Science relies on open debate.   When I first saw the story, my instinct was to give the scientists the benefit of the doubt: many discussions within a scientific research group, if taken out of context and without a thorough understanding of the mathematical and scientific issues involved, could sound to a lay person as “scientific misconduct” especially when people read into them what they want to.  However, the more I read these emails, that doesn’t seem to be the case.  The public is surely blowing some out of context, but with so many of the emails pointing to the same forms of scientific misconduct, there seems to be a very worrisome pattern.  If these emails truly are evidence of what they seem to be, it hurts the scientific community as a whole by degrading public trust.   I keep waiting for someone to put them in perspective from the point of view of CRU, but they seem to be more suspiciously silent than I would expect…

If you haven’t been following the news, basically one of the leading climate change research institutions, the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, or CRU, had their email servers hacked.  The anonymous hackers posted a large file containing emails and some scientific data that they took from the server.  CRU has confirmed the hacking and that the emails appear to be genuine.  There are many news sites and bloggers covering the story, with the previous link being to the Herald Sun, and Australian newspaper.   Ace of Spades HQ picked up the story (twice, lol), which is where I learned about it. 

Let’s put this story into some context, and I’ll be as neutral as I can.  First of all, contrary to what the news media may have led you to believe, the scientific discussion for or against global warming is not a cut-and-dry, black-or-white one.  Even within the community of scientists that believe in anthropogenic (man-made) global  warming climate change (AGW), there is a debate over the details.  There are questions over how sensitive the climate is to additional CO2, whether or not some (if not all) of the warming can be attributed to solar activity, and there is many discussions over just how to analyze – and interpret - the data.  The details of all of this is for a different post.  The important thng to note is this: different ways of analyzing the data can lead to drastically different interpretations nad results, especially when dealing with a politically heated topic as this.   Steve McIntyre, one of the major players in this story/debate - isn’t a climatologist.  However, he has been researching this topic for quite some time, and his arguments have been quite compelling.  He runs the site Climate Audit (which is suffering from major server overload since this story broke), and has been attacking the “Hockey Stick” graph for quite some time, along with the methodology of the authors of the graph, Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes.   The emails that were hacked are correspondence between Mann and other authors at CRU.

Because Climate Audit is running so slowly right now, I suggest reading the story at Watts Up With That (WUWT), who mirried Climate Audit’s post.  WUWT has a good selection of damning emails here. 

  Here are a couple of selections (below the fold):

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich

Taken by itself, I wouldn’t say that this was evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.  As a scientist, we are always processing our data in ways that we believe justifiable in order to demonstrate what we believe the trend to actually be.  However, manipulating your data in order to cover up unwanted results and support a hypothesis that the data doesn’t support is evidence of scientific misconduct.  Throwing out a data point because you believe the instrument malfunctioned or you have dirt on a sensor is one thing, but changes to “hide a decline” seems to be pushing it.  The question I have is whether Jones was being careless in how he phrased his data processing, or if this is part of a larger pattern. 

Other emails seem to point to the later:

From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit

In the above email, “CA” is referring to the previously mentioned website Climate Audit.  Now,  McIntyre have been trying to get his hands on the raw, unprocessed data from Mann, et al in order to try to reproduce their analysis.  This is actually part of the scientific process – scientific data is supposed to be open to peer review.  Mann, et al, have been resisting calls to release their data – even claiming it was lost.  There was even a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed (and here), and emails would’ve been subject to such a request…

A couple of months ago, by the way, McIntyre, with the help of some scientific journal editors, did manage to get the raw data.  I’ll find the link and post it later, but what McIntyre found was an intentional manipulation of the data to produce the Hockey Stick.  When he averaged the data in a way that made a bit more sense (the authors of the study would disagree of course), he found that it completely wiped out global warming trends…

And by the way, speaking of lack of global warming, how about this email:

 

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

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
***

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.***

Emphasis added by Bolt at the Herald Sun, who I’m copying and pasting from.  There’s more at the links. 

Exit question: Hacker or whistleblower?

Hypocrite – a good word to describe President Obama.  While he is screaming and declaring his “outrage”  at AIG for paying out bonuses based on “performance” in 2008 – which is ridiculous in itself – he apparently forgot that he received $104,333 from AIG in 2008. Hat tip to CG for the link and to Cara Ellison for the short but sweet summary.   

To be fair, the list of politicians who have received contributions from AIG is long and it includes Republicans and Democrats alike (although it shows Democrats received the majority of the contributions in 2008).  In my opinion, anyone pretending to be offended by AIG paying out bonuses, while receiving money from them is a hypocrite. 

