Category: climategate2

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose, Pt. 14

The bottle genie works its magic;

A Compas poll, carried out Nov. 28 and released last week, showed — remarkably — that among Canadians with an opinion on a Copenhagen treaty, 73 per cent favoured postponing a decision or not signing on at all.
Respondents’ reasons related to concern about economic recovery following the recession as well as lack of confidence in the science behind climate change. That confidence has been shaken of late by a controversy over manipulation of data at a British research institute. It’s noteworthy that Conservatives have not suffered any significant drop in poll numbers as a result of their cautious approach on climate change.

And that, despite a full court press by an ideologically invested Canadian mainstream news media to ignore, spin and dismiss the content of the released documents.

Climate activists also experienced a setback last week when the Calgary-based Canada West Foundation warned that a national unity crisis could result from letting the West bear the brunt of greenhouse-gas emission cuts.
The warning came in response to a document released last October by the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute. Climate Leadership, Economic Prosperity asserted Canada’s economy could handle significant emissions cuts, with most damage confined to Alberta and Saskatchewan.
The two environmental groups had hoped the document would convince people the task at hand is doable. Instead it pulled the curtain on simmering tensions in the federation.

Suzuki, Pembina, the CBC, and other leftist dinosaurs in media share common traits – they understand even less about average Canadians than they do the environment, and at their core, care little for either.
It’s the Marxism, stupid.

Are the mainstream media capable of surviving their sidelining of the number one global scoop? Are they finally committing suicide? Are they, in fact, any longer mainstream? Every historian knows that any significant trend in society will show warning symptoms over a long period; but the final catastrophe will usually be triggered by a single event. For the moribund MSM that decisive blunder may well be Climategate.
Another feature of any doomed institution is that it signals its imminent demise by behaving in a manner that is contrary to its nature and purpose. Every city in the developed world contains news rooms in which cringing journalists struggle to satisfy the imperative demands of editors for a scoop. Yet the obvious scoop – the BIG ONE of journalistic mythology – is consigned to the waste basket. This is the journalism of Isvestia and Pravda, with all the commercial viability that attached to that school of news reporting.

And like all Marxists, they’d run the planet like they run their conferences.

“People around the world [are] actually expecting something to be done from us,” red-faced Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen lectured delegates from nearly 200 nations.
[…]
BBC video showed truncheon-bearing Danish police shoving the crowd backward as protesters gasped and covered their faces to avoid breathing tear gas.

Hopenchangen: “Kevin, Gavin, Mike, It’s Seth again.”

Since we last checked in on our favourite self-vindicating Climategate character, Associated Press “science” writer Seth Borenstein has taken to hanging out with the cool kids in Copenhagen;

With U.N. security letting in only those cleared last week, hundreds of accredited delegates, journalists and NGO representatives were left to stand for hours in near-freezing temperatures before being let through. “It was crazy,” AP’s Seth Borenstein said. “You couldn’t leave the line. You couldn’t go to the bathroom, you couldn’t eat. Then snowflakes started falling. One woman even said, ‘if lightning strikes me, would they take me out of line?'”
People started handing out food — one gave out tangerines, another croissants. A man screamed “I don’t need food. I need socks! I’m freezing my ass off out here.” At one point, a U.N. official announced the wait would be longer, prompting the crowd to boo and chant “Let Us In!” […]
Seth himself stepped into the line at 7:55 a.m. and was through at 3:15 p.m., but only after another AP reporter, John Heilprin, “saved my bacon” by persuading a U.N. security guard to go out and fetch him. “John was afraid to go out himself in case they wouldn’t let him back in … the first thing I did when I saw him was give him a big hug. I have never been so grateful to be indoors.” Seth’s neighbors in line? “Oh they’re still out there.”

And just in the gloal warming nick of time!
Indeed“This entire circus would be funnier if not for what is at stake: trillions of dollars in regulatory actions and billions of dollars in aid to developing nations. And, if there were to be some miracle and nations in attendance did sign an agreement, who would be in charge of monitoring all these agreed to carbon reductions and oversight of all that development aid? The same entity that can’t even figure out that 45,000 people won’t into a 15,000 person building; the United Nations.”

