My favorite Climategate email so far

Just spent a few minutes skimming through the emails and this one caught my eye.

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , "Philip D. Jones" , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate

In laymen terms Trenberth is saying that since an unverified, unvalidated computer model has predicted more warming than has been observed empirically, the empirical observations (i.e. weather stations) must be wrong. .

Title this one: who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.

Climategate – a new spin on Mann made global warming

By now news of the data theft at Britain’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has is widespered. Thousands of emials and messages between the world’s preminent climate scientists have been made available and it doesn look good.

When I woke up and sat down with my morning bowl of cereal and read about all of this I thought it was a hoax … it just seemed to good to be true. I though for years that global warming advocates were scaring the shit out of people using questioable climate models nut I could have never imagined that they were intentionaly and systematiclay misrepresenting their data.

Its like something out of Michael Criton’s “State of Fear”.

This must have taken them by surprise because the damage control has been weak and hastily put together. A blog titled Real Climate, where many of the individuals discussed in the database congregate, has posted their best attempot at a response to this:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of
any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate
research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global
warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching
orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid
will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

There’s not much else of any substance in the response except to repeat that they did nothing wrong.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. The emails detail many disturbing behaviors including:

- collusion between the researchers to destroy and/or hide information subject to FOIA requests
- organized efforts to block publication of contradictory scientific papers

- discussions on how to conceal data sharing with critics

- discussions on how to conceal and dilute inconvenient data points

Some of these will surely be investigated further and with regard to the destruction and concealment of FOIA requested data, criminal charges are a real possibility.

And the most wonderful thing is we have only scratched the surface of what’s been made available.

For anyone interested, a searchable database of the data can be found here.

Vote Today

The Columbia Journalism Review has a good wrap-up of theirs and the rest of the “Reality Based Community’s” non reaction to today’s election:

With the off-year Election Day now upon us, press outlets as diverse as Fox News and The New York Times are continuing to overemphasize the broader significance of today’s contests. (The lead headline at NYTimes.com all day has read, “3 Contests on Election Day Could Signal Political Winds”—with, of course, a caution deep in the text that it is “probably not wise to draw broad lessons from Tuesday’s results.”) But, encouragingly, there’s also been quite a bit of pushback against that narrative from some influential Web sites and, in at least one case, from a leading newspaper.

I would agree that today’s elections aren’t going to mean much come next November when the real Mau Mauing is going to take place, but there seems to be this reflex from some quarters in the media to write off the elections as meaningless because it does reflect the national mood and Obama’s declining numbers to some extent. How to quantify this “extent” is certainly open to interpretation but what’s coming out of the left right now seems to be a lot of truthie spin about how meaningless these are. To say that New Jersey is “meaningless” is a good indication of how hard some are trying to unspin what is going down today. Obama has been campaign both publicly and privately for Corzine and a loss for Corzine today, in bluer than blue New Jersey no less, is a fairly significant bell weather of the wider national mood.

Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.