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Post Info TOPIC: Climategate: 'Greatest scandal in modern science'...


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Climategate: 'Greatest scandal in modern science'...


Tuesday, November 24, 2009
EDITORIAL: Hiding evidence of global cooling

[link to www.washingtontimes.com]


THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Scientific progress depends on accurate and complete data. It also relies on replication. The past couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations about the baloney practices that pass as sound science about climate change.

It was announced Thursday afternoon that computer hackers had obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England. Those e-mails involved communication among many scientific researchers and policy advocates with similar ideological positions all across the world. Those purported authorities were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global-warming claims.

Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit, and professor Michael E. Mann at Pennsylvania State University, who has been an important scientist in the climate debate, have come under particular scrutiny. Among his e-mails, Mr. Jones talked to Mr. Mann about the "trick of adding in the real temps to each series ... to hide the decline [in temperature]."

Mr. Mann admitted that he was party to this conversation and lamely explained to the New York Times that "scientists often used the word 'trick' to refer to a good way to solve a problem 'and not something secret.' " Though the liberal New York newspaper apparently buys this explanation, we have seen no benign explanation that justifies efforts by researchers to skew data on so-called global-warming "to hide the decline." Given the controversies over the accuracy of Mr. Mann's past research, it is surprising his current explanations are accepted so readily.

There is a lot of damning evidence about these researchers concealing information that counters their bias. In another exchange, Mr. Jones told Mr. Mann: "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" and, "We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind." Mr. Jones further urged Mr. Mann to join him in deleting e-mail exchanges about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) controversial assessment report (ARA): "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re [the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report]?"

In another e-mail, Mr. Jones told Mr. Mann, professor Malcolm K. Hughes of the University of Arizona and professor Raymond S. Bradley of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst: "I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!"

At one point, Mr. Jones complained to another academic, "I did get an email from the [Freedom of Information] person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn't be deleting emails." He also offered up more dubious tricks of his trade, specifically that "IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on." Another professor at the Climate Research Unit, Tim Osborn, discussed in e-mails how truncating a data series can hide a cooling trend that otherwise would be seen in the results. Mr. Mann sent Mr. Osborn an e-mail saying that the results he was sending shouldn't be shown to others because the data support critics of global warming.

Repeatedly throughout the e-mails that have been made public, proponents of global-warming theories refer to data that has been hidden or destroyed. Only e-mails from Mr. Jones' institution have been made public, and with his obvious approach to deleting sensitive files, it's difficult to determine exactly how much more information has been lost that could be damaging to the global-warming theocracy and its doomsday forecasts.

We don't condone e-mail theft by hackers, though these e-mails were covered by Britain's Freedom of Information Act and should have been released. The content of these e-mails raises extremely serious questions that could end the academic careers of many prominent professors. Academics who have purposely hidden data, destroyed information and doctored their results have committed scientific fraud. We can only hope respected academic institutions such as Pennsylvania State University, the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst conduct proper investigative inquiries.

Most important, however, these revelations of fudged science should have a cooling effect on global-warming hysteria and the panicked policies that are being pushed forward to address the unproven theory.






Want to read the Climate Emails that were hacked? Here is a link to them.



[link to www.eastangliaemails.com]





-- Edited by Franklin on Tuesday 24th of November 2009 04:42:55 PM

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ClimateGate Totally Ignored By TV News Outlets Except Fox By Noel Sheppard (Bio | Archive)
November 24, 2009 - 11:03 ET

The Obama administration has another reason to hate Fox: it appears to be the only national television news outlet in America interested in the growing ClimateGate scandal.

Despite last Friday morning's bombshell that hacked e-mail messages from a British university suggested a conspiracy by some of the world's leading global warming alarmists -- many with direct ties to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- to manipulate temperature data, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC through Monday evening have completely ignored the subject.

LexisNexis searches indicate that NPR appears to also be part of this news boycott.

