Is Climate Change really man-made?

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[Mr-Bridger]

I might not know the truth about climate change, but I recognise trickery and slippery excuses when I see them by Stephen Glover, Daily Mail

Thursday, November 26th 2009, 5:01 PM EST


One of the charges often made by climate change sceptics about climate change believers is that they sometimes manipulate statistics. The believers say exactly the same thing about the sceptics.
What are we to make of such allegations? By 'we' I mean the vast majority of humanity who are not experts on climate change. These include most politicians and journalists, all non-scientists, and even scientists in unrelated fields.

My own response is to assume both sides are capable of twisting the facts. This is not based on scientific knowledge of climate change, since like almost everyone else I don't have any.
You could say it is a common sense point of view. In any heated argument, both sides are liable to be selective, and we shouldn't expect scientists to be immune from such tendencies.

It is nonetheless shocking to read leaked emails from the University of East Anglia which imply selectivity.
The university may not be generally regarded as one of this country's finest academic institutions, but its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is reckoned one of the most influential in the world.

In one email, dated November 1999, Professor Phil Jones, head of the CRU, wrote: 'I've just completed Mike's Nature [the scientific journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline.'

The CRU, which has played a key role in several United Nations reports, has refused to provide detailed information about the data underlying temperature records.
Other emails are no less damning. Some suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by sceptics, or to keep it out of an Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change.

In another email, Professor Jones refers to the death of a prominent sceptic by writing 'in an odd way this is cheering news'

These and other emails do not give a impression of relentless seeking after truth, or of constant fair-mindedness.
Rather, they hint at a tendency to conceal inconvenient facts in their own research and to suppress them in others.

What has been the response of the CRU in particular and climate change believers in general? With one or two honourable exceptions, such as George Monbiot in The Guardian newspaper, it has been unapologetic, and beside the point.

The University of East Anglia even refused to admit for a while that the emails were genuine.
There are those such as Professor Julia Slingo, chief scientist at the Met Office, who complain that the emails were obtained criminally, as though this somehow frees her and others from any responsibility to justify them.

There is also the hoary old defence that they have been taken out of context.
Defenders of the CRU have even argued that the emails span a period of some ten years, and are therefore bound to include a few disobliging references. Professor Jones has tried to explain away his email about tricks and hiding decline by saying it was written in haste.

This won't do. Even in haste, a prominent academic writing to a colleague does not say something he does not mean. Professor Jones should explain why he used words which would appear to be self-incriminating. I suspect he won't because he can't.

You may say that, just because a few leading climate change evangelists misbehave, it does not follow that all climate change believers do so, or that all their arguments are false.
That, of course, is true. But if there is evidence that one of the world's most influential climate change institutions has acted - to say the least - unprofessionally, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether such techniques are not more widely used.

Almost none of us will ever understand climate change. Without specialised scientific knowledge, most of us can only make an educated guess as to whether it is caused by man.
My guess is that it is to an extent. In coming to this tentative conclusion I am influenced by the integrity and sense of fair dealing of those who volubly make the argument for man-made climate change.

So when these people show a want of openness and fair dealing, and when they fail to offer a proper defence of apparently dodgy emails, such faith as I have in them is shaken. I may not understand climate change but I can recognise slippery responses when I see them.
But then this is not a debate that is often conducted in an open way. In some quarters climate change sceptics are derisively dismissed as 'deniers', which is to put them on the level of Holocaust deniers.

But whereas the Holocaust is a historical event, attested to by many survivors and observers, man-made climate change is only a theory, albeit a highly plausible one.
Its adherents invest it with the authority of an unchallengeable doctrine - which is why, when some of them are discovered not being wholly straightforward, they do not bother to offer a creditable defence.

And, even more disturbingly, much of the media does not feel obliged to put them on the spot, having uncritically swallowed everything they say.

Imagine that a leading climate change sceptic had been unmasked using this sort of language.

There would be a tremendous hullabaloo. BBC news bulletins, which have either ignored or underplayed the University of East Anglia's emails, would be full of fury.

