ClimateGate
gregladen | June 27, 2014Another Great Video from Greenman Peter Sinclair:
More details and links HERE.
illconsidered | July 20, 2012Hopping down the bunny trail comes the (not) surprising news that law enforcement investigating the CRU email scandal (aka Climategate, aka Swifthack) have concluded that the email servers were hacked and this is not the imagined whistle blower the WUWT and Curry crowd like to pretend. Though they can not identify the perp, they do conclude that:
“However, as a result of our enquiries, we can say that the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU’s data files, carried out remotely via the internet. The offenders used methods common in unlawful…
gregladen | March 28, 2012Climate scientist Michael Mann is no stranger to smear campaigns. Man has the distinction of having made important contributions to climate science, for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize. He is famous to many of you for having come up with the "hockey stick" metaphor.
Michael Mann is a good scientist who has done honest, important, and high quality work, but there are those who don't want to hear about the results he and other climate scientists have come up with. So, they hate him. And by "hate" I don't mean that they sit there not liking him. I mean, they actively hate him. They…
gregladen | February 14, 2012This seems to be fairly big news. The Heartland Institute is a conservative and libertarian "think" tank that cut its teeth on denying the dangers of cigarette smoking back in the 1990s. These days the Heartland Institute seems to be focused on Anthropogenic Climate Change Denialism and Science Denialism in general.
A piece of one of the revealed documents suggesting that the Heartland Institute wants to "dissuade teachers from teaching science."
Well, just a few hours ago, members of the climate change science, journalism, and blogging community received an interesting Valentine's Day…
illconsidered | November 28, 2011(not an original moniker in the title, someone remind me where it came from so I can give credit where credit is due!)
While I think the approriate response to ClimateGate 2.0 is to ignore it, I also think the mainstream media is doing mostly just that so it is safer to bring your attention to this good rebuttal to the whole affair from potholer54 on YouTube:
I think the most telling quote echoing around the denialosphere right now is this one from Jonathan Overpeck:
The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid what's included and what is left out.
It's supposed to…
tlambert | November 27, 2011Peter Hadfield (potholer54) talks on the deceitful quoting of the emails stolen from CRU in 2009
Juliette Jowit in The Guardian puts some more of them in context.
tlambert | November 22, 2011Some more of the emails stolen from the Climate Research Centre in 2009 have been released. This time they are accompanied by a readme with out-of-context quotes that asserts the purpose of the release is information transparency, but that's an obvious lie, since they've sat on them for two years and released them just before Durban conference. The timing suggests that the people behind the theft and release have a financial interest in preventing mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. It is most unlikely that there is anything incriminating in these emails -- if there was, it would…
hrynyshyn | November 22, 2011If this is the best they've got, it's kind of sad, really.
Looks like the link to the zip file of what was left over from the 2009 release has been removed, just a few hours after the world became aware that the FOIA gang is at it again. But most of what found its way onto the web so far, tiny snippets without even a clue as to the subject matter that prompted the excerpts, doesn't ever rise to the level of lame.
Of course, that won't stop the denial punks from engaging in a display of juvenile histrionics. But still, after the embarrassment of the BEST study conclusions, it is beginning to…
gregladen | November 2, 2011You've heard about "ClimateGate." ClimateGate was a very successful but illegal campaign by anti-science to discredit climate science and climate scientists. Rest assured, the climate science is fine and the climate scientists are just trying to do their jobs, and doing quite well at that. Nonetheless, a combination of inaccurate representation of the contents of various emails written between climate scientists and what amounts to unethical treatment of climate science by the press resulted in a shift among the general populous in the US from about half of the people thinking that Global…
illconsidered | November 22, 2010One of the shocking revelations of the Swifthacking of CRU one year ago (aka Climategate) was the fact that scientists can be downright nasty. Contrary to all previous indications, scientists are not always shy, reserved and polite, prefering the inside of a lab to any possibility of confrontation.
On the heels of the discovery of this new phenomenom comes a fresh bit of research from the icey confines of Antarctic research facilities.
After three long months of studying ice core samples in the Antarctic, a multidisciplinary climate research team presented startling evidence showing that all…
illconsidered | November 18, 2010November 17 marked the one year anniversary of the hacking of CRU mail servers and the release of thousands of emails between climate scientists.
