Heliogenic Climate Change

“What has changed over the past few months? Certainly not the science.  … [T]he “climategate” e-mails … do not call into question the robustness of the surface temperature record produced by UEA. There are two other independent [NOT!] data sets that show clearly that global-average temperature has increased over the past century and this warming has been particularly rapid since the 1970s.  …

What has not been called into question is the basic science.

The key finding that “warming is unequivocal and very likely due to man’s activities” remains robust.  …

The big difference then, is not in the physics of climate change but the public’s perception of what climate research is all about.

That means it is a communications problem and the blame for that has to lie at least in part with the scientists and in part with the way that science is reported.”  “Research is robust but communication is weak“

“Another day, another IPCC-gate.  …

The attachment of “gate” to this scandal is more than appropriate.  In its original 1973-4  incarnation, little bits of information, snippets of foul play, and deletions of records dripped out one-by-one over a year.  Ultimately the person responsible, President Richard Nixon, had to resign.

We’re seeing the same with climategate and the IPCC.  Wouldn’t if just save everyone a lot of time and trouble if Rajenda Pauchari resigned and the United Nations disbanded the IPCC.  Neither its head nor its body have any remaining credibility, so why not put it out of its misery?”  “Kill the IPCC“

“The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen [leaked] e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.

The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The stolen [leaked] e-mails , revealed on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, showed how the university’s Climatic Research Unit attempted to thwart requests for scientific data and other information, and suggest that senior figures at the university were involved in decisions to refuse the requests. It is not known who stole the e-mails.

Professor Phil Jones, the unit’s director, stood down while an inquiry took place. The ICO’s decision could make it difficult for him to resume his post.”  “Scientists in stolen e-mail scandal hid climate data“

“The unauthorized release in November 2009 of thousands of e-mails containing correspondence among scientists affiliated with the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) makes clear that insurers, regulators, and anyone else with a serious interest in climate change cannot afford the luxury of simply assuming that the “reports and studies” to which the [NAIC (National Association of Insurance Commissioners) Climate Change and Global Warming] Task Force white paper alludes present an accurate and unbiased picture of what is known about climate change.

The CRU e-mails show that a close-knit group of the world’s most influential climate scientists actively colluded to subvert the peer-review process (and thereby prevent the publication of research by scientists who disagreed with the group’s conclusions about global warming); manufactured pre-determined conclusions through the use of contrived analytic techniques; and discussed destroying data to avoid government freedom-of-information requests.

Viewed collectively, the CRU e-mails reveal a scientific community in which a group of scientists promoting what has become, through their efforts, the dominant climate-change paradigm are at war with other scientists derisively labeled as “skeptics,” “deniers,” and “contrarians.” The insularity and non-collegiality of these climate scientists had previously been noted in a 2006 report to Congress prepared by a committee of statisticians led by Dr. Eugene Wegman of George Mason University. The Wegman Report examined the body of research behind the widely-publicized “hockey stick” graph, which purported to show a dramatic and unprecedented increase in average global temperature during the twentieth century. After thoroughly discrediting the hockey stick graph, the report observed that “authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.” The report further noted “the isolation of the paleoclimate community,” concluding that “even though they rely heavily on statistical methods, they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community.” When members of paleoclimate community were asked to explain and defend their work, “the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done.”

In short, because serious questions have been raised about the integrity of contemporary climate science, NAMIC [National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies] believes it would be exceedingly risky for any insurance company to make important business decisions based on an uncritical acceptance of the dominant scientific paradigm on climate change. Put differently, we believe there is considerable risk involved in an approach to assessing “climate risk” that assumes the validity of any particular theory or set of beliefs about anthropogenic global warming.

Companies that share our perspective should be encouraged to do so in their responses to the Climate Risk Disclosure Survey. We fear, however, that the wording of the survey questions, together with the public pronouncements of some regulators, will inhibit the expression of what might be viewed as unwelcome “contrarian” responses. This fear was reinforced by the overall tone and substance of the Task Force-sponsored Climate Risk Summit that took place in San Francisco on December 9, 2009. Rather than thoughtfully assess the implications that the CRU e-mail scandal holds for insurers and the Climate Risk Disclosure Survey process, all but one speaker ignored the matter entirely. That speaker, in facilely dismissing the e-mail scandal as a plot hatched by malevolent “contrarians,” personified the doctrinaire partisanship and intolerance toward dissent that is so clearly displayed in the CRU e-mails.”  Letter from NAMIC to NAIC

“In the face of rising unemployment and record-breaking deficits, policy experts at the National Center for Public Policy Research are criticizing the Obama Administration for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State Professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.