The Corporation long ago stopped questioning the climate change consensus. Visit its website and you will find little, if anything, critical of the University of East Anglia.
But you can watch a video clip of Bianca Jagger, borrowed from its programme The Daily Politics, informing us that climate change is the biggest threat we face, with scenes of the Cumbrian floods in the background. She suggests they were caused by man-made climate change.
Bianca Jagger cannot possibly know whether or not they were, and nor does the BBC.
Her views about the causes of climate change are completely worthless, and yet the BBC cheerfully broadcasts them - as it would certainly not broadcast the views of an ignoramus who was a sceptic.

If climate change really is the biggest threat facing humanity, let's have a more measured and reasoned argument in which the sceptics are not shouted down or ignored.
If our way of life is to be changed, and our countryside transformed, and the Third World possibly deprived of the opportunities of economic growth, we deserve a bit more than bogus pictures of polar bears perched on lumps of ice, and Bianca Jagger informing us that the Cumbrian floods are the result of climate change.

And the University of East Anglia - a public institution largely funded by the taxpayer - owes the world a more straightforward explanation than it has so far bothered to give about those apparently discreditable emails.

The misbehaviour of one influential group in seeking to manipulate the facts obviously does not mean that all climate change believers are wrong.

But in future people would be wise no longer to take on trust their most outlandish and hair-raising claims.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-1231024/STEPHEN-G LOVER-I-know-truth-climate-change-I-recognise-trickery-slippery-excuse s-I-them.html

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[GodSaveTheTeam]

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[Mr-Bridger]

The Climate E-mails and the Politics of Science

Ivan Kenneally

For years, the left has spun the debate over global warming in the starkest Manichean terms. Those who disagree with the scientific and policy orthodoxy have been maligned as greedy capitalists bent on raping the earth of its natural resources for cheap material gain; they have been cast as the benighted enemies of reason itself. Efforts to publicly challenge the science behind global warming have too often resulted in professional and political character assassination. To be skeptical about the fashionable scientific and policy platform aggressively advocated by the mainstream media and self-indulgently championed by the Hollywood elite is nothing less than an “assault on reason,” to borrow Al Gore’s hyperbolic rhetoric. In predictably technocratic fashion, the left has claimed its own peculiar position as the only scientifically legitimate one—everything else reduces to craven interest, manifest dishonesty, or antiquarian faith.

However, maintaining this self-serving narrative just got a lot harder. In the last few days, the cause of climate alarmism took a big hit when more than a thousand e-mails exchanged by scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) suddenly surfaced online. These e-mails were published by the computer hackers who apparently stole them, a crime that should be investigated and prosecuted. But notwithstanding the e-mails’ route to publication, their actual content is extraordinary. These behind-the-scenes discussions among leading global-warming exponents are remarkable both in their candor and in their sheer contempt for scientific objectivity. There can be little doubt after even a casual perusal that the scientific case for global warming and the policy that springs from it are based upon a volatile combination of political ideology, unapologetic mendacity, and simmering contempt for even the best-intentioned disagreement. Especially in anticipation of the major climate summit taking place in Copenhagen next month, the significance of this explosive disclosure is hard to underestimate. According to climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”

The evidence of scientific dishonesty supplied by these communications is so copious it’s hard to know where to begin an attempt to describe them. Many of the e-mails brazenly discuss the manipulation of scientific data either to provide the appearance of greater support for global warming science or to undermine the claims of skeptics. For example, CRU scholar Timothy J. Osborn explicitly describes how data can be reconfigured so that evidence of an apparent cooling period disappears. His colleague Tom Wigley discusses recasting the data on sea-surface temperatures so that the results seem considerably warmer but also scientifically plausible. The director of CRU, Phil Jones, brags about his use of eminent climatologist Michael Mann’s “Nature trick” which deliberately confuses scientific data to “hide the decline” in current temperatures.

Other e-mails openly encourage the suppression of data that could prove difficult to repudiate. Michael Mann provides strategic advice on how to deal with a journal, Geophysical Research Letters, that seems to be open to publishing views that dissent from climate orthodoxy. In an e-mail to Phil Jones, Mann also expresses his desire to “contain” the very inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period, so important in overthrowing Mann’s classic “Hockey Stick” model of anthropogenic warming, even though he admits they don’t have an appropriate model to do that legitimately.