By contrast, here are some of the stories news organizations apparently favored by the Obama adminstration have covered since ClimateGate broke:


ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson" Friday did a very lengthy piece about Oprah Winfrey ending her syndicated daytime talk show
ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson" Monday did a lengthy piece on new revelations involving the marital affair of Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.)
CBS "Evening News" Saturday reported a ten-year-old pianist playing at Carnegie Hall
CBS "Evening News" Sunday did lengthy pieces on the website FreeCreditReport.com not being free and the movie "New Moon"
CBS "Evening News" Monday did lengthy pieces about defective drywall and a man who makes money wearing t-shirts
NBC "Nightly News" Friday reported on Switzerland's supercollider being turned back on
NBC "Nightly News" Saturday did a somewhat lengthy report on food carts
NBC "Nightly News" Sunday reported the release of British singer Susan Boyle's CD, and then followed it up with another report Monday on her promoting it.
It's not that these aren't valid news stories, but should they ALL be of greater importance than a scandal involving scientists from around the world including some employed by NASA and American colleges?

Also consider that the news divisions of ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcast many hours during the day besides their evening programs, and LexisNexis identified no ClimateGate reports in those either (through Monday).

As for CNN, it has been broadcasting for almost 100 straight hours since this story broke, and it appears the so-called "Most Respected Name In News" has yet to devote one second to this scandal.

By contrast, Fox News did at least four reports on this subject on Monday alone. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has also done multiple stories on this matter, as has BBC.com.

Yet, despite the seriousness of this issue, as well as a prominent Senator calling for hearings to investigate it, America's television news organizations appear to be actively boycotting this growing controversy.

Is this a replay of how they ignored September's ACORN scandal for many days until they were basically forced to cover what had gone viral across the Internet, talk radio, and Fox News?

What is it going to take for these so-called news outlets to begin sharing this subject with their viewers?

On a humorous related note, ABC might not be interested in ClimateGate, but it still is devoted to spreading climate fear.

On Tuesday, ABCNews.com's top story was, "Worse Than the Worst: Climate Report Says Even Most Dire Predictions Too Tame"

There's even less time for humanity to try to curb global warming than recently thought, according to a new in-depth scientific assessment by 26 scientists from eight countries.

Sea level rise, ocean acidification and the rapid melting of massive ice sheets are among the significantly increased effects of human-induced global warming assessed in the survey, which also examines the emissions of heat-trapping gases that are causing the climate change.

"Many indicators are currently tracking near or above the worst-case projections" made three years ago by the world's scientists, the new Copenhagen Diagnosis said.

Nor has manmade global warming slowed or paused, as some headlines have recently suggested, according to the report, which you can see here.

Well, at least ABC is consistent.

[link to newsbusters.org]


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Treemometers: A new scientific scandal
Alert Print If a peer review fails in the woods...


A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers.

At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.

At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a "reconstruction" of historical temperature anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors.

Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is problematic, and a dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In dendro jargon, this disparity is called "divergence". The process of creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples - a choice open to a scientist's biases.

Yet none of this has stopped paleoclimataologists from making bold claims using tree ring data.

In particular, since 2000, a large number of peer-reviewed climate papers have incorporated data from trees at the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. This dataset gained favour, curiously superseding a newer and larger data set from nearby. The older Yamal trees indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures.

How could this be? Scientists have ensured much of the measurement data used in the reconstructions remains a secret - failing to fulfill procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious peer reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to demand the data from contributors. Until now, that is.

At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions B the data has leaked into the open - and Yamal's mystery is no more.

From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.

In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which ten were alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the mid-19th century. The implication is clear: the dozen were cherry-picked.


(This oversimplifies the story somewhat: for more detail, read this fascinating narrative by blogger BishopHill here.)

Controversy has been raging since 1995, when an explosive paper by Keith Briffa at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia asserted that that the medieval warm period was actually really cold, and recent warming is unusually warm. Both archaeology and the historical accounts, Briffa was declaring, were bunk. Briffa relied on just three cores from Siberia to demonstrate this.

Three years later Nature published a paper by Mann, Bradley and Hughes based on temperature reconstructions which showed something similar: warmer now, cooler then. With Briffa and Mann as chapter editors of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this distinctive pattern became emblematic - the "Logo of Global Warming".

[link to www.theregister.co.uk]


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The Evidence of Fraud:




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