Anyway, this reminds me of a comparison someone made about Democrats trying to “fix” the housing and economic problems – they said something like “it’s like an arsonist coming back and trying to help put out a fire he started.”  I wish I could remember the source of that quote.  The point being that first Democrats create these horrible messes, and then pretend to be outraged, all while still managing to make a profit.   

One of the biggest claims Democrats/liberals always make is that Republicans stand for big corporations.  The repeat over and over that Republicans are not for the people, they’re for big business, etc, etc.  The truth (and I learned it recently and the hard way) is that politicians from both sides get money from corporations.  I’ll be the first to say that I was (maybe still am to some point) a Wal-Mart hater.  I had it in my head that Wal-Mart “oppressed” workers and they got away with it by paying off Republicans – yes, I was one of many victims of the mainstream media.  I’ve slowly learned that corporations are necessary to create a little something that the U.S. needs – it’s called JOBS.  

I don’t want to ramble – just wanted to note Obama’s hypocrisy – not that it’s the first, or the last time, there will be opportunity to point it out.

Yesterday, after picking up my daughter from my mom’s house, we were in the car and my daughter mentioned that her pinky finger hurt.  Naturally, the next question was why?  Did you fall?  Did someone hit you?  All of the motherly questions that tend to stream out of my mouth whenever she tells me any part of her body hurts.  I did not expect her answer though.  She explained that Earth Day was coming and that Student Council (under guidance from the Teacher Advisor) decided to weed the grass field for the school.   

Pause for a minute and grasp this scenario.  The school’s “grass field” is actually a City park and it is very large.  My daughter and other students were trying to do a good deed no doubt, but I was not thrilled about the idea of her pulling weeds in a City park (I think the City has landscapers for this) – and most especially without the right tools (such as gloves maybe?).  

I explained this to my daughter, to which she replied in an exasperated tone, “Moooooom, it’s for Earth Day.”  I asked her what weed pulling had to do with making the Earth a better place.  Silence.  I proceeded to explain to her that I was glad she was doing a good deed, but that whenever you take an action you have to know why you’re taking that action.  She then explained that the teacher asked them to do it, and how could she question the teacher.  Uh-huh – red flag going up –  most definitely.  

I had a long talk with her about her right to question teachers and things that she is told.  I told her the only way to learn is to ask questions and not just follow instructions.  I’m sure the teacher might have had a good explanation (like we’re planting new plants) or whatever, but the point is my daughter should have asked why she was being asked to pull weeds.  

Anyway, that’s how I got to thinking about Earth Day and global warming and “Going Green.”   

Here’s what I’m thinking, liberals take this stance of protecting the earth, saving the planet, global warming is going to kill us all, and then try to legislate the solutions, i.e. tax breaks for Hybrids, and strict fines for leaving carbon footprints – we must offset our prints, etc., etc.  Why do we need to have government dictate to us what should be common sense?  

Growing up in a poor Mexican family, we were “going green” long ago – before it was a hip new term.  My mom always recycled aluminum cans that we either a) used, b) picked up from the streets, or c) she brought from her job.  The money was used to buy milk, bread, or whatever else we needed at the time.  Before it became trendy to buy “vintage” clothing, my mom was shopping for our family at Goodwill and Salvation Army.  This is evidence by my 3^rd grade school picture where I’m wearing a yellow T-shirt with the name of a middle school I had never heard of (it’s true people).   

I’m sure it is not just poor Mexican families, but rather people with common sense.  People that know it’s not good to throw trash on the street, or people that just know that reusing items is better, or people that prefer to bicycle places instead of drive all of the time.  Why do we need the government to step in based on a THEORY.  Yes, I said it.  Global warming is a theory – it is not proven fact.  Just because there are many scientists out there claiming it as a fact, and Al Gore has made tons of cash promoting this theory, it does not make it fact.  If people cared enough to read they would find many scientists who state global warming is just part of the Earth’s many climate cycles.   

It’s funny that Obama just said something, when justifying his stupid decision (this will be a topic for another day) to fund embryonic stem cell research with taxpayer money, that relates to this. He stated “we base our public policies on the soundest science,” and appoint scientific advisors based on expertise and “not their politics or ideology.” Right.  

I don’t think anyone is asking people to stop caring about the planet.  The problem is that liberals are forcing people to “care” by imposing laws and fines on things that should be common sense. To make it worse is that liberal logic (oxymoron?) is way off – maybe there is just no logic.  For some things they claim they want to let science work (stem cell research) and for others like global warming they cannot accept that it is scientifically only a THEORY.   

I’m finding that liberals are inconsistent – they want others to pay while they play and they will say whatever it takes to make it happen.  Conservatives work and weed the fields, while liberals have fun and then come and pick our flowers.