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: Kevin, Gavin, Mike – It’s Seth Again!

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
By Seth Borenstein, Raphael Satter and Malcolm Ritter, Dec 12, 2009

“E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.”

On Jul 23, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Borenstein, Seth wrote:

Kevin, Gavin, Mike,
It’s Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that
Marc Morano
is hyping wildly. It’s in a legit journal. Whatchya think?
Seth
Seth Borenstein
Associated Press Science Writer
[7]sborenstein@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
The Associated Press, 1100 13th St. NW, Suite 700,
Washington, DC
20005-4076
202-641-9454

(muchas gracias)
Update – a more detailed critique of the AP conflict of interest at WUWT, along with contact information for you to register complaints.

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose, Pt 13

Jim Prentice – call your office;

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.
The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.
The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.

Poor Harry.

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: Our Friends, The Saudis

The Australian;

SAUDI Arabia has seized on a series of stolen British university emails to become the first country to cast doubt on the consensus about man-made climate change ahead of next week’s Copenhagen summit.
[…]
[C]hief Copenhagen negotiator, Mohammad al-Sabban, suggested in an interview with the BBC yesterday that there was now no longer any point in seeking an agreement to reduce emissions.
“It appears from the details . . . that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change,” he said.
“Climate is changing . . . but for natural and not human-induced reasons. So whatever the international community does to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have no effect on the climate’s natural variability.”
His government might be prepared to take “no cost” measures to control emissions but more drastic and painful action would be out of the question until there was “new evidence” about what was causing climate change, he said.

Globe & Mail readers must be wondering what rock their paper was hiding under for the past two weeks.

On a political level, coming on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, the controversy has been catastrophic…

Those stupid bastards gave us a whole two weeks to blanket the internet with the contents and analysis of those files. Now, that it’s finally hit the “news”, guess what’s waiting for those folks just sitting down at their computers for their first search…
Like I said, it’s a spin doctor’s worst nightmare.
And I’m lovin’ it.

The Bottle Genie

Well, it finally happened. Much of Canadian media broke radio silence on Climategate today. There really wasn’t much choice but to report it, now that Environment Minister Jim Prentice had officially described the allegations as “serious”, coupled with the day-old news that CRU head Phil Jones was “stepping aside” in preparation for his encounter with a double-decker.
As of this evening, there are 23,100,000 Google results for “climategate” – and exactly one on-air report from the CBC.
It’s been 14 days since the cork was pulled from FOIA 2009.zip
And as it turns out, the concerted efforts of a protective mainstream media to ignore the scandal turned out to be worst possible course of events for the University of Anglia’s motley CRU and their supporters in the wealth distribution industry.
They gave us something very powerful – 14 days of time. Time, while scores of bloggers and thousands of readers put in uncountable man hours of dissection and analysis.
Time for those who’d been discussed and copied in the leaked emails to confirm that there was no evidence of tampering.
Time for programmers to sift through Harry’s now famous code line by line, to test it for themselves.
Time for members of the academic community to get their outrage and condemnation on the record, and on their own terms. Time for those who’d been targeted to retell their stories.
Time for opinion columnists and talk radio to break ranks and take on the job their news editors refused to do, to disseminate the facts gathered, checked and analyzed by bloggers to a wider audience.
Time for the comments sections of every online newspaper in the western world to fill with angry demands from their readers to cover the damned story. Not because they were needed anymore, but because we wanted the stupid charade to end.
So when Peter Mansbridge went on the National tonight to admit what he had surely known for days, we didn’t watch to find out what’s contained in FOIA 2009.zip, for we’d read it for ourselves.
We only watched to see if he had.
For perhaps the first time in the history of mass media, the gatekeepers broke a major scandal to an audience fully 10 days ahead of them.
It’s a spin doctor’s worst nightmare.
As I’ve been saying from the beginning, they’re hearing the sound of all hell breaking loose. And as much as it’s being directed at the research institutions and the policy makers following along like so many imprinted penguins, the bulk of public rage has focused on the media.
I don’t think my friends in traditional news gathering truly appreciate what it is they’ve done. I don’t believe they fully comprehend how gravely they have injured themselves, and how they’re driving home the razor into an industry already struggling for survival with abbreviated, dismissive, misleading reports and “denier” and “conspiracy nut” slurs.
The bloggers tried to warn them. The opinion columnists tried to warn them, the talk hosts tried to warn them. Their readers, viewers and listeners tried to warn them.
The news media perfected the business of bombshells. They wind them up, drop them, film the explosion, and move on.
They’re just learning now that we’re in the business of bottle genies.

