More Climategate findings...

[JohnnyLingo]

But I am certainly not going to take statman's word for it.

Come on, Lebowski. You're a smart guy. Statman has linked to tons of articles on this, as has oxcoug and others.

No one is asking you to take their word for it.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Come on, Lebowski. You're a smart guy. Statman has linked to tons of articles on this, as has oxcoug and others.

No one is asking you to take their word for it.

I wonder if statman appreciates you being his toady.

[statman]

In this case, I meant the former but the latter applies also. It is standard practice to jettison the paper data once they are entered into the computer. That fact alone is not unusual at all and is not any kind of reason to suspect wrongdoing. Furthermore, there are often adjustments and transformations that are made as the data are originally entered into the database. This includes tossing outliers that are clearly a result of measurement error, adjusting to a uniform time scale, or making transformations for things such as temperature, barometric pressure, salinity, etc. In some cases it may be important to keep around the unscaled data, but it depends entirely on the situation.

I don't know anybody who keeps paper data. In fact, paper is rarely used anymore. The current trend is to provide immediate public access via a variety of electronic means: websites, online databases, web services, etc. This is a high-profile US effort funded by the NSF to provide access to water data:

http://www.cuahsi.org/

I am currently working with the Australian government on a similar effort. They have a new multi-billion dollar program to provide a centralized system for managing water data.

Having said all that, I have not yet investigated the "alterations" in question regarding climate data suffciently well to make a judgment on significance. But I am certainly not going to take statman's word for it. This is a guy that is PRONE TO HYPERBOLE and is wishing that a couple of scientists get raped in prison. Yowza.

We're not talking abotu keeping paper records. These ass-clowns deleted the original values from their data sets and retained only their 'transformed' numbers with no documentation on how transformations were performed. And of course, they refused to release any of the data to the public at large, so no one could check on anything that they'd done - they like their alchemy done in silence, thank you very much!

As the article I posted yesterday showed - two groups of scientists have already balked at portion of the IPCC data. Scientists who provided data from Siberian weather stations, and were wise enough to retain the original data themselves, said that the IPCC data estimates the increase in temperature to be 4X greater than what the actual raw data indicate. Thats quite a transformation!

Researchers with access to Antarctic temperature data say that what the IPCC clowns did there was find one anomalous temperature trend from ONE weather station in Antarctica, and apply the same anomalous increase to the entire continent. That's like saying, "Local temperatures in the US were flat in 2009, but in Provo, UT, it got 1.5 degrees warmer. We'll just apply the 1.5 degree increase to the entire US. Sounds about right." Similar curious data transformations have also occurred with original data from both New Zealand and Australia.

And there's the rub. The IPCC jokers not only don't provide original data, they say they've deleted it. You have to just trust them on their transformations. But in all of the places mentioned, the majority of the temperature increase comes from the transformation, not from any increase in measured temperature (in Siberia, the average measured increased accounted for only about 20% of the total increase. The 'transformation' did the other 80% that they needed to support their "sky is falling" claims. How convenient...).

[statman]

The problem with conspiracies is that you have to have other people to conspire with. There's no way I'm buy a global conspiracy about this. I read all of the emails the very day the story broke, and while some of them are asinine, there is no conspiracy reaching around the globe. The Brotherhood of Nod is more likely.

1079 emails and thousands of pages of fortran code. In one day. I'm calling bullshit on that one waup...

[wuapinmon]

1079 emails and thousands of pages of fortran code. In one day. I'm calling bullshit on that one waup...

Alright, since I don't speak Fortran, you got me there. What I did read were three exhaustive play by play summaries, around three hours of reading (because I was incensed at the time)--I'm a bit better informed about this than your average bullshitter. Now that I've calmed down a little since the story broke, I recognize that these guys are smug jerks, but I do not buy a global conspiracy. The only way to keep secrets like that are if some of the people are dead.

