Sunday, November 29, 2009

Climate gate finally getting noticed

Sure, the mainstream media here in the the U.S. are still refusing to report the story, but the international media sees it for what it is: The biggest scientific scandal ever.

On the eve of the Copenhagan conference, I'll bet this thing cools their private jets just a little bit.

13 comments:

Roadrunner said...

Oh, you mean the scandal that some right-wingers illegally broke in and got some private emails?

Anonymous said...

Oh, come on now. That's just 'bat crap and you know it. When do you have time to eat?

Roadrunner said...

So, anon and Rob, you support computer hacking? Is it okay if computer hackers start digging in to your private email?

Have you ever sent an email that might be misconstrued if it were made public?

MAX Redline said...

RR,

Had you been following events (as I have) then you'd not be pushing the tired old "a hacker stole my homework!" line. For those not paying attention: CRU have been subject to numerous Freedom of Information requests which they have failed to honor.

What they did do was compile the requested information, preumably in the event that they were ultimately forced to comply with the requests.

It appears that somebody inside CRU simply hit "send".

Those who actually know something about systems would immediately realize that thwe probability of a "hacker" being able to break in and copy thousands of emails and documents all revolving around the subject of the FOIA requests is nil.

Anonymous said...

Yo' 'bat ... it's not 'hacker'. It's 'whistleblower'. Think ACORN. Unless that blows your warped world-view mind.

Rob Kremer said...

RR:
These guys are right ... the only people claiming these emails were accessed through hacking are at CRU. I don't pretend to know how they were released, but it sure looks a lot more like leaking than hacking.

That is, an insider with ethics got fed up with the scam and decided to reveal how extensive the rot has become.

The "hacking" red herring is such an obvious attempt to not have to deal with the substance of the emails.

Nice try, RR.

You have nothing to say about the emails themselves?

Ex-European said...

Year 1909 AD: Copenhagen, International conference on saving the telecommunications,

Consensus: Our houses are a miserable 50 F in the winter, but unless we stop burning wood for heating, our descendants 100 years from now will live in a terrible world. A world without telegraph poles! Imagine, a world without tele-communications. It’s an emergency! We must stop burning wood even if that makes our short lives a lot more unpleasant, so that we can save our great-great-great-grand children’s ability to tele-communicate.

-------------------------------


Conversely, the other day, I got a letter from one of my descendants into the future. He says:

----------
Year 2109 AD:

Hi, I’m your great-great-great-grand nephew from year AD 2109. I have a life expectancy of 160+ years. I’m 3 times richer than you are (in real inflation indexed terms). I have technological conveniences and opportunities at my fingertips that were flat out unimaginable to you 100 years ago. As you may imagine from what has been the trend with human progress, our lives in the last 100 years (2009 to 2109) have improved twice as much as they had in the last 100 years of your lifetime (1909 to 2009). But you fool! You felt sorry for me, and with your then puny capabilities and knowledge, thought that it would bother me to live in a world that is 2C warmer? [ha!] and actually went ahead and foolishly inconvenienced your short miserable life to address it? [LOL!] The further irony is that your projected 2C warming did not even happen after all. Not that much because your scientists then were wrong, but rather, because carbon became obsolete 50 years after you died anyway, when the XYZ technology came into being and, besides, climate is now mostly controlled through the IJK technology.

Seems like science fiction? Think of the changes the world underwent in the past 100 years and extrapolate into the future. And keep in mind that, as my descendant points out, the pace of changes is also accelerating. Every century seems to lead to proportionally more progress than the previous.

The science of climatology is one thing. Completely discounting that human progress will continue (most likely at an ever accelerating pace) is another. Assuming that our descendants 100 years from now (when per capita GDP even in Africa will be equal to today’s US per capita GDP) will be seriously inconvenienced by a world 2C warmer (which assumes BTW that in 100 years time they will not be able to find solutions other than deprivation) is ridiculous!

Roadrunner said...

These emails are much ado about nothing. So, somebody emailed that a paper shouldn't be published because it had problems. It eventually got published, then the editor-in-chief resigned because of it. I'd say the person who emailed that the paper shouldn't see the light of day was right in the first place--bad science is bad science.

Here's a good review:

http://gawker.com/5415361/climate-email-scandal-scientists-engaged-in-a-conspiracy-of-science

Jack Roberts had a good column over the weekend about how the truth is that the planet is still warming. The deniers have used an outlier year (1998) in an attempt to "prove" that the planet has been cooling since then.

I'm assuming that you folks aren't, in fact, stupid, but that your ideology has gotten in the way of your ability to think.

Roadrunner said...

How about this "scientific" scandal:

http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.html

What I don't understand is how you deniers can live with yourselves. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that humans are causing global warming, and that it may have catastrophic results for humans.

