Climategate Update Feb 18, 2010 Phil Jones and the NASA files

In an interview with the BBC, Phil Jones, the head of the British Climatic Research Unit at the heart of ClimateGate, told the BBC: the recent warming trend that began in 1975 is not statistically different from two other planetary warming phases since 1850; there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and; it is possible the Medieval Warm Period was indeed a global phenomenon thereby making the temperatures seen in the latter part of the 20th century by no means unprecedented. Jones also explained why he manipulated the data to “hide the decline.”

The BBC interview: http://tinyurl.com/yb9h7vd

 

Chris Horner, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, filed a freedom of information request to NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), in August 2007. Finally on Dec. 31, 2009 NASA complied with the request and released emails and other documents.

According to Horner, “The emails show the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA, wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise. The emails show NASA making off with enormous sums of taxpayer funding doing precisely what they claim only a “skeptic” would do. The emails show NASA attempting to scrub their website of their own documents, and indeed they quietly pulled down numerous press releases grounded in the proven-wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in uncorrected form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial, after years of hysterically trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies.”

Horner article part 1 here: http://tinyurl.com/ylkkq76

NASA emails here: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/business/foia/GISS.html

3 Free Gifts

One of my pet peeves is with advertisers that offer “free gifts” but impose an obligation to collect them, or say you can get something free, “just pay shipping and handling,” or “free gift with purchase.”

While this form of up-selling may be legitimate, I think companies should not be allowed to offer “gifts” or something “free” unless it really is offered without obligation.

I recently put this to a test. I subscribe to Reader’s Digest magazine. For the past three months, my magazine came with a card that offered “3 Free Gifts.” RD provided a website where I could go to collect the “3 free gifts.” Upon visiting the website, I found that I could download a cookbook for free, but for the other two “gifts” I would have to sign up for a book club. I wrote to Reader’s Digest about this matter but never received a response.

Since the headquarters of Reader’s Digest is in New York, I wrote to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. He replied within a week saying he was forwarding my complaint to the proper department. A week after that, I received a letter from Karine Patino of the New York Bureau of Consumer Frauds and Protection. She wrote, “I am forwarding your complaint to the company to request a statement of their position and a possible adjustment.” Maybe just the inquiry from the New York Attorney General will cause Reader’s Digest to rethink their advertising methods. I would have no problem with RD offering a bonus for trying their book club.

Arizona Attorney General, Terry Goddard, also mentions scams involving “gifts” in his office’s brochure “Ten Top Consumer Scams.” (See: http://www.azag.gov/consumer/TopTenScams.pdf )

Goddard mentions that some auto dealers “Advertised minimum trade-in amounts and free gifts. Dealers may raise the price of the car to offset a low value trade-in or the cost of the gift.”

Caveat Emptor.

Do you wordsmiths out there have any phrases you would like to see disappear – phrase such as “very unique,” or “past history,”  “terrible tragedy,”  or even the one I used, “pet peeves?”

The State of our Surface Temperature Records

The Science and Public Policy Institute has published a paper on Surface Temperature Records, in which the authors document the following points:

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.

2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.

3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.

4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.

5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.

6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.

7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.

8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.

9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.

10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.

11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”.

12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.

13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.

14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”

15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

A PDF file of this 111-page report is available here:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf

Climategate Analysis

The Science and Public Policy Institute has published an analysis of the leaked climategate emails. This 149-page document takes the emails in chronological order and shows, with comments on each message, how science was perverted.

In the introductory material the report says:

The entire industry of “climate science” was created out of virtually nothing, by means of a massive influx of funding that was almost universally one-sided in its requirement that its recipients find evidence for man-made climate change—not investigate whether or how much mankind had caused climate change.

Many “climate scientists” built their entire careers on this funding; and so it is not surprising that they became so completely reliant on this conditional lifeline, that they became single-mindedly focused on achieving the ends for which they were commissioned—and viciously attacking any intruders who may threaten that lifeline.

The PDF file may be download from either of these links:

Click to access climategate_analysis.pdf

or http://tinyurl.com/yl8o3t8

Climategate: Conflicts of interest and corrupted science

As the climategate story unfolds from the leaked emails and documents from the British Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and now from other organizations, we are learning about conflicts of interest and even more data manipulation.