“It’s outrageous that economic stimulus money is being used to support research conducted by Michael Mann at the very time he’s under investigation by Penn State and is one of the key figures in the international Climategate scandal. Penn State should immediately return these funds to the U.S. Treasury,” said Tom Borelli, Ph.D., director of the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project.”  “Economic Stimulus Funds Went to Climategate Scientist“

“The last email exchange within the Climategate files is November 12, 2009. Within the tight circle of climate skeptics, the significance of this date is telling. It is coincidentally the day before a crucial piece of information was denied to the peer-to-peer reviewers.

On November 13, 2009, a letter was sent by the Director of Information Services at the University of East Anglia to Steve McIntyre refusing his request for temperature data under the UK’s version of the Freedom of Information Act. The timing of the denial, which was a day after the last email in the Climategate files, and the fact that the files were titled FOIA.zip and FOI2009.zip, which are both abbreviated references to this Act, provides a striking indication to the impetus of the leak. This denial may have been just enough to incite someone from within the guarded establishment to give others a peak behind the green curtain.

If the connection holds, it shows a fascinating circularity of how a denial of  transparency actually led to a forced transparency – consequently displaying how a professional culture changes regardless of its resistance to change.”  “Peer-to-peer review (part III):  How ‘Climategate’ marks the maturing of a new science movement“

“The central lesson of Climategate is not that climate science is corrupt. The leaked e-mails do nothing to disprove the scientific consensus on global warming.” “On issues like global warming and evolution, scientists need to speak up“
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“OK, so you’re a climatologist and some whistler blower published your emails on the internet for all to see. What can you do? Well, you might take a cue from a lying, cheating scumbag whose wife walked in on him and his mistress while they were…(cough)…emitting lots and lots of carbon dioxide.

Here’s what the bastard might say to his wife as she pulls a .44 magnum from her purse:

“Honey, this isn’t what it looks like…”

Of course, you can’t use those exact words, but you can massage them a bit like you do temperature data to achieve the objective of covering your ass:

“Those emails aren’t what they seem; they were taken out of context…”

Now the wife isn’t stupid. She saw with her own two eyes what the lying, cheating scumbag husband of hers did to his mistress…and the bed sheets. Unfortunately for you, some of the public aren’t stupid either–they can read the emails.

The cheating husband will be in for a world of hurt, since the wife is aiming the gun at his privates. Your career could suffer a similar fate if you don’t come up with a better line of BS. Here is what the bastard husband might come up with:

“OK, Honey, you win! It IS what it looks like–but…but…but I only cheated on you this one time. Throughout the rest of our marriage I have been faithful to you.”

Here again, you can’t use those exact words, but you can tweak them like you do the climate data to get the result you want:

“OK…OK…so I manipulated the data–but…but…but all the other data out there in the greater climatology world is perfectly valid–and it shows that we are all going to die if the world doesn’t do what I say…(keep sending grant money, etc.) “

Unfortunately for the lying, cheating husband, he is now a soprano. But you need not worry because some members of the public are gullible–they won’t check the other data because you said it’s OK, or better yet, your friends at the drive-by media say it’s OK–so it must be OK. Right?” “Sex, Lies and Climate-gate“

“What makes Green Stalinism more than a mob fad, and more than Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, is that it shows every sign of international collusion in fraud, data manipulation, and hundreds of billions of dollars of carbon credit bribes and payoffs. The media have been mired hopelessly in this cesspit for a long, long time. To their eternal shame, so has the scientific establishment, including the great science journals — like Nature, which was founded by Isaac Newton, and Science, established to rival Nature for publishing first-class science. Scientific American used to be a fine, credible journal, but now it is disgusting. National Geographic used to be wonderful, but it has become poisoned beyond retrieval. Need we say anything about the unspeakable BBC, the mafia-like New York Times, and the macaca-dropping Washington Post? This is all corruption — the deepest betrayal of the role of independent media in a democratic land.” “Is Stalinism back?“
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“The environmental movement threw most of its efforts behind the AGW media offensive. All of its eggs in one basket.

In my adopted home state of Oregon, Google offers 3,400,000 hits for “global warming,” but only 359,000 for “old growth” and 16,600 for “endangered salmon.” AGW’s Tet Offensive has crowded out discussions about soil conservation, habitat preservation, chemical contaminants in the food chain, safe drinking water, and so many other important environmental issues.

Now, AGW is exposed for the specious theory that it is. Respected scientific voices have long voiced skepticism and are now being heard. The Climategate scandal caused the most fundamental data behind AGW to be questioned. Sunlight is a great disinfectant for methodologies “proving” AGW. The word is out. This is good. Rigorous standards must be applied to scientific inquiry.