[Indy Coug]

Alright, since I don't speak Fortran, you got me there. What I did read were three exhaustive play by play summaries, around three hours of reading (because I was incensed at the time)--I'm a bit better informed about this than your average bullshitter. Now that I've calmed down a little since the story broke, I recognize that these guys are smug jerks, but I do not buy a global conspiracy. The only way to keep secrets like that are if some of the people are dead.

Define "global conspiracy". I'm not sure why a global conspiracy is necessary if the information was in the hands of relatively few people. All you need after that point are organizations that want to leverage those bogus results for their own personal gain; they don't have to have knowledge of how the books got cooked nor do they have to have participated in the cooking.

[wuapinmon]

Define "global conspiracy". I'm not sure why a global conspiracy is necessary if the information was in the hands of relatively few people. All you need after that point are organizations that want to leverage those bogus results for their own personal gain; they don't have to have knowledge of how the books got cooked nor do they have to have participated in the cooking.

So, go back to my motive question then. If there's no vast or even meager conspiracy the way that some people have tacitly suggested, then what's the motive of these scientists to fudge numbers the way stat is claiming. Are we to believe that it's all so the research money will keep rolling in? Maybe, that's the most plausible explanation, far more than governments and such colluding.

[Indy Coug]

So, go back to my motive question then. If there's no vast or even meager conspiracy the way that some people have tacitly suggested, then what's the motive of these scientists to fudge numbers the way stat is claiming. Are we to believe that it's all so the research money will keep rolling in? Maybe, that's the most plausible explanation, far more than governments and such colluding.

The most plausible explanation to me is that a group of scientists had a theory and spent a lot of time and money trying to prove it. During this time, they got the attention of outside parties, who had their own altruistic/financial/political reasons for the research to produce certain results.

Incomplete and sometimes contradictory data led to poor decisions to manipulate results in a way to bolster their original hypothesis, thus keeping the interest (and funding) alive as more and more outside parties began to rely on their results as justification for their decision making. There is more money and power in change than there is in maintaining the status quo.

[statman]

The most plausible explanation to me is that a group of scientists had a theory and spent a lot of time and money trying to prove it.

The primary scientific players involved (Mann et al), made their careers while there actually looked to everyone like there was global warming, and that man was a major-player in its cause. There's no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas - that's a physical-chemical fact. There's also no doubt that for about 15-20 years from the late 1970's until the late 1990's, there was coincidentally steadily increasing CO2 levels and temperatures. This is when these guys made their careers. Man-made global warming was their meal ticket. CO2 and temperature are linked and man responsible for it.

But then it stopped.

The Earth hasn't warmed in a statistically significant sense in a single year since 1996. Over the whole 13 years, it's warmed only about .2 degrees Fahrenheit - while CO2 has kept on increasing. The CO2-temperature link that had made these guys their careers, is obviously broken. But that's not how they've seen it. They've seen it as measurement error, and have gone to great lengths to support the same causal relationship an effect sizes that they were estimating in the 1980s & early 90s. As we go longer and longer without any appreciable warming, the support of these old estimates gets more and more ridiculous. But they've got too much invested in it. It took this long to overcome political inertia. They can't now just say - "Oops, we were wrong." They'd look like fools.

They'd obviously rather look like liars and really bad scientists - which is what they're going to look like in the end.

The first really telling event in the whole AGW-scientists-are-full-of-crap series of events, was the reaction of the GW community to McIntyre's complete and total debunking of Mann's "hockey stick." His source data was rigged (cherry picked data, especially in the last 40 years), his methods were terrible (his bastardization of the use of principal components analysis shows that he has no idea about how it's supposed to be used), his computer code was rigged (literally, McIntyre showed that with the computer code they used, you feed RANDOM data into it, and the output is still the "hockey stick").