Several stories revealed that Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has conflicts of interest because of his involvement with companies that benefit from the contention that carbon dioxide emissions pose a danger. From the U.K. Telegraph: “Although Dr. Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as ‘the world’s top climate scientist’), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics, he has no qualifications in climate science at all. What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr. Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.”

See story: http://tinyurl.com/ydpouot

EUReferendum, a British blog, tells a tale of alleged money laundering by Pachauri:

see: http://tinyurl.com/yeertqn

India Today also has a story on Pachauri’s conflicts of interest:

see: http://tinyurl.com/yll3vr6

More data manipulation revealed:

John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, said in a blog on KUSI TV, San Diego, “It has been revealed that a ‘sleight of hand’ was used in the computer program that rated 2005 as ‘The Warmest Year on Record.’ Skeptical climate researchers have discovered extensive manipulation of the data within the U.S. Government’s two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North Carolina, and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. These centers are being accused of creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based. The two investigators say the system has been distorted in other ways as well. They have documented their findings in great detail in a scientific report that has been posted online. These findings are presented as a part of my television special report “Global Warming: The Other Side” telecast Thursday night, January 14th at 9 PM here on KUSI TV.” See full blog article here: http://tinyurl.com/yhbjwd5

See the TV show here: http://tinyurl.com/y8vldjp

See the report referred to here: http://tinyurl.com/yj53lq3

We are seeing, more and more, that Congress’s proposed Cap & Trade legislation and the EPA’s proposal to regulate carbon dioxide are based on faulty data. Both campaigns should cease while the situation is being investigated.

See my previous blogs on climategate:

Climategate, the plot thickens: http://tinyurl.com/yjznje8

Climate Data, Fact or Fiction: http://tinyurl.com/yzhd8w9

More Climate Skullduggery: http://tinyurl.com/ygnz9yu

Feedback from a vested interest: http://tinyurl.com/yk26cbz

Climate industry meets reality: http://tinyurl.com/ygnawb5

Climategate Update: http://tinyurl.com/ylqefrq

Climategate: http://tinyurl.com/ykajcoc

Climategate The Plot Thickens

Here’s some of the news that our Main Stream Media didn’t report.

Russian IEA claims CRU tampered with climate data – cherrypicked warmest stations

“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.”

Source: http://en.rian.ru/papers/20091216/157260660.html Scroll about half way down the page.

Global weather dataset being systematically corrupted

“For the past six days, several climate scientists have discovered an alarming trend: clear evidence of alteration of historical data at weather stations around the world, in order to support the contention of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The changes appear to affect the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), a project of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center.”

Source: http://tinyurl.com/yat5tgo

Antarctic GHCN uses single warmest station instead of whole dataset

“Of all the stations available in the antarctic, GHCN has chosen to use a single station on the Antarctic Peninsula to represent an entire continent of the earth for the past 17 years. But it’s not just any station, it’s a special one. Rothera Point has the single highest trend of any of the adjusted station data.”

Source: http://tinyurl.com/ydbr4ag

Computer programmer makes case that release of files from CRU was an inside job.

See: http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/FOIA_Leaked/

How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles

See: http://tinyurl.com/yf6r9l3

Politicians take note: It could be that all the sound and fury over climate change is based on bad data. For traders in carbon credits: the house of cards is beginning to fall and your market may be the next multi-billion dollar bubble to burst.

Climate Data, Fact or Fiction

Politicians meeting in Copenhagen are hoping to decree what the proper global temperature should be. Their concern stems, apart from politics, from a perceived dangerous warming. But, just like in elections, it’s not the voters that determine outcome; it is the vote counters. In the climate game, it appears that actual temperatures, and their relationship to natural cycles, don’t count; it is how the temperatures are presented that fuel concern.

There are three main data sets of global surface temperature. One is kept by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU), the agency under fire for “hiding the decline.” Another is kept by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GIS). The third, maintained by NOAA , is the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) which is based on physical weather stations. CRU and GIS get most of their raw data from the GHCN and then make “adjustments.” Sometimes the adjustments are legitimate such as when a station moves or gets new instrumentation. But almost all the adjustments have resulted in more warming than shown by the raw data. That is highly unlikely if the adjustments are legitimate. Two examples:

The following two graphs show NASA’s adjustment to the Santa Rosa, CA, station (which happens to be at the headquarters of NOAA).

The following is what the folks at CRU did with the GHCN data from the airport at Darwin, Australia. In this graph, the blue is the raw data, the red is the adjusted data.