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose, Pt. 12

SDA gets results!
CBC;

The U.K.’s University of East Anglia says the director of its Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations stemming from the publication of hacked emails.
Phil Jones, the director of the global research centre on climate change, announced that he will stand aside until an independent review determines whether he overstated the case for man-made climate change.
The university said Peter Liss will become acting director of the climate research unit.

As I noted yesterday, this comes on the heels of an announced Penn State investigation into Michael “hockey stick” Mann.
Via John, who found it accidentally buried in the CBC Technology & Science headlines, where few will find it to comment. But we’ll help them out with that.
Over a week ago I wrote;

“But this event is less bombshell than it is bottle genie. No matter what efforts are undertaken by a protective media to bury this scandal, no matter how badly the warmist industry tries to spin it away, the CRU data release is now part of the permanent climate debate, and it ain’t ever going away.”

The number of those voicing doubts is growing exponentially – a graduate student at MIIT Tech, this lengthy article in Reason.
More here from a “working scientist”“I don’t see how these messages can be interpreted in any other way as an attempt to break the law, and I don’t see how they can be defended:”
(In related news….)

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Wang Affair

A guest post by Douglas J. Keenan
I was glad to see your post about my allegation against Wang. Following is a summary and update on that pertaining to Climategate, and a comment on something related.
In 2007, I published a peer-reviewed paper alleging that some important research relied upon by the IPCC (for the treatment of urbanization effects) was fraudulent. The e-mails show that Tom Wigley, one of the most highly-cited climatologists and an extreme warming advocate, thought my paper was “valid”. They also show that Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit, tried to get the journal editor to not publish my paper.
After my paper was published, the State University of New York, where the research was conducted, carried out an investigation. During the investigation, I was not interviewed: contrary to the university’s policies, federal regulations, and natural justice. I was allowed to comment on the report of the investigation, before the report’s release, but I was not allowed to see the report: truly Kafkaesque.
The report apparently concluded that there was no fraud. The leaked files contain the defense against my allegation. The defense is obviously and strongly contradicted by the documentary record. It is no surprise, then, that the university still refuses to release the report. More details on all this, including source documents are, here.
Relatedly, my paper (§2.4) demonstrates that, by 2001, Jones knew there were severe problems with the urbanization research. Yet Jones continued to rely on that research in his work, including in his work for the latest report of the IPCC.
The biggest concern with global warming is, arguably, that warming itself will cause further warming. For example, the polar ice caps reflect sunlight back into space (thereby cooling Earth); if the caps shrink, due to warming, then they will reflect less sunlight, and so Earth will warm further. It is possible that Earth warms so much that it reaches what is called a “tipping point”, where the global climate system is seriously and permanently disrupted—like when a glass of water has been tipped over, and the water cannot realistically be put back into the glass.
There is much scientific debate over how much Earth has to warm before it reaches a tipping point. No one knows for sure. About a thousand years ago, though, there was a time known as the “Medieval Warm Period”, when much of Earth appears to have been unusually warm. It is not currently known just how warm the Medieval Warm Period was. Clearly, though, the warmth then was below the tipping point, because Earth’s climate continued without problem.
Suppose that during the Medieval Warm Period, Earth was 1°C warmer than today. That would imply that the tipping point is more than 1°C higher than today’s temperature. For Earth’s temperature to increase 1°C might take roughly a century (at the rate of increase believed to be currently underway). So we would not have to be concerned about an imminent disruption of the climate system. Finding out how warm the Medieval Warm Period was is thus of enormous importance for the study of global warming.
It turns out that global (or at least hemispheric) temperatures are reflected by the climate in western Ireland; for a short explanation of that, see here. Trees grow in western Ireland, of course, and each year, those trees grow an annual ring. Rings that are thick indicate years that were good for the trees; rings that are thin indicate the opposite. If many trees in western Ireland had thick rings in some particular years, then climatic conditions in those years were presumably good. Tree rings have been used in this way to learn about the climate centuries ago.
Queen’s University Belfast has data on tree rings that goes back millennia, in particular, to the Medieval Warm Period. QUB researchers have not analyzed the data (because they lack the expertise to do so). They also refuse to release the data. I have been trying to obtain the data, via the UK Freedom of Information Act, since April 2007. The story is scandalous.
In light of all the slander going around, maybe I should add this: I used to do mathematical research and financial trading on Wall Street and in the City of London; since 1995, I have been studying independently (for more details, please see my web site); I have received no payment of any kind from any entity for any work that I have done since 1995.
Douglas J. Keenan
http://www.informath.org

