and ask to have it ordered in. It increases the chance they’ll decide to stock it.
Another recommendation: this soon-to-be-published gem is an “extraordinarily powerful and detailed history of the hockey stick scandal”.
I, For One, Welcome Europe’s New Communist Overlords
Nigel Farage – a must watch.
The Economist has more on Baroness (Catherine) Ashton.
h/t Adrian
Y2Kyoto: Stuff I Should Have Thought Of First
“Warmergate plumbers”
Post morning coffee update…
Finally, an actual Canadian news story free of dismissiveness, by Canwest – “From Climategate to Copenhagen” . Factual, concise, and it treats the scandal with the seriousness it deserves. Good job, Robert Foot.
This past week has seen Canada’s opinion guys doing the job their news departments won’t do, and a very good one at that – Gunter, Goldstein, Gormley, Adler, Solomon, and now Coren. The radio guys have been exceptional in this regard, in large part because they spend their days talking with their audience, instead of down to it.
As Mark Steyn notes, it puts the lie to sniffy proclamations such as this;
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Andrew Bolt (in Australia) – “You fools. You cut your own throats.”
What do you think the people reading of this scandal there conclude when they then turn to, say, The Age or the ABC, and find there barely a word of coverage?
I’ll tell you: they’ll conclude that the media cannot be trusted to tell even the news, let alone the truth, when it conflicts with their agenda.
On a related note, your 9:00 am Saturday morning traffic report: more than 9,200 visits to SDA since midnight, 2,700 in the last hour.
Internal logs show significantly higher traffic than does web-based Sitemeter counter, which is usually the case. We’re pushing out 4.6 Gigs of bandwidth per day at the moment.
On another related note….
Y2Kyoto: Hopenhagen[1] H’orderves
In other news, polar bears are eating their young., topped with Beluga caviar and a Coca Cola chaser.
Overpopulation is an ugly thing.
[1] – Not making that up.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite
Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Bob Shane, John
Stewart, and Nick Reynolds, as the Kingston Trio, performing
Scotch & Soda, ca. 1967 (2:44).
As y’all know, for many years now there has been an ongoing debate between those who think that recent abnormal changes in the temperature of the earth’s biosphere have been caused by side-effects from the behaviour of homo sapiens, and those who do not think they have been so caused. It turns out that in practice they are both wrong: there have not actually been any abnormal changes in said temperature. As a result of the exposure of The CRU Papers, we now know that claims of such changes were fraudulently fabricated and perpetrated by the priests and believers of the fear-mongering climate-change faith system.
And, just as fraudulent claims by the false priests of any other fear-mongering religion claiming to be saving your soul in some non-confirmable way say nothing about the metaphysics of theology, so too the protection-racket extortions being perpetrated by the false priests of abnormal climate change say nothing about the epistemology of science.
What we have here is not science, folks, it is neither more nor less than yet another example of the never-ending phenomena of human mob behaviour so well illustrated in Charles Mackay’s 1852 classic, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds. Like other frauds and bubbles documented therein, this one is now bursting due to the inadequacies of its own undergirding. Because of the degree of deployment in this case, the terminal phase of this bubble will take some time, but eventually The CRU Papers and Climategate will become known as the beginning of the end of the current Climate Change Bubble.
Meanwhile, homo sapiens will merrily continue on: first chasing and then bursting whatever other fraudulent bubbles happen to capture our mob fancy from time to time, such as various instantiations of collectivism and godism and dowsing and other mystical and paranormal beliefs. If it weren’t that somehow we seem to continue to incrementally improve our temporo-normative situation, three steps forward and two steps back, one might as well be a pessimist, but since we do, one might as well be an optimist (besides, as Heinlein pointed out: it’s more fun).
So, to be clear, my additional Reader Tip for you tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is: try to avoid saying that these recent results tell us something about science. They only tell us something about some people who were lying to us about doing science: they said they were and they were not. Don’t let their malfeasance reflect badly upon you by dint of your mischaracterizing it.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Climategate: CBC Special Report
Via
Update: For Instapundit and Corner readers trying to get up to speed on this scandal, I’ve created this compendium of reference links “Hide the Decline” – the Climategate links. There’s more on the main page.
Be sure to bookmark Climate Audit and WattsUpWithThat, and check back frequently.
Happy Eid Al-Adha
Shop 
to find the perfect bathtub for your holiday reindeer slaughter!
h/t Harry
Y2Kyoto: Piltdown Mann
Science published today yet-another-Mann-et-al-reconstruction
And nobody caught the part that was upside down.
Meanwhile, the timed-to-Copenhagen drumbeat of manufactured alarmism continues to rise unquestioned by a media too stupid to realize that increasingly large portions of their audience are already 7 days into this file. And that their late-to-the-game pronouncements about “a few emails” only reveal that they’re too damned lazy to look for themselves.
Yesterday, the emails were lying. Today, the satellites are lying.
Because a guy in a boat says so.
I feel as though I’ve woken up inside a Michael Crichton novel.
Public Service Announcement
The Sky Is Not Falling – Putting Climate Change on Trial presented by the FCPP.
Guest Speaker: Bruno Wiskel, Professional Geologist, Author and Speaker
Date: December 2, 2009
Place: Windsor Room, Viscount Gort Hotel, 1670 Portage Ave., Winnipeg
You must register by today. Check at the link for more details.
“mmmmmmm, yellow cake.”
Russian uranium producer Atomredmetzoloto JSC said Friday it had made an all-cash offer to acquire Toronto based miner Khan Resources Inc.
