“…is overpowering“:
The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.
‘Humphrey’, said to work at Defra, writes: ‘I cannot overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story.
‘They want their story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.’
Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the centre of the affair, said the group findings did stand up to scrutiny.
Yet one of the newly released emails, written by Prof. Jones – who is working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – said: ‘Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden.
‘I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.’
I wonder who at DOE that was, and if it was during the Bush administration?
I had missed this earlier:
Houghton [MetO, IPCC co-chair][…] we dont take seriously enough our God-given responsibility to care for the Earth […] 500 million people are expected to watch The Day After Tomorrow. We must pray that they pick up that message.
And these (emphasis mine):
Trenberth:In addition to the 4 hurricanes hitting Florida, there has been a record number hit Japan 10?? and I saw a report saying Japanese scientists had linked this to global warming. […] I am leaning toward the idea of getting a box on changes in hurricanes, perhaps written by a Japanese.
Jones:We can put a note in that something will be there in the next draft, or Kevin or I will write something – it depends on whether and what we get from Japan.
Jones:Kevin, Seems that this potential Nature paper may be worth citing, if it does say that GW is having an effect on TC activity.
Jones:Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital – hence my comment about the tornadoes group.
They’re not just hiding declines, they’re hiding anything that fails to show increasing “extreme events”. Actually doing any science that, you know, LINKS increasing temps to extreme events isn’t even on their radar screen. Their mindset is: Don’t worry about the science, just talk about “abrupt change” and let emotion carry it.
There are over 200,000 emails that are sealed under a 264 bit encryption algorithm. One things that this is out there to make sure that the point is made regarding just how much of this is around.
In any rational world this would cause a major reappraisal of the science and the players in the game.
DW,
in any rational world this level of collusion, lies and MONEY changing hands would fall under RICO laws here in the U.S. and similar laws elsewhere!
In any rational world this would cause a major reappraisal of the science and the players in the game.
I think it will. One thing that is becoming more and more obvious is that what they are doing is not science. They are playing with relationships among models, whose anchor data are being lost or corrupted. Science studies reality. They are “studying” models of reality, all of which by their own admission are wrong. Even if the models are right, however, they are all being run outside of their calibrated realms, and that by itself is wrong.
The layman who knows that computer weather predictions become less reliable the further out they try to predict sense this. But semi-“sophisticated” warmmongers will say: “Well, the exact prediction is not reliable beyond a few days, but the models can still give information on long-term trends.”
No, in fact, a computer program which solves systems of differential equations in a manner which quickly departs reality does not yield any useful information about the “long run.” It just becomes more and more wrong. That its initial conditions and constraints can be tweaked to yield desired results is no surprise. Aircraft designers, working with CFD models that are several orders of magnitude simpler than climate models, have been doing this for twenty years or more. They make a (wrong) prediction using CFD, then get wind tunnel data which helps them “correct” the model, get that working, and then find the real aircraft data disagree with predictions. So they modify the model again, and voila! The aircraft performance agrees with the CFD! Except it was the other way around. The aircraft CFD modelling turned out to be a sophisticated exercise in curve fitting, and nothing more.
I actually have a golden opportunity to have a warmist “scientist” to test one of his predictions against reality. It will involve the use of public funds, and I know this person is dishonest. But I’m very tempted to make it happen. What do y’all think?
MfK, I say make them live up to their own rules.
People in the scientific community can, have, and will spin this as “da guyz talking tough” but there was no overt scientific misconduct, and that the hijinks of these fellas doesn’t change the underlying reality-on-the-ground with respect to warming.
I think our people need to be a little careful with “See! See! It is all a manufactured crisis!” because many people don’t come at it from our perspective and won’t see these e-mails in the same way.
What I would recommend to people, however, is reading or perhaps re-reading Feynman’s speech and essay “Cargo Cult Science.” The title Cargo Cult Science was coined by Feynman to describe investigators going through the motions and procedures and outward forms of scientific investigation but coming up with meaningless results, not simply on account of confirmation bias or sloppy experimental procedure, but because science is hard and requires the most rigorous adherence to protocol and the most intense of soul searching and second guessing to get right.