Asunder, Down Under

Environmentalists have been warning about this, and now it’s happened. Climate change is enroute to claiming its first government.

In a caucus revolt triggered by (former) leader Malcolm Turnbull embrace of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the Australian Liberal caucus has ejected their leader, electing Tony Abbott in his place. Turnbull lost the his leadership by one vote this morning.
Mr. Rudd’s ETS which will face a Senate vote, and is expected to be defeated in the Upper Chamber. Last week, Turnbull faced the first significant challenge to his leadership over ETS when five of his shadow ministers resigned in protest of their leader’s support for Rudd’s carbon trading bill.
Upon failure of the ETS legislation in the Senate, the bill can be reintroduced by Rudd but this would likely cause a double dissolution election; Rudd cannot pass the legislation due to a majority possessed by the Liberals and Family First party (a party also against Rudd’s ETS legislation).

World leaders weigh in on the crisis…. “Whoops! Sorry about that.” – carbon billionaire Al Gore
Tim Blair has details –

Seconds after Mr Abbott beat Malcolm Turnbull by one vote, he then declared a secret ballot on the ETS.
The motion proposed that the legislation should be delayed for three months, and if this could not be secured, then the legislation should be defeated.
The motion was carried by 54 votes to 29, guaranteeing the death of the Rudd Government’s ETS.

That folks, is the sound of all hell breaking loose.

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose, Pt. 11

Now you know why they chose a railroad engineer to head up the IPCC…

“He said an independent inquiry into the emails would achieve little, but there should be a criminal investigation into how the emails came to light.”

skytrain.jpg

Considering that news editors North America wide had determined within hours that the 62 megabyte document dump revealed no data chicanery whatsoever, it’s odd he felt the need to speak at all.
Climategate really is just like Watergate – complete with Deep Code, the Internet Plumbers, and Bob Woodward in the role of Nixon.

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: “Beware The Scientific-Technological Complex”

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

 

‘It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.’ – Wegman Report, 2006

2009: Penn State to investigate Michael Mann;

In recent days a lengthy file of emails has been made public. Some of the questions raised through those emails may have been addressed already by the NAS investigation but others may not have been considered. The University is looking into this matter further, following a well defined policy used in such cases. No public discussion of the matter will occur while the University is reviewing the concerns that have been raised.

An unhappy colleague. Mike Hulme of UEA (location of CRU)

But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. 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; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.
It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? 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 – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

A contributing author to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, Eduardo Zorita, Department of Paleoclimate, GKSS Research Center (Germany)

“Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process”

Frank J. Tipler, professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University

The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable. As Lord Monckton has emphasized here at Pajamas Media, this deliberate destruction of data and the making up of data out of whole cloth is the real crime — the real story of Climategate.
It is an act of treason against science. It is also an act of treason against humanity, since it has been used to justify an attempt to destroy the world economy.