Via Eric Anderson who notes – “who needs those fancy automated machines and Canadian safety standards anyway?”
Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss Al Gore
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Telegraph UK – The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) found that during past periods of high carbon dioxide, temperatures in Antarctica were up to 6C above current levels. This could cause a sea level rise of up six metres, threatening coastal cities like London, New York and San Francisco.
Al Gore’s multi-million $$$ condo …
Indeed.
Disaster averted!
10,000 Melons rushed to Calgary!
Phew!
The Herald’s article comes with a bonus. Big Norm’s, “How to make a watermelon helmet” how-to video. The original can be found on Rider Fans.
The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose, Pt. 10
The hidden decline…. found!
“Contrary to Gavin Schmidt’s claim that the decline is “hidden in plain sight”, the inconvenient data has simply been deleted.”
And what an IPCC reviewer had to say…
Show the Briffa et al reconstruction through to its end; don’t stop in 1960. Then comment and deal with the “divergence problem” if you need to. Don’t cover up the divergence by truncating this graphic. This was done in IPCC TAR; this was misleading (comment ID #: 309-18)
Not that it mattered.
Bill Illis (who occasionally guest authors at Watts Up With That) explains what “Hide the Decline” means, in the comments;
The scientific rationale to “hide the decline” can only be that the tree rings started showing spurious cooling trends starting in about 1960 – there was no actual cooling, it is just that the tree-rings started showing a spurious decline in 1960 for non-climatic reasons.
There could be an actual explanation for this which might include pollution, acid rain, aerosols blocking sunlight, increased forest fire fighting creating increased competition from other trees, CO2 fertilization creating increased competition etc.
But none of these other rationales have been shown in the science to produce a spurious decline. In fact, the NH forest cover increased substantially after 1960. There is no substantiated rationale.
And if the “other” rationale was to just show “actual measured temperatures” instead of the proxy measurements, then the truncation should have started in 1850 rather than the day tree-rings started showing the divergence.
So, if there is no science backing up the truncation starting in 1960, then it is truly “hiding the decline” and it is just attaching a line going up instead. It is also admitting that tree-rings are not temperature proxies after all. They are just mathematical constructs designed to produce a hockey stick.
Science should never be “illogical”. It should never make you say to yourself “Well that makes no sense whatsoever, especially considering the evidence. In this case, you will have to prove it which you have not done so far.” Yet, no proof is offered or demonstrated.
Reader Tips
| Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Ton Scherpenzeel, Pim Koopman, Max Werner, Johan Slager, and Cees van Leeuwen, as Kayak, performing See See the Sun, from their See See the Sun album, in 1973 (4:18). |
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
This Isn’t Your Grandma’s Humane Society
Arrests at the Toronto Humane Society;
Police have arrested the Toronto Humane Society’s president, chief veterinarian and three other senior staff members and charged them with animal cruelty, six months after a Globe and Mail investigation revealed widespread troubles at the shelter.
At the same time, the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals executed a search warrant at the shelter’s River Street facility late Thursday afternoon.
Humane Society president Tim Trow is facing Criminal Code charges of animal cruelty, conspiracy to commit cruelty to animals and obstruction of a peace officer. If convicted, Mr. Trow faces a maximum penalty of $2,000 and six months in jail for the animal cruelty charges, and two years in jail for the obstruction charges.
Head veterinarian Steve Sheridan, shelter manager Gary McCracken, manager Romeo Bernadino and shelter supervisor Andy Bechtel have also been arrested and face animal cruelty charges under the criminal code.
All of the above, as well as the Society’s board of directors, are also being charged with five counts of animal cruelty, a provincial offence under the Ontario SPCA Act (as opposed to criminal charges).
Better late than never. But that’s the problem with animal “rights” fronts like this and the
Humane Sociey of the United States. They have no real interest in the welfare of individual animals, beyond those they can exploit for fund raising campaigns. Their true goal is to eliminate animal ownership.
Y2Kyoto: Usunder, Down Under – Now With More Reservations!
An Australian Liberal Party revolt over the carbon tax;
ABC news reports that five frontbenchers from Australia’s opposition Liberal party have resigned their portfolios rather than follow their leader Malcolm Turnbull in voting with Kevin Rudd’s Government on a new Emissions Trading Scheme.
[…]
Though the ETS squeaked narrowly through Australia’s House of Representatives, its Senate is proving more robust – thanks not least to the widespread disgust by the many Senators who have read Professor Plimer’s book Heaven And Earth at the dishonesty and corruption of the AGW industry. If the Senate keeps rejecting the scheme, then the Australian government will be forced to dissolve.
Now there’s a message in there for Michael Ignatieff, hiding in plain sight.
Too bad he’s preoccupied licking self-inflicted wounds.
h/t Tim Blair.
Update:
The growing resignation list;
Tony Abbott – former Howard minister, opposition families, housing, community services and indigenous affairs portfolio.
Nick Minchin – Liberal powerbroker and leader of the opposition in the Senate.
Sophie Mirabella – early childhood education, childcare, women and youth portfolio.
Stephen Parry – Chief Opposition Whip in the Senate.
Eric Abetz – Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate.
Michael Johnson – Opposition Whip in the House of Representatives.
Tony Smith – Opposition assistant treasurer.
Mathias Cormann – Opposition parliamentary secretary
Mitch Fifield – Opposition parliamentary secretary
Brett Mason – Opposition parliamentary secretary
h/t Kathryn