This makes one wonder if we really know what the temperatures, and the keepers of the temperatures, are doing. It also makes one wonder if politicians are basing policy on fact or fiction.

Global Warming Industry Meets Reality

It seems that there really is “Mann”-made global warming. It is made of fraud, data manipulation, collusion, squelching dissent, hiding data, deleting data, and punishing scientific journals that dared to publish papers challenging the carbon cabal.

The global warming industry is very big business and there is a huge vested interest in maintaining the myth that human carbon dioxide emissions are dangerous. “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” George Orwell, 1984.

The upcoming Copenhagen meeting sponsored by the United Nations had hoped for a global redistribution of wealth over the next 20 years of between $6 trillion and $10.5 trillion, according to the draft treaty, to “Compensate for damage to the less developed countries’ economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees.” Third world governments see dollar signs.

 

In the U.S., the Treasury Department estimates that the president’s cap-and-trade approach would “generate federal receipts on the order of $100- to $200 billion annually.” The Congressional Budget Office reports that a 15 percent CO₂ reduction would cost an average household $1,600 a year.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a bureaucrat’s paradise that exists solely to perpetrate the myth, while enjoying frequent meetings at exotic venues throughout the world.

Many governments maintain bureaucracies just to “study” the myth. In the U.S., it’s the Global Change Research Program. NOAA, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the National Climate Change and Wildlife Center of the USGS, and the EPA are just a few other federal agencies feeding at the trough.

Over the last 20 years, the US government spent $32 billion on climate research, yet has failed to find any evidence that carbon dioxide emissions significantly affect temperature or represent a danger. Government agencies, the private sector, and universities were the recipients of this money. These organizations have a vested interest in maintaining the myth.

The feds also spent another $36 billion for development of climate-related technologies in the form of subsidies and tax breaks. Solar and wind-power generation of electricity can be a supplemental supply, but these methods could not compete with fossil fuels without a subsidy. These industries have a vested interest in maintaining the myth.

The ethanol industry is founded solely on the myth that we must reduce our use of fossil fuels, even though the U.S. has abundant supplies.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Bailout bill) contained $3.4 billion for research and experimentation in the area of carbon sequestration – burying carbon dioxide generated by fossil fuel plants. There are also, really wild schemes for geoengineering, schemes to block the sun with mirrors, or seed the atmosphere with sulfur to produce more clouds.

On the world commodities market, trading carbon credits generated $126 billion in 2008, and big banks are collecting fees, and some project a market worth $2 trillion. Al Gore’s venture capital firm, Hara Software which makes software to track greenhouse gas emissions, stands to make billions of dollars from cap-and-trade regulation. If the myth is destroyed, this market will evaporate.

Back in 2007, a coalition of major corporations and environmental groups formed the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) to lobby for cap & trade. The companies planned to profit (at least in the short term) from either the cap-and-trade provisions or from selling high-priced, politically-favored (if not mandated) so-called “green” technology to the rest of us — whether we need it or not, and regardless of whether it produces any environmental or societal benefits.

Corporate USCAP members include: Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar Inc., Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, DuPont, FPL Group, Exelon, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, John Deer & Co, PG&E Corporation, and PNM Resources.

Has science been co-opted by greed and ideology; has government been co-opted by scientific elitists?

In his farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave this warning:

“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. 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.”

“It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”

The Obama administration, which promised to “restore science to its rightful place,” is ignoring events and sailing its ideological titanic to Copenhagen.

The vested interests are strong and many. Is the global warming industry “too big to fail?” It remains to be seen whether those interests, and political ideology will triumph over truth and common sense.

We should suspend any further consideration of cap & trade schemes and carbon taxes until there is a thorough investigation and re-analysis of the science, costs, and benefits. We also need the government to re-examine energy policy. We need to examine our system of research grants to universities which seems to have been biased toward the politically correct, rather than seeking scientific truth.

The global warming industry is predicated on manipulated computer modeling rather than observational data. The touted “consensus” has been shown to be the result of suppression of dissenting voices, and fueled by greed, power seeking, and the perversion of the scientific method.

If the “warmists” have their way, the result will be suppression of freedom and a criminal waste of resources.

