Politics killed climatology (for the time being anyway). You might be surprised how much the IPCC is seen (even in scientific circles) as the last and best word on the subject. But maybe you mightn't be.

Shot, always the cynic!

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Fri, 4 Dec 2009 07:29.

Nils-Axel Mörner in an open letter to the President of the Maldives :goldfish:

Quote from Shotglass :

we dont but im getting tired of people acting as if this is the only noteworthy climatology research group in the world

It isn't, but it is one of the most noteworthy. Specifically as the HADCru temperature product that the IPCC bases many of its assumptions on in regards to warming in the 20th C is developed out of UEA CRU (in conjunction with the Hadley Centre). You have consistently failed in this thread to understand the weight and importance of the UEA CRU and its position in this debate.

The MSM have written themselves into almost complete irrelevance when it comes to accurate reporting on climate change. Of that I have no doubt.

BBC does seem to be the worst of them.. but please let's not go there!

PS, for those interested, here's a video interview with Steve McIntrye on the various hockeystick reconstructions- it's in Finnish (not Steve M though) but there are subtitles.

http://dotsub.com/view/19f9c335-b023-4a40-9453-a98477314bf2

Quote from SamH :

The nature journal is pretty interesting in the way it pretends the content of the emails is not damming. It's also interesting how it refers to sceptics as a "delialist fringe". Many uses of derogatory terms, such as "paranoid", "obstructionist", "harassment" etc. I certainly learned quite a bit about nature.com from its own particularly loaded wording. It's pretty apologist.

There are a couple of other strange points that Nature seems to be trying to make. One is that

Quote :

If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden.

Firstly, scientists would not be having this problem if they were to properly present their research methods and all data along with their results. Many tricks have been used by these guys in order to hide and obfuscate various data which would seem to take up more time on their part than simply handing over the data on request or doing the right thing in the first place. If all the data is out there, then there would be no reason for any kind of 'harassment', as they see it. They are making things more difficult for themselves.

If the scientists or readers of Nature are genuinely interested in progressing the state of climate science, then they will need to start acknowledging the input and work of scientists such as Steve McIntyre and others which have so far been doing their best to call attention to shoddy science and correct it. If not for Steve M, then the original M Mann hockeystick would probably still be regarded as correct (for example), and since it's been shown to be dodgy, then the science can move forward more quickly by not referencing and building apon shoddy work.

edit: the sentence "Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden" sounds scarily like Nature is supportive of the attempts by researchers to block or refuse FOIA requests. That's just not cricket!


Also -

Quote :

Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability. But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide held fixed, the results bear little resemblance to the observed warming. The strong implication is that increased greenhouse-gas emissions have played an important part in recent warming, meaning that curbing the world's voracious appetite for carbon is essential

This implys that all the various natural forcings are known and accounted for, and are being simulated correctly in the models (a wild eyed claim as far as I'm concerned).




I agree that the overuse of the term 'denier' drags the article down.
The whole thing seems to be a gloss over.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sat, 5 Dec 2009 16:26.

Quote from xaotik :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-gate

No need to follow - there are so many of them that they eventually follow you. Amusingly the closest to you geographically was a "Utegate". Motorsports-wise there were a couple regarding McLaren.

Quote :

Winegate — A beat-up over a bottle of wine on a jet landing in an alcohol-free Aboriginal community

Can't believe I didn't hear about that one

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 3 Dec 2009 10:34.

Shot doesn't realise that his scientist friends tinkering with their results and climate giants like Phil Jones tinkering with their results are seperated by orders of magnitude of difference. He doesn't get it.

Quote from Shotglass :

or they simply removed it on the grounds that adding gate to anything mildly scandalous is offensively stupid

'Climategate' was originally posted by a blogger for humour value (that's how I read it anyway). It's simply been picked up and run with since then. I don't know of any other 'gates' currently in use, but I don't usually follow such things anyway.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Wed, 2 Dec 2009 22:21.

Quote :

Well, if they wanted to censor it they would surely remove the hits it provided as a keyword as well, no? Or just completely scrub references to it from their Google News, Google Videos, etc. Are people all that reliant on the suggestion feature that if they don't see what they're expecting they cease typing it out? It's probably just a glitch, dealing with boring SEO tasks at times I've seen a few that come from antispam mechanisms and such.