Public spokesmen for the global warming agenda constantly claim a near-universal consensus within the scientific community supporting their position, but these private exchanges often reveal serious personal reservations regarding what they really know and how confident they are in the statistical models they rely upon. In an e-mail to several prominent climate scientists (including Mann and Jones), Kevin E. Trenberth, one of the leading contributors to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, offers this confession: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.” In another e-mail, Trenberth admits climatologists have a limited understanding of where our energy ultimately goes, what the effects of cloud formation might have on the entire issue, and expresses doubts about the efficacy of geoengineering to provide any substantive relief, again saying that the gaps in the scientific knowledge amount to “a travesty.” All of this a far cry from the strident claims about unimpeachable evidence and demonstrable theory that usually emanates from these quarters.

Perhaps the most damning e-mails concern CRU deputy director Keith Briffa’s analysis of the diameter of tree rings in Yamal, Siberia. That research is a major evidentiary pillar in support of twentieth-century global warming and it helped resurrect Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” graph of global warming. The scientist largely responsible for challenging Mann’s work, Steve McIntyre, turned his attention to Briffa’s resurrection of it and accused him of cherry-picking samples that would confirm his politically desirable hypothesis.

The response to McIntyre’s work revealed in the CRU e-mails shows a breathtaking pattern of ideological rigidity and academic fraudulence that is simultaneously egregious and casually self-satisfied. First, it becomes clear that the global warming crowd, in particular Mann and Osborn, are quick to dismiss McIntyre’s work as “not legitimate science” even before reviewing his studies. Their initial reflex is not to scrutinize McIntyre’s analysis or to reconsider their own entrenched positions but rather to respond with a kind of angry, territorial protectiveness. Then they collectively identify someone who could, in fact, “shed light on McIntyre’s criticisms of Yamal” but choose not to contact him because he “can be rather a loose cannon.” Another scientist who might have helped clarify the Yamal situation is dismissed by Mann for being “not as predictable as we’d like.” Unquestioning loyalty to a political platform is understood to be the precondition of scientific authenticity.

Even worse, in response to the charge that Briffa’s work is difficult to verify because he withholds key data from the published study, Tom Wigley actually issues a justification of the practice:

And the issue of withholding data is still a hot potato, one that affects both you [Phil Jones] and Keith [Briffa] (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons — but many good scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The trouble here is that withholding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden.

Wigley provides no discussion at all regarding what would count as an appropriate reason for concealing data, or what benefit this could bring to the scientific community at large. One is left to wonder if the justification for hiding information is political rather than scientific. Mann seems unconcerned that any of these issues will resonate with a friendly media: “Fortunately,” he wrote to a New York Times reporter, “the prestige press doesn’t fall for this sort of stuff, right?”

In his “Memorandum on Scientific Integrity” from earlier this year, President Obama stated that it is the function of “science and the scientific process” to “inform and guide” his administration on virtually every issue from health care to national security. This came on the heels of his promise in his inaugural address to “restore science to its rightful place,” and his boast that his administration will “base” its “public policies on the soundest science,” indicating that the proper relation between politics and science subordinates the former to the latter. The classic concern about science—that it might become dangerously liberated from moral or political guidance—is not what concerns President Obama in his memorandum and speeches. Rather, he worries about the suppression or politicization of unambiguous scientific fact. If the president’s words are taken at face value, his administration should seriously reconsider its enthusiastic embrace of aggressive climate legislation, since the CRU e-mails reveal a political appropriation of science instead of a science liberated from political pressure.

Hillary Clinton famously remarked that during the Bush years it was “open season on open inquiry,” rehashing the familiar charge that a faith-based obscurantism dogmatically dismissed not only the claims of legitimate science, but also the very claims of reason itself. President Obama has stayed true to the liberal posture that whatever policy he happens to advocate is the only one substantiated by empirical science. However, it has become increasingly clear that the president’s claim to rigorously adhere to a science of politics—a science that provides unprejudiced information upon which he can craft sound policy—has been overtaken by a politics of science—the crass and Procrustean transformation of whatever data is available into further confirmation of his own ideological commitments. Australian writer Andrew Bolt has suggested that the CRU e-mail leak is a “scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science.” But the greater scandal may be that the United States and the rest of the world are considering enacting energy-restrictive and economy-damaging climate policies based on ideological distortions of scientific fact.