Feynman goes on to say that in writing the Discussion and Conclusions sections of a scientific paper, a scientist should disclose whatever way to conclusions offered could be wrong, to in fact second guess oneself openly and publically. Were one to scrutinize the e-mails, one probably won’t find the “smoking gun” of falsified data or manufactured results. But I think any reasonable person would agree that the people communicating in those e-mails are not working to the high standards that Feynman had offered, and Feynman offered examples where not working to those standards an lead to meaningless conclusions.
I would scold you for lacking the rigor to link it, but I’ll let your sense of irony do so in my stead. 🙂
Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in professional scientific research.
I guess since they weren’t conducting scientific research, it was covert instead of overt.
Gooooooooood point there. Paul.
I saw this defense linked at another blog: http://youtu.be/4OB2prBtVFo
Comments? The *small* part I watched is claiming that the vast right-wing conspiracy is taking quotes out of context.
Oh please, Paul!
These guys had a preconceived idea of what they wanted to show and deliberately suppressed evidence to the contrary to obtain financial gain from governments and deliberately damaged the careers of those who disagreed.
They’re crooks. If everything was alright, they’d be in jail.
What I would recommend to people, however, is reading or perhaps re-reading Feynman’s speech and essay “Cargo Cult Science.”
That’s especially relevant because, like the original cargo cult, belief in AGW has attained the status of a secular religion. It’s defended by True Believers — people who honestly see nothing wrong with fudging data and analyses in service to the Cause. They know they’re right, so a few exaggerations and little white lies to convince the heathens of the Truth are entirely justified.
Remember the Great Satanic Child Molestation Scare of the ’80s and ’90s? The same principles were operating back then … The data, however ambiguous and contaminated, were always trustworthy. All of the scary stories were true (except when they would have subjected the Cause to ridicule, as when the McMartin Preschool kids accused Chuck Norris of taking them on airplane rides and abusing them). The original data often were unavailable and impossible to verify, but don’t worry, the Experts had an accurate reconstruction. The people who claimed that there were 50,000 satanic abductions a year were the Experts, the ones who had studied the issue; they had PhDs! If you disagreed with them, you were an ignorant fool, or else deliberately on the side of Evil. The science was settled — the Experts understood everything about
greenhouse gas linear forcingsrepressed and recovered memories. The Government backed the Experts, who in turn gave the Government new reasons to extend its powers. The issues were so important, and so much was at stake, that we dared not disbelieve — think of the potential harm if we were to do nothing!And then people looked up … and it all … went away …
A (long) open letter to Jones from Willis Eschenbach.
(in response to Jones’ “Cherry-picked phrases explained”)
Now, I’ve come to accept that you lied to me. Here’s what I think. I think you are a scientist, and a reasonably good one, who was hard squeezed by two things—the Peter Principle, and Noble Cause Corruption. When you began your scientific career, your sloppy record keeping didn’t matter much. And you didn’t want to be the record keeper in any case, you wanted to do the science instead, but you kept getting promoted and you ended up curating a big messy dataset. Then things changed, and now, climate decisions involving billions of dollars are being made based in part on your data. Disarray in your files didn’t make a lot of difference when your work was of interest only to specialists. But now it matters greatly, money and people’s lives are at stake, and unfortunately you were a better scientist than you were a data manager.
So when my FOI request came along, you were caught. You were legally required to produce data you couldn’t locate. Rather than tell the truth and say “I can’t find it”, you chose to lie. Hey, it was only a small lie, and it was for the Noble Cause of saving the world from Thermageddon. So you had David tell me the data was available on the web. You knew that was a lie. David, apparently, didn’t realize it was a lie, at least at first. You hoped your Noble Lie would satisfy me, that I would get discouraged, and you could move on.
But I asked again, and when I called you on that first answer, you thought up another Noble Lie. And when that one didn’t work, you invented another Noble Lie.
R.T.W.T.