The environmental movement’s Tet Offensive has failed.

But what will the cost of the “all your eggs in one basket” approach be to the environmental movement?

It will be much harder to persuade the public to listen to discussions of the less sexy but verified environmental problems facing us. The press, unable to resist a bandwagon, will enable this. The many important environmental issues facing us will fade from our consciousness until the public’s resentment over being manipulated wanes. There will be many costs to pay in the meantime.” “AGW: The Greens’ Tet Offensive“

“A few years ago, I accepted global warming theory with few doubts. I wrote several columns for this paper condemning what I thought were unfair attacks by skeptics and defending the climate scientists.

Boy, was I naive.

Since the Climategate emails and documents revealed active collusion to thwart skeptics and even outright fraud, I’ve been trying to correct the record of my earlier foolishness. In one of those columns, I even wrote: “And see Real Climate (www.realclimate.org) for global warming science without the political spin.”

In fact, Real Climate was and is nothing more than the house organ of global warming activists, concerned more with politics than with science.

My mistake was assuming only the purest of motives of the global warming alarmists, while assuming the worst of the skeptics. In fact, the soi-disant moralists of the global warming movement can also exploit their agenda for profit.

Climategate jolted me into confronting the massive fraud and deception by top global warming scientists, who were in a position to twist the peer-review process in their favor, and did so shamelessly.” “From Global Warming Believer To Skeptic“

If you missed it live last night, go over to WUWT for the video of the Fox News program “Global warming, or a lot of hot air”. It’s well worth a view.
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“What the e-mails do not prove — or even suggest — is that the main product of the CRU, namely the record of global surface air temperature based on thermometer readings, has been compromised.” Hans von Storch and Myles Allen
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“Their [Douglass and Christy] story hits very close to home with me, as I went through a very,very similar process with respect to a comment (PDF) and reply (PDF) on the “shameful article” on hurricanes and global warming that I co-authored in 2005 (PDF). (If my emails ever get hacked you’ll see that ugly episode from the inside.;-) That situation had a positive outcome only because at the time I protested efforts to deny us a right to respond in accordance with journal policies and threatened to go public with the improper efforts at stage-management. I am sure that these sort of shenanigans go on in academia more than we’d like to admit, however that does not justify them.

What these episodes reveal is an effort by activist climate scientists to stage-manage the peer review process much like how one might manage a partisan blog for public consumption.” “Treating peer review like a partisan blog“
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“The CRU emails have revealed how the normal conventions of the peer review process appear to have been compromised by a team* of global warming scientists, with the willing cooperation of the editor of the International Journal of Climatology (IJC), Glenn McGregor. The team spent nearly a year preparing and publishing a paper that attempted to rebut a previously published paper in IJC by Douglass, Christy, Pearson and Singer (DCPS). The DCPS paper, reviewed and accepted in the traditional manner, had shown that the IPCC models that predicted significant “global warming” in fact largely disagreed with the observational data.

We will let the reader judge whether this team effort, revealed in dozens of emails and taking nearly a year, involves inappropriate behavior including (a) unusual cooperation between authors and editor, (b) misstatement of known facts, (c) character assassination, (d) avoidance of traditional scientific give-and-take, (e) using confidential information, (f) misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of the scientific question posed by DCPS, (g) withholding data, and more.

* The team is a group of a number of climate scientists who frequently collaborate and publish papers which often supports the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. For this essay, the leading team members include Ben Santer, Phil Jones, Timothy Osborn, and Tom Wigley, with lesser roles for several others.” “A Climatology Conspiracy?“
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“What really rocked the paleoclimate work at CRU, and ultimately shook the IPCC, was a seemingly out-of-the-blue email on June 17, 1998, from Michael Mann to Phil Jones, then head of East Anglia’s CRU centre. Before then, no mention had been made in the email cache of Michael Mann, then adjunct assistant professor, department of geosciences, Morrill Science Center, University of Massachusetts. It is, in many ways, the email that rocked climate science.

Dear Phil,
Of course I’ll be happy to be on board. I think the opportunity for some direct collaboration between us (me, and you/tim/keith) is ripe, and the plan to compare and contrast different approaches and data and synthesize the different results is a good one. Though sidetracked by other projects recently, I remain committed to doing this with you guys, and to explore applications to synthetic datasets with manufactured biases/etc remains high priority. It sounds like it would all fit into the proposal you mention. There may be some overlap w/proposals we will eventually submit to NSF (renewal of our present funding), etc. by I don’t see a problem with that in the least.
Once the collaboration is officially in place, I think that sharing of codes, data, etc. should not be a problem. I would be happy to make mine available, though can’t promise its the most user friendly thing in the world.
In short, I like the idea. Include me in, and let me know what you eed from me (cv, etc.).
cheers,
mike

Exactly what those words mean is hard to know. It must be science talk. What is certain from the Climategate emails is that world climate science, and the Climategate emails, would never be the same thereafter. Mr. Mann quickly rose to be the dominant figure in the paleoclimate effort. He and associates, Ray Bradley at the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm Hughes, a meso-climatologist and Professor of Dendrochronology in the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, had just finished a paper titled “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcings over the past six centuries.” The core of that paper was a graphic that would come to be known as the graphic “hockey stick” presentation of the temperature over the past centuries.