Ivan Kenneally is an assistant professor of political science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is writing a book on technocracy in American politics.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-climate-e-mails-and-the -politics-of-science

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I see your proxy post is still making the exact same distortions MrB.

Being mindful that this is a co-ordinated pre-Copenhagen propaganda campaign, with a repeating echo chamber pushing the same points from different sources which are never going to correct themselves, how do you feel about that, now you know?

I don't suppose you notice that it's always the same small group of
professional deniers that always give the quotes either.
Or is it a case of you're seeing a lot of it, so it must be true and that's
good enough for you.

You know, instead of holding up handfuls of dripping shiit planted at
the bottom of the sewer for you to find and going "look I what I found everybody", you could
try informing yourself with real information.

You could always start here:
http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/Copenhagen/Copenhagen_Diagnosis_LOW.pdf
which shouldn't be too difficult, provided you finished secondary school.

That's the one thing the corporate shills fear is an informed public.
Misinformed and disinformed dupes are their stock in trade.

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Its unstoppable now in spite of the Climate Liars best efforts. The game is up!

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100018003/climategat e-five-aussie-mps-lead-the-way-by-resigning-in-disgust-over-carbon-tax  /

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Things have come to a pretty pass when it is the Thatcherites and the Torygraph which are the voices of reason regarding this gigantic Man-made climate change scam.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100018056/climategat e-this-is-our-berlin-wall-moment/

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The "scientist" speaks his "truth". AGAIN!!!

http://www.bluegrasspundit.com/2009/11/ignorant-al-gore-must-believe-w e-live.html

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http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/11/26/ lawrence-solomon-new-zealand-s-climategate.aspx

More from the Climate Liars.

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http://www.examiner.com/x-18425-LA-County-Nonpartisan-Examiner~y2009m1 1d26-Climategate-falsified-data-suppressed-evidence-professional-journ al-censorship-carbon-tax-hoax

More lies of the Climate Liars.

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"Dodgy site" with "dodgy" scientist with the "wrong" politics pauses from denying the Holocaust to give his "wrong" conclusions dictated to him by "big oil".

http://www.prisonplanet.com/uk-scientist-case-for-climate-fears-is-blo wn-to-smithereens-whole-theory-should-be-destroyed-and-discarded-and-u n-conference-should-be-closed.html

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http://infowars.net/articles/november2009/261109Milloy.htm

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Lots of graphs and facts to highlight the lies of the Climate Liars if you visit the site.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/26/warwick-hughes-shows-how-jones-p ut-bias-in-australian-temperatures/

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http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/three-things-you-absolutely-must-know-abo ut-climategate/

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As we know, there are 300 a day of you idle crunts reading this so now's the time to

********* MAKE YOUR VOICES HEARD ************.

1) Who thinks that banjoboy v.8.0 really has something this time?

2) Who thinks he's spamming desperately like a spambot or a
$10 whore on crystal meth gone wild?

3) Who thinks it's about time he stopped using this forum for
his spambombing campaign and actually DISCUSSED
THE ISSUES once he's been shown to be mistaken on them?

4) Who thinks all the attention seeking and pulpit-pounding dross he posts
actually just gives him an erection?

5) Who wonders how these morons co-opted the word "truther"

6) Who wonders wattsupwithtony when he ignores stuff like:

[paul wright]

Idle crunts? Maybe just people who suspect the weather and the political climate is being fixed.

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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100018173/climategat e-sack-no-longer-credible-michael-mann-from-ipcc-urges-climatologist/? utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

What the evildoers do to the good guys! What they have been doing for years.

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http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/27/more-on-the-niwa-new-zealand-dat a-adjustment-story/

Liars liars LIARS!

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/506735 1/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html

More from a "dodgy" site and people with the "wrong" politics.

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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100018034/climategate-% 20%20e-mails-sweep-america-may-scuttle-barack-obamas-cap-and-trade-law s/