Are you folks really so knowledgeable that you know for certain that the overwhelming consensus of scientists who study the issue is wrong? Really?

And what if you're wrong--think how people two, three, four generations from now will view you folks. Are you really that certain that you're right?

Don Smith said...

LOL. The Union of Concerned Scientists? And where's their funding from? Read the Telegraph UK column on this issue. Hell, read ANYthing on the issue not created by propagandist "global warming *ahem* climate change scientists". You're hilarious.

"B-b-b-but it was hacked data, Rob, therefore we should ignore it."

"B-b-b-but Exxon is BAD, Rob."

"B-b-b-but the polar bears Rob. They're populations are growing and that's terrib- oh wait, never mind."

Cap and trade is the beginning of the global financial oligarchy. See how much support Goldman Sachs has thrown behind it. I'm sure it's out of the goodness of their hearts.

Oh, and if this "data" is accurate and replicable, why won't the scientists who produced the data (as opposed to collecting it) release the raw data? Why have they stonewalled FOIA requests?

Get a clue. I hate reckless and selfish environmental degradation as much as you, but I don't trust the government that can't even let a bank fail without a trillion-dollar bailout to "solve" global warming through a tax. Are you nuts?

Me said...

RR,

The notion that an "overwhelming scientific consensus" is as contrived as the adjusted data showing historical late 20th century warming. The CO2 emissions connection is fantasy run amoke.

Your foolish and impressionable naivety leaves you a mentally crippled adult pretending to have studied what you blindly accept.

You can't even detect the polar bear fabrication. Or any other whoppers which riddle thew AGW movement.

Anonymous said...

You know what I love most about this? I could never put a finger on it, but every time somebody cried "but it was peer-reviewed!" I would immediately feel like the global warming argument was akin to negotiating with a car sales man. Now the true meaning of "peer-reviewed" climate science is exposed.

Does this mean I still need to renew my DEQ tags today?

MAX Redline said...

RR,

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that humans are causing global warming, and that it may have catastrophic results for humans.

I can see how that line may frighten you; it does sound scary. However, it is also untrue.

That line came from Dr. James Hansen, who is presently AlGore's right-hand man. You may recognize the name; if you don't you certainly should. In the 1970's he was saying the same thing - except his concern at that time was global cooling:

On July 9, 1971, the Post published a story headlined "U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming." It told of a prediction by NASA and Columbia University scientist S.I. Rasool. The culprit: man's use of fossil fuels.

The Post reported that Rasool, writing in Science, argued that in "the next 50 years" fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun's rays that the Earth's average temperature could fall by six degrees.

Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, Rasool claimed, "could be sufficient to trigger an ice age."

Aiding Rasool's research, the Post reported, was a "computer program developed by Dr. James Hansen," who was, according to his resume, a Columbia University research associate at the time.

So what about those greenhouse gases that man pumps into the skies? Weren't they worried about them causing a greenhouse effect that would heat the planet, as Hansen, Al Gore and a host of others so fervently believe today?

"They found no need to worry about the carbon dioxide fuel-burning puts in the atmosphere," the Post said in the story.


By this point in time, according to Hansen and his spiffy computer models, and acoording to a number of others back in the day, the planet should be essentially completely glaciated. You may have noticed that this has not occurred.

Hansen recieves periodic infusions of cash from one George Soros; the last record of which I'm aware is a gift of $720,000 in 2006.

These emails are much ado about nothing. So, somebody emailed that a paper shouldn't be published because it had problems. It eventually got published, then the editor-in-chief resigned because of it. I'd say the person who emailed that the paper shouldn't see the light of day was right in the first place--bad science is bad science.

I don't know about you, RR, but I've been through the peer-review process a few times, and so I tend to discount most of your above paragraph. It seems to me that this is not an area in which you have experience, although you obviously feel qualified to generate an opinion.

When you start talking about "good science" and "bad science", you're rather missing the point of science itself. If observations or effects can be independently replicated, we have science. When replication is not possible, we have non-science. In the latter category, we have Pons and Fleishman, who claimed to have discovered "cold fusion". Others, armed with the same apparatus and guidelines, failed to replicate their claim.

In the case of the AGW enthusiasts, a similar level of replication applies - whether or not this results from the refusal of the "scientists" involved to make freely available their data and methods provides considerable fodder for speculation; it is fact, however, that their refusal to permit independent analysis renders their conclusions non-science.

You may call a package of some 3,000 relevant documents and emails which appear to indicate massive fraud in addition to intentional witholding of data and methodology "much ado about nothing", but I suggest, RR, that you are neither scientist nor Shakespeare.