If you have ever wondered how real scientists perform their day to day work, or how your tax money is spent on Climate research, then Climategate is the App for you.
Every CRU email leaked in the so-called Climategate scandal always at the ready on your iPhone. This self-contained, searchable app is available free of charge.
I was checking out the blogoshere and latest on Michael Mann and how he has been cleared of all wrong doing. I noticed that they are now admitting he did hide the decline, but now their saying that its no big deal.
Tree data showing global temps going down didn’t mesh with actual recorded temperatures, so pains were taken, (most of the time disclosed, but sometimes not) to use actual temp recordings and “hide the decline” from trees. Sometimes, on the so called hockey stick charts that show global temps as a flat line and then a sharp upward spike are indeed mixing tree ring data and actual temps.
Jones and Mike Mann had been adding real temperatures to the end longer graphs of temperature estimates based on tree rings. The only thing being “hidden” was tree ring data that did not match reality.
This last statement is remarkable because it shows that what is being done in the realm of “Climate Science” is not science at all but rather politics.
Professor Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the ‘climategate scandal’, is to be reinstated in his role at the University of East Anglia after being cleared of dishonesty by a major review.
By Louise Gray
Prof Jones lost his job as head of the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA after personal emails he sent appeared on the internet.
The emails referred to a ‘trick’ used to interpret data and the death of a leading climate change sceptic as “cheering news.”
Sceptics claimed the stolen emails showed Prof Jones and his colleagues were willing to manipulate key data to exaggerate the rise in global temperatures.
The scandal, that became known as ‘climategate’, caused repercussions around the world as it was used by those who question the case for man made global warming.
However a comprehensive review into the case by Sir Muir Russell, a senior UK civil servant, has cleared Prof Jones of dishonest behaviour.
Edward Acton, Vice Chancellor of the UEA, immediately announced that Prof Jones will be reinstated as Director of Research in CRU, a role of similar importance to his last post.
He said it was a personal vindication for Prof Jones, who has said he considered suicide over the affair.
“We hope this means the wilder assertions about the climate science community will stop,” he said.
However sceptics claimed the report was a whitewash and questioned the reinstatement of Prof Jones.
David Holland, one of the leading sceptics on the blogosphere, pointed out that Prof Jones referred to deleting emails in one of his communications.
“Would you trust a man who has asked to delete evidence?” he said.
Recently, the Record-Bee published a missive from Michael Mann that attempted to defend the global warming scam. Professor Mann’s so-called research has been so thoroughly refuted by the scientific community that further comment by me would be redundant.
However, the letter from Norman Fleishman in the June 17 Record-Bee requires an answer.
Mr. Fleishman’s assertion that global warming is due to an expanding population’s requirement for heat is brand new, at least to me. Until now it has all been blamed on our collective use of fossil fuels for industry and transportation.
Former Vice President Al Gore spent the last decade as a larger-than-life figure, more of a symbol than a living, breathing human being. Stolen from the pages of a Danielle Steele novel and plopped on stage at the 2000 Democratic Convention, this normally lifeless personality was possessed by the ghost of Madmen’s Jon Hamm and political pop-culture history was made. Al and Tipper’s kiss marked the dawn of Gore’s personal stardom and his pet project: anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmism.
Since his mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, Gore has been married to the AGW cause. And just as Al’s and Tipper’s kiss represented the dawn of the most successful movement in pseudoscience, their divorce aptly marks its end.
A stark trend toward accepting empirical science instead of speculation has caused the ground beneath AGW to cave in quickly. Like the news of the Gore divorce, the scientific evidence hit the public as if from nowhere. But both these cases are results of major, longstanding problems instead of a single cataclysmic event.
For AGW alarmism, what were once dismissed as minor discrepancies are being exposed as major contradictions of the scientific facts.
At first, AGW was a smooth talker. Graphs, models, charts, PowerPoints, and Hollywood movies all worked to persuade. As questions began to arise, however, patronizing and talking down turned small spats into explosive arguments. The Michael Mann “hockey stick” diagram was exposed as being based on a trick that would make any trend look like a spike. Gore’s new mansion was built in an area he had predicted would be underwater in the near future. The Climategate scandal showed us AGW was hiding the facts. Stories weren’t adding up.
Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.
The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect - there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.”
The admission that the society needs to conduct the review is a blow to attempts by the UN to reach a global deal on cutting emissions. The Royal Society is viewed as one of the leading authorities on the topic and it nominated the panel that investigated and endorsed the climate science of the University of East Anglia.