With Mr. Mann on board, everybody else seemed to go overboard. In the emails, he soon elbowed out Keith Briffa as the prime tree-ring guru. The Mann hockey stick, and the science work behind it, would end up consuming thousands of email hours over the next decade and, as we shall see in Part II on Monday, now threatens to consume one of the scientific pillars of climate science.” “A 2,000-page epic of science and skepticism — Part 1“
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“The most damning part of the program is when Ben Santer, a climate researcher and lead IPCC author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC Working Group I Report, admits that he deleted sections of the IPCC chapter which stated that humans were not responsible for climate change.

Accusing Santer of altering opinions in the IPCC report that disagreed with the man-made thesis behind climate change, Lord Monckton told the program, “In comes Santer and re-writes it for them, after the scientists have sent in their finalized draft, and that finalized draft said at five different places, there is no discernable human effect on global temperature – I’ve seen a copy of this – Santer went through, crossed out all of those and substituted a new conclusion, and this has been the official conclusion ever since.”

“Lord Monckton points to deletions from the chapter, and there were deletions from the chapter, to be consistent with the other chapters we dropped the summary at the end,” Santer admits to the program.

Commenting on The Alex Jones Show today, Lord Monckton said that this was the first time Santer had publicly admitted to deleting the information.

Santer was intimately involved in the Climategate email scandal, communicating with other IPCC-affiliated scientists who conspired to “hide the decline” in global warming.

Does Santer’s shocking admission that he deleted the opinions of scientists who stated that human activity did not cause global warming from a key IPCC report represent Climategate 2?

Watch the [video] clips below.” “Exclusive: lead author admits deleting inconvenient opinions from IPCC report“

Pat Michaels has written a devastating summary of the hockey team’s efforts to silence scientists and journals that did not toe the team’s AGW line. Below are a few excerpts. Read the whole thing: “How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus”

“Mr. [Michael] Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put [the journal] Climate Research out of business. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” he wrote in one of the emails. “We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”

After Messrs. [Phil] Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn’t toe Messrs. [Tom] Wigley, Mann and Jones’s line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results. …

GRL [Geophysical Research Letters] is a very popular refereed journal. Mr. Wigley was concerned that one of the editors was “in the skeptics camp.” He emailed Michael Mann to say that “if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official . . . channels to get him ousted.”

Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Wigley on Nov. 20, 2005 that “It’s one thing to lose ‘Climate Research.’ We can’t afford to lose GRL.” In this context, “losing” obviously means the publication of anything that they did not approve of on global warming.

Soon the suspect editor, Yale’s James Saiers, was gone. Mr. Mann wrote to the CRU’s Phil Jones that “the GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there.”

It didn’t stop there. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory complained that the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) was now requiring authors to provide actual copies of the actual data that was used in published papers. He wrote to Phil Jones on March 19, 2009, that “If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available—raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations—I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals.” …

The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to “skeptics” (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn’t publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.

Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.”

More on same by Michaels here: “Peer-Review Thuggery“
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“Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.

Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.

Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing incomplete data and highlighting the global-warming process, rather than stations facilitating uninterrupted observations.

On the whole, climatologists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations.

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5% of the world’s land mass. The IEA said it was necessary to recalculate all global-temperature data in order to assess the scale of such exaggeration.

Global-temperature data will have to be modified if similar climate-date procedures have been used from other national data because the calculations used by COP15 analysts, including financial calculations, are based on HadCRUT research.” “Russia affected by Climategate” h/t Icecap

“To a chorus of boos, a man dressed as a polar bear entered Copenhagen’s main conference center Tuesday and began paging the discredited climate scientist whose hacked e-mails sparked the Climate-Gate scandal.

Using a megaphone to pierce the rumble of hundreds gathered inside the Bella Center, which is hosting the city’s global climate summit, the polar bear boomed out:

“PHIL JONES??? HAS ANYONE SEEN PHIL JONES???”" “Polar Bear Goes Hunting for Climate-Gate Scientist at Copenhagen Summit“