Though irrelevant to the scientific case for anthropogenic climate change, the event was significant in the public relations sphere. I have not found the time to do a proper memorial write up though I think it is important to reassess and reframe the controversy with the benefit of hindsight. But as luck would have it, a young climate blogger named Kate at Climate Sight has written a piece as well laid out and written as I could ever have hoped to…
illconsidered | November 5, 2010Judith Curry has become quite a blog sensation, and did so long before starting her own. I have expressed my frustration with her in the past for a seemingly reckless affinity for "hit and run" postings. I will appreciatively grant that she comments alot, and engages many conversants extensively, but she has posted many very inflammatory or technically flawed diatribes in the past, the kind sorely needing defending or ammending, and left the clear and substantive rebuttals unanswered or inadequately answered. Frequently interested readers were left with only vague promises of "more on that…
illconsidered | October 9, 2010It seems that substantial evidence compiled by John Mashey has helped lead to an investigation into Edward Wegman's possible academic misconduct in the production of his very prominent report to Congress [PDF] on the Hockeystick.
See DesmogBlog for background, USA Today for the story, and Deep Climate for the details.
I will only add a couple of brief comments. Firstly, although the media buzz will be largely about the plagarism charges (and the apologists will focus there as well - copied doesn't mean wrong), there is much more to John's detailed evidence than this. Citations were not just…
illconsidered | August 23, 2010Via a new blog started up this summer, Fool me Once (sounds like wishful thinking ;-), proprieter Alden has graciously permitted me to embed a most excellent video he has produced on arctic sea ice.
He is covering a standard denialist talking point, that arctic sea ice has/is recovering, so the concepts will not be unfamiliar to any regulars here, but the very clear trains of argument and great use of data and graphics make this well worth watching.
The original posting is here.
His other post from about a month ago, is similarily clear and compelling. (Warning: video starts automatically,…
tlambert | August 8, 2010Following in the foot steps of the Sunday Times' retraction of their bogus Jonathan Leake story, the BBC has apologized for falsely stating that UEA researchers had "distorted the debate about global warming to make the threat seem even more serious than they believed it to be". The BBC offers the excuse "that this was a live programme being put together under the pressure of events", which is fair enough, except that it has taken over nine months to make this simple correction, for which, surely, there is no excuse.
Hat tip: BCL.
illconsidered | July 31, 2010A few random items on expertise, elitism and credibility.
The first is from an interview with the late Stphen Schneider about the recent PNAS paper on the relative expertise of "convinced" and "unconvinced" climate science activists, an interesting read:
About the 'elitist' part: Scientists are really stuck. It's exactly the same thing in medicine, it's the same thing with pilot's licenses and driver's licenses: We don't let just anyone go out there and make any claim that they're an expert, do anything they want, without checking their credibility. Is it elitist to license pilots and doctors…
tlambert | July 7, 2010Following vindications from the NRC panel, the independent Penn State Committee, the House of Commons report, the International Panel, the Penn state Investigatory Committee, the Independent Climate Change Email Review has reported
On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt. ... we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments. ... But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness
On…
illconsidered | July 7, 2010Via the amusing and insightful musings and insights of Marc Roberts:
(click for slightly larger and more legible image)
I think this is rather apropos given the recent retraction of one of Jonathon Leake's um, let's be kind, "dodgy" bits of journalism from the recent spate of IPCC "gates".
(Cartoon seen at In It For the Gold who uses it for the recent UVA report that again finds no academic misconduct by Mike Mann)
jstemwedel | July 3, 2010When you're investigating charges that a scientist has seriously deviated from accepted practices for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, how do you establish what the accepted practices are? In the wake of ClimateGate, this was the task facing the Investigatory Committee at Penn State University investigating the allegation (which the earlier Inquiry Committee deemed worthy of an investigation) that Dr. Michael E. Mann "engage[d] in, or participate[d] in, directly or indirectly, ... actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for…
jstemwedel | July 2, 2010Way back in early February, we discussed the findings of the misconduct inquiry against Michael Mann, an inquiry that Penn State University mounted in the wake of "numerous communications (emails, phone calls, and letters) accusing Dr. Michael E. Mann of having engaged in acts that included manipulating data, destroying records and colluding to hamper the progress of scientific discourse around the issue of global warming from approximately 1998". Those numerous communications, of course, followed upon the well-publicized release of purloined email messages from the Climate Research Unit (…