Dr. John Lewis, Dep’t of Physics & Physical Oceanography, Memorial University (by email);

It is worth noting, in regard to the deletion of raw data by the CRU that real scientific organizations are rather fierce about raw data. NASA, for instance, gives the Principal Investigator (and group) sole access to data for one year, and one year only. After that, the data are placed in the public domain. I do know that some PIs have asked for longer embargos – whether they got them or not I don’t know, but if so, not easily. If the PI simply deleted data it would be the end of his or her career.
NASA’s view is that data collected with public monies should be available to the public; and without copyright – US gov’t materials generally are not copyrighted. All of this is to a good end – the PIs get the obvious results, but some data – e.g. for the IRAS mission – have continued to yield information upon reanalysis even 15 years after the IRAS shut down.
Not every installation is set up to handle terabytes of data, but CRU was very well funded apparently, and anyway, if they couldn’t handle it they shouldn’t have collected or received it.
The CRU leaks will confirm the views of every half-baked political scientist in the world, that science does not deal in fundamental truths but is, rather, a politically negotiated discourse. It is very disturbing.

Dear Judy,

I am a young climate researcher (just received my master’s degree from xxx University) and have been very troubled by the emails that were released from CRU. I just want to applaud and support your response on climateaudit.org [95% of it 🙂 ]. Your statement represents exactly how I have felt as I slowly enter this community. The content of some of the emails literally made me stop and wonder if I should continue with my PhD applications for fall 2010, in this science. I was so troubled by how our fellow scientists within the climate community have been dealing with opposing voices (on both sides). I hope we can all learn from this and truly feel that we are going to need voices like yours to fix these problems in the coming months and years.

Dr. Judith Curry is Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Audio: An Australian reporter hears something he may not have anticipated – scathing criticism from Aynsley Kellow, Professor and Head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania. Expert reviewer for the United Nation’s IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change and Key Vulnerabilities. (Or go directly to the mp3 here.)

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Wang Affair

It starts…

… with the question of urban heat islands, and their effect on the temperature record. It is well known, and easily measured, that the centres of cities may be up to 4 C warmer at night than the countryside around them […]
The IPCC relied on a particular paper published in 1990 by Phil Jones in Nature that basically said the UHI effect was trivial, which in turn relied in large part on data from China supplied by professor Wang of Albany, State University of New York.
In describing this data, Jones et al. said “The stations were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times.” which in turn was based on the similar statement in Wang et al. “They were chosen based on station histories: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times…” The truth of these statements was essential for the papers to be valid, which in turn was relied on in part by the IPCC report. The problem is, they’re not true. And what’s more, somebody must have known it.
At first, nobody knew because the source data was (of course!) unpublished and unidentified. But because Phil Jones is in the UK and subject to FOIA, the Climate Audit crew managed after a fight to extract the list of weather stations from him. (One reason, no doubt, why he is so wary of FOIA compliance now!) This enabled the mathematician Doug Keenan and others to trace the Chinese weather stations used in the papers, and found that of the 84 stations used, there were in fact no records of station location for 49 of them, 8 had inconsistent histories, 18 had substantial relocations, 2 had single-year relocations, and only 7 were known not to have been relocated at all. Wang could not possibly have selected them on the basis claimed, and indeed there was other evidence that he knew of their problems in advance.

It caused the good Professor Wang no end of trouble until New York State University at Albany came to his rescue.
SDA flashback(2007)“Douglas J. Keenan raises serious questions about the Chinese surface station data ….”

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: No U-Turns Allowed

Flashback to April 18th…

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, todayClimategate: 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.
************************************
Original post “U-Turn Ahead” renamed and edited with update
************************************

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.

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: Every Breath You Take

Lorrie Goldstein;

If you’re wondering how the robot-like march of the world’s politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed “climategate,” it’s because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don’t give a s*** about “the science.”
They never have.

Indeed, they never have. Watch this and marvel…

Well, the focus has changed.
[This] article dated November 26th 2009 reveals that the MSM has a new reason for reducing carbon dioxide and it’s no longer global warming or climate change. The new reason for cutting carbon dioxide is

“ … slashing carbon dioxide emissions also could save millions of lives, mostly by reducing preventable deaths from heart and lung diseases, according to studies published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet.”