It's a stupid move if they are subtley trying to deflect curiosity from people who may not be searching for climategate specifically (ie, they're looking for something 'climate' related). If they are, then it's only going to bring more attention to the fact that there could be something to hide. There's no hiding anything now so its double dumb, which leads one to believe it's just a glitch (unless they are double dumb, or triple smart).

Apparently Phil Jones has stepped aside as director of CRU, as investigations begin. Poor guy must have had a shocker of a week.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Wed, 2 Dec 2009 22:12.

Yeah. Who knows.

hey Xaotik, sorry to bring this up again (and sorry all), by try climategate again at google.com.


I'm not getting it. (although 'climate-gate' is a search word. Climate Guatemala must be a real hot topic right now).


It's also not on Bing at the moment...



(this offer may be for a limited time only)




:ufo:

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Wed, 2 Dec 2009 21:14.

Quote from wien :

You have proof that:

- "Google has just censored the w ... tocomplete search feature"

Because those were the conspiracies I was talking about, and I sure haven't seen any proof. These comments are just so far beyond loony-bin it's not even funny. As the saying goes "It's impossible to reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into.", which means this whole thread is nigh on useless. Never in my life have I seen such a display of violent ignorance and hatred.

You're all ****ing mad.

I said it 'appears' that Google had censored 'climategate'. I only had heard from various people that they were noticing that the word wasn't showing when it had been previously. I did check for myself, and other search engines, but as Xaotik pointed out I wasn't using Google.com but Google.com.au, and that's the reason 'climategate' was not showing for me. I can't speak for anyone who had been using Google.com, there's no way I can prove that the word was censored, and anyway it's a stupid diversion from the main issues. It's back now anyway.

PS, I didn't really like your simplistic water vapour/feedback explanation. Shot did rightly point out that you had forgotten (conveniently?) to include clouds into the picture and he also rightly said that this is an area where the science is not well understood. I think if you actually feel you have a good working understanding of feedbacks in the climate system you should sign up for a job with the IPCC, because they admit freely that the area needs a lot more work.

As far as the 'hatred' in your comment goes (I was formerly addressing the ignorance comment) I don't 'hate' any of these scientists, or wish to see their heads on a platter or any such thing. What I do want to see is a return to good science based on a fair analysis of the actual facts and uncertainties in climatology, and have these communicated honestly to the public which needs to know what the issues and problems are. My reaction when I heard about 'climategate' was probably mostly one of relief. I have been following this stuff for a while and have noticed many examples where people were not being given the full or correct story about what was going on in climatology, and have seen time and time again how the media have distorted a particular story in favour of an alarmist angle over more fact based reporting. It is rife.

I have reasoned myself into my current position and if you hold a different position then I would hope that we could atleast respectfully disagree. I'm a person who is genuinely interested in the science of global warming, I have a great concern and care for the planet (eg, I've spent half of my adult life in environmental restoration, have been an activist for the greens, and been involved in numerous urban organic community gardens and other projects). I just don't like lies, from either side of the debate.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Wed, 2 Dec 2009 17:24.

Quote from amp88 :

The reaction from the general public when they hear about this is probably going to be "so man-made global warming is rubbish then?" but that's not the message people should be taking away from this. The message is that there needs to be a lot more transparency involved in what is inevitably in charge of our future. We are all subject to the policy decided based on this data and other data like it.

I agree. PS, for what it's worth the BBC just ran an article called 'Show Your Working: What 'Climategate' means', which helps to address your point. Interestingly though, it's in part written by Mike Hulme, a Professor of Climate Change at UEA (yep he's in the emails) and founding director of the Tyndall Centre, and who has been known to advocate stronger relationships between science and politics in the past.

From Hulme...

Quote :

The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow…exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.

…‘self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking…scientists – and politicians – must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy.

Climate change is telling the story of an idea and how that idea is changing the way in which our societies think, feel, interpret and act. And therefore climate change is extending itself well beyond simply the description of change in physical properties in our world…

...