The man battling NASA for access to potential “Climategate” e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.
Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.
Mr. Horner said he expects the documents, primarily e-mails from scientists involved with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), will be yet another blow to the science behind global warming, which has come under fire in recent months after e-mails from a leading British research unit indicated scientists had manipulated some data.
“What we’ve got is the third leg of the stool here, which is the U.S.-led, NASA-run effort to defend what proved to be indefensible, and that was a manufactured record of aberrant warming,” Mr. Horner said. “We assume that we will also see through these e-mails, as we’ve seen through others, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws like FOIA.”
University professors aren’t known to be the most organized bunch, but in Virginia they do seem to have found a cause in opposition to Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s subpoena to the University of Virginia seeking documents related to the work of climate scientist Michael Mann.
The Union of Concerned Scientists today released a letter it said has been signed by 800 scientists and professors in Virginia urging Cuccinelli (R) to drop his efforts to collect documents about Mann. Cuccinelli has said he is investigating whether Mann defrauded the public as he sought grants to perform research into global warming. Mann left U.-Va. in 2005 and now teaches at Penn State University.
This is a translation of an article in the Norwegian newspaper Forskning.
By Bjornar Kjensli
A German climate researcher says that people are beginning to lose faith in climate research, pointing to the IPPC as one of the main causes. Norwegian IPCC veterans disagree about what the organization should do about it.
After a winter of setbacks and disclosure of mistakes, many different ideas have been put forward about what can be done about the IPPC and these ideas abound in newspapers and in journals such as Nature and Science. One of the most vociferous critics has been Hans von Storch. He is a professor of meteorology at the University of Hamburg, director of the Institute for Coastal Research at GKSS in Geestacht and was the main author of the chapter on regional climate in Working Group 1 (WG1) of the Third IPCC Assessment Report (AR3), which was published in 2001.
On 22 April 2010 he was in Oslo, where he addressed the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in a lecture containing a number of objections to the IPCCs current way of working. The presentation of the lecture, you can see here.[link]
Not skeptic but a critic
Von Storch has long been critical of the way the IPCC has dealt with scientific uncertainty, and was himself described in less than flattering terms in some of the disputed emails released from the CRU at the University of East Anglia last November.
The man behind the hockey stick curve, Professor Michael Mann wrote, among other things, in an email to Phil Jones, the head of the University of East Anglia Climate Centre, that “Von Storch is a strange guy”, and that it would not surprise him if he was really a climate skeptic. Von Storch says he has nothing against being a strange guy, but he is not in any doubt that anthropogenic emissions are leading to climate change. He is however very critical of the internal processes of the IPCC and the role of chairman, Rajendra Pachauri.
The Penn State climate professor who has silently endured investigations, hostile questioning, legislative probes and attacks by colleagues has finally spoken out. He says he’ll sue the makers of a satirical video that’s a hit on You Tube.
Their response: Bring it on.
Michael Mann, one of the central figures in the recent climate-data scandal, is best known for his “hockey stick graph,” which was the key visual aid in explaining how the world is warming at an alarming rate and in connecting the rise to the increase in use of carbon fuels in this century. E-mails stolen from a university in England were released online, revealing exchanges between climatologists and a reference to a “trick” that Mann had used to get the graph to portray what global warming scientists wanted to see.
The parody video, titled “Hide the Decline,” had more than 500,000 viewers on YouTube and received national attention when Rush Limbaugh played it on his radio show. It features a cat with a guitar, a talking tree, and a dancing figure sporting the image of Professor Mann. It’s the use of his image that Mann is complaining about, arguing that the video supports “efforts to sell various products and merchandise.”
“The guy is crazy to threaten legal action,” said Jeff Davis, the President of No Cap and Trade, a large organization that includes the group Mann is threatening to sue, Minnesotans for Global Warming. “A lawsuit would give us full discovery — and there’s a lot to look at in his work.”
In November last year a file appeared on the internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. How this file got into the public domain is still uncertain, but the emails, whose authenticity is no longer in question, provided a startling view into the world of climate research.
In what has become known as Climategate, one could see unambiguous evidence of the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation.
Moreover, the emails showed collusion with other prominent researchers in the US and elsewhere. The CRU supplies many of the authors for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
One might have thought the revelations would discredit the science underlying proposed global warming policy. Indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December’s Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits.