For more information, see my blogs on Climategate at the Tucson Citizen:

http://tucsoncitizen.com/wryheat/2009/11/21/climategate/

and

http://tucsoncitizen.com/wryheat/2009/11/24/climategate-update/

For more stories on the climate scandal see:

http://www.climatedepot.com/

Climate Audit explanation of the “trick”: http://tinyurl.com/yd2aj2d

Bishop Hill selected emails: http://tinyurl.com/ylzrmro

 

Searchable index of emails: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/index.php

Climategate Update

Continued analysis of emails and reports leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in eastern England, which have been confirmed as real by CRU, show not only an effort to manipulate climate data, but that their computer database is in disarray. Both the IPCC and the EPA have relied heavily on these databases to form their policy decisions.

At the very least, Congress should thoroughly investigate the state of the science before passing any Cap & Trade system and before the EPA promulgates rules about carbon dioxide “pollution.”

The following is from a CBS News report including their embedded links.

The leaked documents (see our previous coverage) come from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in eastern England. In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: it claims the world’s largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report. That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it “relies on most heavily” when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.

Last week’s leaked e-mails range from innocuous to embarrassing and, critics believe, scandalous. They show that some of the field’s most prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data (“have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots”), cheered the deaths of skeptical journalists, and plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

One e-mail message, apparently from CRU director Phil Jones, references the U.K.’s Freedom of Information Act when asking another researcher to delete correspondence that might be disclosed in response to public records law: “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise.” Another, also apparently from Jones: global warming skeptics “have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” (Jones was a contributing author to the chapter of the U.N.’s IPCC report titled “Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.”)

In addition to e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named “Harry” — possibly the CRU’s Ian “Harry” Harris — was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic. Some excerpts from what appear to be his notes, emphasis added”

I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation – apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective – since we’re using an off-the-shelf product that isn’t documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn’t coded up in Fortran I don’t know – time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn’t enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it’s too late for me to fix it too. Meh.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight… So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

One thing that’s unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country’s met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up – but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!

Climategate

In the past few days a major scandal in climate science has developed. Someone hacked in to the files of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) based at the University of East Anglia, in England (aka Hadley CRU). The CRU has been a major proponent of anthropogenic global warming and a principal in report preparation for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

More than 1,000 internal emails and several reports from CRU have been posted on the internet and the blogosphere has gone wild with the implications of the revealed messages. Dr. Phil Jones, head of CRU, confirmed that his organization has been hacked and that the emails are accurate.

The emails reveal a concerted effort on the part of a small group of scientists to manipulate data, suppress dissent, and foil the dissemination of the information by “losing” data and skirting Britain’s Freedom of Information Act. The emails reveal that the contention that there is dangerous human-induced global warming, is not supported by the data, that those supporting that contention knew it, and sought to control the discussion so as to hide the unreliable nature of what they were claiming.

This revelation should be noted by policy makers since it undermines the justification for control of carbon dioxide emissions.

Comment by Dr. Roy Spencer on the incident:

While it is too early to tell just yet, there seems to be considerable … evidence that data have been hidden or destroyed to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) data requests; data have been manipulated in order to get results that best suit the pro-anthropogenic global warming agenda of the IPCC; e-mails that contain incriminating discussions are being deleted. And, on the bright side, we skeptics seem to be quite a thorn in the side of the IPCC.

In reading these e-mails from the ‘other side’ of the scientific debate I am particularly amazed at the mind set of a few of these scientists. I exchange e-mails with other like-minded (read ‘skeptical’) scientists, as do the IPCC scientists with their peers. But never do I hear of anyone manipulating climate data to achieve a certain end. I must say that I am pleased to see that NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth admits that it is a “travesty” that no one can explain the lack of global warming in recent years. See: http://tinyurl.com/ylz7ss5 See a follow-up blog: http://tinyurl.com/yzdh8zy

 

You can read some of the news stories here:

London Telegraph: http://tinyurl.com/yhx9juw

Guardian (UK): http://tinyurl.com/yf5c2er

Canada Free Press: http://tinyurl.com/yljzn9h This one names a prominent University of Arizona professor as being involved.

Herald Sun, Australia: http://tinyurl.com/ybka6az

Examiner.com Phoenix: http://tinyurl.com/yd372g2

This article shows several of the emails including one from Phil Jones that says in part how he hid the decline in proxy temperature data and appended other data to produce the infamous “hockey stick” graph.

Here is access to a searchable database of the emails:

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/index.php

Note to readers of RealClimate.org: Many RealClimate bloggers are principals in the scandal.

This is story is still unfolding. The next few weeks should be interesting.