Read them both, then;

[S]end a message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper by e-mail (pm@pm.gc.ca), fax (1-613-941-6900) or call toll-free (1-866-599-4999) and ask to be put through to the Office of the Prime Minister.
Do the same for Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff by e-mail, (ignatm@parl.gc.ca). fax, (1-613-947-0310), or call-toll free (1-866-599-4999) and ask to be put through to the Liberal Leader’s Office.
Tell them you want no part of the madness in Copenhagen.
Blow their phones off the hook.

Your Member of Parliament can be contacted here.
Related – Charles Adler has Lorrie’s column from yesterday for those who missed it, along with commentary from Dr.Tim Ball.

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose, Pt. 9

It’s the tale of the red hot Kiwi…

[New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research’s] David Wratt has told Investigate magazine this afternoon his organization denies faking temperature data and he claims NIWA has a good explanation for adjusting the temperature data upward.
[…]
Those adjustments were made by New Zealand climate scientist Jim Salinger, a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who started work on the series when he was with the University of East Anglia, the centre of the Climategate scandal. (Salinger was dismissed by NIWA this year for speaking without authorisation to the media.)
The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, which created the last two graphics and includes an IPCC reviewer, now alleges that Salinger and NIWA have refused to explain the basis on which the data was adjusted:

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.

Adjusted upward – by 1500 per cent.
Comparative graphs at the first link, full report from the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition here (pdf).
(Thanks, tipsters. There were lots of you.)

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose, JGL Edition

(Bumped)
Editor’s note: for as much attention as the emails have received – and they are damning – it’s the computer code that is revealing the real story behind the climate models. It includes corrupted and incomplete data, data manufacture and manipulation. programming failure, and program bias. The details are too lengthy and complex to include in this round-up post, but no commentary on this scandal is complete without a thorough examination of what is being uncovered in the CRU computer code files and documentation.
John Gormley Live and SDA – doing the job the CBC won’t do! (link fixed) Segment here.

If you’re arriving here new to the Climategate scandal, these links will help to bring you up to speed.
“The fix is in.” Possibly the best summary yet of the corruption of peer review, at Real Clear Politics.
Let’s go to the pub – even better than the first.
Climate Audit (currently on a mirror site as the original site server has been incapable of handling the traffic.) Original Climate Audit site (very technical).
Surface Stations temperature station auditing project – Is the U.S. surface temperature record reliable? In a word – no.
Watts Up With That? – Meteorologist Anthony Watts is your best bet for major breaking developments, explained in layman’s language.
The CRU emails in a searchable format.
THe CRU emails in clipping format.
Charlie Martin at Pajamas Media has an extremely good analysis..

Hide the Decline! “Mike’s nature trick” explained.

The Hockey Stick was never accurate–and CRU knew it

The Hockey Stick Peer Review Gauntlet

The Yamal Implosion – a saga uncovering wholesale data “cherry-picking” in an all out effort by CRU scientists to save the “hockey stick”. It’s long, but it’s a must read.

The Harry_Read_Me.txt file – the world’s most frustrated Fortran programmer, in his own expletives.
Data Destruction; East Anglia CRU “have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.”
Freedom of Information denied“This is an attack on the heart of science,”
Beware The Scientific-Technological Complex
Powerline Blog series on the email archives.
Recent Canadian commentary
Stephen Taylor interviews Ross McKitrick
Ross McKitrick, Financial Post“Flawed climate data”
Lorne Gunter, National Post – Cooking The Climate Books
Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun – “‘Botch after botch after botch'”
Douglas J. Keenan – The Wang Affair
As usual, their columnists are well ahead of the news department. What gives? I presume they’re published out of the same building….
The SDA “The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose” series in chronological order, a loose compendium of links, quotes, and developments as they emerge across various sites on the net.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012684.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012685.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012690.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012694.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012696.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012698.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012709.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012711.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012729.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012736.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012738.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012747.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012764.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012794.html
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012912.html

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