I can get quite jittery when I think about the possible societal ramifications of chucking out (normal) science in favour of a more post-modern re-interpretation of science (or post-normal science, as it's apparently called). Humle seems happy that science should be driven by politics; I think that 'climategate' gives enough clues as to how this has damaged scientific objectivity and traditional scientific credibility. We should all stop and have a think about whether this is how we want science to operate in the 21st Century.

(More information on Hulme and some of his views on post normal science and climate change, here, here, here).

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Tue, 1 Dec 2009 20:30.

Yep, you're right. It shows up fine.

(paranoia receding)

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:57.

I only did that to show that you could (well, I could) get right to the end of the word without the suggestion. Typing in 'climate' doesn't bring it up for me. (or any amount of letters in the word)

edit: Maybe its a location thing. Any Australians want to do this experiment?

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:13.

Yeah, wow! Well that is weird (see my .jpg in the post just before yours).

It's still there in the google search pages, but removed from the autocomplete function (well, it is from where I'm sitting)- the list of suggestion words which come up when you start a search.

example, if you start typing google- you'll get suggestions like 'google maps' 'google earth' etc, after you've finished typing 'go'. With 'climategate' you can get right to the end of the word and it still won't suggest ('climate guatemala' seems to be the closest match). That is now. But it was suggesting beforehand.

Try on some other search engines and you'll probably find that climategate is a popular suggestion term. Google just scrubbed it off the list.

edit: if it's working for you then that's pretty strange. I haven't heard of it working in some instances. If that's true then I could almost start to wonder what google is thinking about me

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:00.

Quote from PhilS13 :

I don't need to point out the irony here do I?

Have you heard of the Gore effect?

http://www.washingtontimes.com ... 9/mar/04/the-gore-effect/

John Adams - Fearful Symmetries

Quote :

(eg the finely selected tree samples from iirc russia)

You seem to be talking about Keith Briffa's paleo work and the Yamal chronology. The story on Yamal is over here. The problem is that Briffa had used a very small subset of data from Yamal (ie, he cherrypicked) for the 20th C period, only 12 trees out of a much larger set- which gave his desired uptick at the end of the 20th C. In particular one very special tree, an extreme outlier listed as YAD061, has been dubbed 'The Most Influential Tree in the World'.




Steve McIntyre's criticisms of Briffa's methodolgy seem to have been accepted by Briffa. But Briffa has apparently now 'moved on'.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:42.

Quote from Shotglass :

unless im mistaken the hacking was done by someone outside their group and being a research group naturally brings the possibility to come up with something patentworthy (although very unlikely in a field such as climatology) so being able to not give out all your information is a basic requirement for a research group to function

It's not clear in fact whether it's some outside hack or whether it was an internal leak. The weight of the evidence so far seems in favour of the 'whistleblower' theory. I'm sure the employees at UEA CRU would really like to know for sure.

The rest of your argument is a moot point now, as the UEA CRU has now issued a statement that it will release all data and methods (who knows when). Your forgetting (perhaps conveniently, you say you are a familiar with the scientific process after all) that the heart of this issue is the issue of replicability, that any claims being made by scientists are worth nothing unless they can be properly replicated by an independent means. Any claims/data which are being kept secret means that other scientists cannot verfify those claims- and therefore those claims must be automatically assumed to be false.

Best article i've seen from the MSM on the issue yet, all very clearly laid out.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t ... onment/article6936289.ece


One point though..

Quote :

This weekend it emerged that the unit has thrown away much of the data. Tucked away on its website is this statement: “Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites ... We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (ie, quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

This has been known for about two months.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:36.

Quote from Shotglass :

its not a criminal offense as far as i can tell

Hacking data is a criminal offence. FOI obstructions due to withholding or deleting information are serious offences which need to be investigated. Which basics am I failing to understand?

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:50.

Quote from Shotglass :

again failing to understand the basics
those people arent public figures as such theyre paid for by the university so if they dont do their jobs properly they really have no one but their bosses to answer to

Shot, forgive me- but this controversy isn't simply limited to employees of the University of East Anglia. People refered to in these emails are staffed at different places around the world including other universities, NASA, etc. It really needs to be examined thoroughly by an independent 3rd party, with utmost neutrality and without a possibly tainted connection to any of the universities or parties involved.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:30.