But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the effect of the emails appears to have been small.
The general approach of the scientific community (at least in the US and Britain) has been to see whether people will bother to look at the files in detail (they mostly have not) and to wait until time diffuses the initial impressions to reassert the original message of a climate catastrophe that must be fought with widespread carbon control. This reassertion, however, continues to be suffused by illogic, nastiness and outright dishonesty.
There were, of course, the inevitable investigations of individuals such as Penn State University’s Michael Mann (who manipulated data to create the famous “hockey stick” climate graph) and Phil Jones (director of the CRU).
The investigations were brief, lacked depth and were conducted mainly by individuals already publicly committed to the popular view of climate alarm. The results were whitewashes that are incredible given the data.
Looks like the warmists are getting SLAPP happy (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation).
Climate modeller Andrew Weaver launches libel action in Canada for publishing ‘grossly irresponsible falsehoods’
By David Adam
One of the world’s leading climate scientists has launched a libel lawsuit against a Canadian newspaper for publishing articles that he says “poison” the debate on global warming.
In a case with potentially huge consequences for online publishers, lawyers acting for Andrew Weaver, a climate modeller at the University of Victoria, Canada, have demanded the National Post removes the articles not only from its own websites, but also from the numerous blogs and sites where they were reposted.
Weaver says the articles, published at the height of several recent controversies over the reliability of climate science in recent months, contain “grossly irresponsible falsehoods”. He said he filed the suit after the newspaper refused to retract the articles.
Weaver said: “If I sit back and do nothing to clear my name, these libels will stay on the internet forever. They’ll poison the factual record, misleading people who are looking for reliable scientific information about global warming.”
The four articles, published from December to February, claimed that Weaver cherrypicked data to support his climate research, and that he tried to blame the “evil fossil fuel” industry for break-ins at his office in 2008 to divert attention from reported mistakes in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on which he was lead author.
The lawsuit also highlights several claims in the articles that attempt to question or undermine the scientific consensus on climate change, including that annual global mean temperatures have stopped increasing in the last decade and that climate models are “falling apart”.
Such statements, the lawsuit says, would lead readers to conclude that Weaver “is so strongly motivated by a corrupt interest in receiving government funding that he willfully conceals scientific climate data which refutes global warming in order to keep alarming the public so that it welcomes… funding for climate scientists such as himself.”
Weaver said: “I asked the National Post to do the right thing, to retract a number of recent articles that attributed to me statements I never made, accused me of things I never did, and attacked me for views I never held. To my absolute astonishment, the newspaper refused.”
A spokesman for the National Post said: “Beyond saying that we intend to defend the article, we do not comment on such suits.”
It’s been a rough five months for the credibility of many of the “leading” climate scientists.
First, the ClimateGate e-mails appeared to show unethical or illegal behavior of high profile scientists and a potential conspiracy to distort science for political gain. These weren’t just a few renegade scientists; in the following months, damning information came to light about the world’s leading climate alarmists and their work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Stern Report, the U.S. National Climate Data Center and even NASA.
Even with the 40th anniversary of Earth Day coming up on April 22, Americans are skeptical about the threat of climate change. A March 2010 Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans think the threat of global warming is “generally exaggerated.” That’s the highest in 13 years, according to Gallup.
The public’s receding fear of climate change may be related to the series of scandals and admissions that have been uncovered since Nov. 20 when e-mails from University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were leaked. Those e-mails provided “ammunition” to climate skeptics about the authenticity and ethics surrounding the CRU’s work on global warming science.
The networks news media were unshaken by the apparent bad behavior on the part of the very climate scientists and organizations whose claims they had pushed for years. Less than 10 percent of stories mentioning global warming or climate change since Nov. 20, 2009, referenced any of the climate science scandals.
The first scandal of many – ClimateGate – involved thousands of stolen e-mails showing the potential manipulation of temperature data, a willingness to destroy information rather than release it under British Freedom of Information (FOI) law and the intimidation of publications willing to publish skeptical articles.
This video documents Chicken Little’s journey to Washington DC to see the king. Unlike the traditional children’s story, Chicken Little decided to make his trip once he discovered that the sky wasn’t falling after all and that claims of man-made global warming were untrue. Chicken Little went to Washington to stand-up for his friends at Minnesotans for Global Warming (M4GW), including Elmer-Welmer, Ducky Lucky, Henny Penny and other American patriots. His friends had recently come under attack by “warmers” like Michael Mann.