EVERYTHING about the hockey stick said it was either a sham or gross incompetence. And the GW community collectively put their fingers in their ears and screamed "LALALA! We can't hear you!" That and they started with the ad hominem attacks, the suppression of access to journals for McIntyre to publish his paper, the rigging of the peer-review process (see Climategate emails for evidence about this one), the stacking of the deck at all the 'reputable' climate journals (ditto on the emails), etc. When McIntyre's paper came out, they knew the jig was up. That's when they started playing nasty.

And the bureaucrats at the UN/IPCC - crooked as the day is long. They're lining their own pockets and the pockets of the corporations & tin-horn dictators that put them in their positions of unchecked power...

[oxcoug]

The motives actually aren't that complicated

I'd summarize them as follows:

1. Reputation: In a profession that depends on systematic integrity, it can be difficult to recover from having doubled down on half-assed science.

2. Ego/Status: This is different than mere reputation. Guys on "the Team" like Trenberth, Jones and Briffa have been running around the world being treated like saviors and sharing the reputational and material spoils of Al Gore's ridiculous Nobel. It's not easy to walk away from that once you have it.

3. Money/Livelihood: The CRU cleaned up over $20m in grants in the last five years after getting less than half that in the 10 years prior to that. That is for one reason and one reason only - they created the appearance that they were at the leading edge of science that was going to diagnose the world's fever - and rescue it. The second that appearance is compromised

4. Politics: Not for all of them but for many of them. Some of them are just well meaning scientists who succumbed to group think and continued to believe they must be right even after the empirical data started disappearing (i.e. the ice cores which they used to think showed a correlation bt atmospheric carbon and warming, but which newer cores around 2003 with better time resolutions debunked). But many of these people are intensely politically motivated. Bill McKibben is as much or more an activist than he is a scientist. "Science and advocacy have gone to bed and both have had a very good time" as one Canadian put it.

It really doesn't need a global conspiracy to explain it. However - it is beyond dispute that a very wideranging network of interests and institutions have invested HUGE resources and hopes in the realization of a system of global governance. And one of the sentiments unquestionably driving a lot of that is anti-Americanism. Many people abroad see this issue as one that can help them force America into line with European positions.

Again - this doesn't, itself, invalidate all of the science, but it's a fact that governments abroad have come to see "global warming" as a means of reining in American "unilateralism."

[SeattleUte]

This reminds me of when people say what would Joseph Smith's motive have been to fabricate the book of Mormon? Being a cult hero is a lot cooler than being presidennt.

[WashingtonCoug]

I'd summarize them as follows:

1. Reputation: In a profession that depends on systematic integrity, it can be difficult to recover from having doubled down on half-assed science.

2. Ego/Status: This is different than mere reputation. Guys on "the Team" like Trenberth, Jones and Briffa have been running around the world being treated like saviors and sharing the reputational and material spoils of Al Gore's ridiculous Nobel. It's not easy to walk away from that once you have it.

3. Money/Livelihood: The CRU cleaned up over $20m in grants in the last five years after getting less than half that in the 10 years prior to that. That is for one reason and one reason only - they created the appearance that they were at the leading edge of science that was going to diagnose the world's fever - and rescue it. The second that appearance is compromised

4. Politics: Not for all of them but for many of them. Some of them are just well meaning scientists who succumbed to group think and continued to believe they must be right even after the empirical data started disappearing (i.e. the ice cores which they used to think showed a correlation bt atmospheric carbon and warming, but which newer cores around 2003 with better time resolutions debunked). But many of these people are intensely politically motivated. Bill McKibben is as much or more an activist than he is a scientist. "Science and advocacy have gone to bed and both have had a very good time" as one Canadian put it.

It really doesn't need a global conspiracy to explain it. However - it is beyond dispute that a very wideranging network of interests and institutions have invested HUGE resources and hopes in the realization of a system of global governance. And one of the sentiments unquestionably driving a lot of that is anti-Americanism. Many people abroad see this issue as one that can help them force America into line with European positions.

Again - this doesn't, itself, invalidate all of the science, but it's a fact that governments abroad have come to see "global warming" as a means of reining in American "unilateralism."

Bingo!