The main stream media has a lot of skin in the Global Warming game. They have been promoters rather than reporters; studiously ignoring troubling gaps in the science and complete failings in the IPCC forecasts and predictions. Their use for the rational skeptic has been to brand him a fool. Even carefully researched opinions contrary to the promoted story line has been ridiculed, dismissed and buried.
It is no surprise that the media has largely ignored and downplayed the CRU emails that were posted about 72 hours ago.
The Oprah Retirment Story was so good, who has time for real news?
And why not? What’s a landmark event at the core of the “rigorous science” underpinning trillions of dollars of global policy compared to a story about Oprah Winfrey’s impending 2011 retirement? The lack of interest on Nov 21st? I’m sure they were just resting up for the deluge of stories to be released on Nov 22nd . . . oh never mind.
Fortunately anyone can – and should – bypass the current joke we refer to as the main stream media and access the CRU documents themselves, especially if they were inclined to take the bait offered by Al Gore, the media, the IPCC and the heavily funded warmist scientists. Back in 2006, people couldn’t wait to jump on that baited hook and swallow it deeply – I recall the looks and comments I have received over these past few years for daring to question the science and politics of this issue.
Eroding Creditibility
But as we see in the Pew Research data, objective reality comes to bear over time. Especially when observable conditions run counter to the predictions that were cast with such force and certainty. My objection has always been to degree and severity of the claims made by the Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) crowd. That is a specific charge and it carries the burden of proof. Present your claim. Show the data and techniques used to produce it so it may be challenged or confirmed. That is the way it is supposed to work. But that is not the way it has worked. The divergence from accepted practices of scientific research combine with Al Gore’s politicization of the issue raised my suspicions. So you have to forgive me for not waxing up my surfboard in anticipation of riding a prairie wave.
Finding serious problems in the CRU correspondence is a very easy task. So easy that even a reporter from the NY Times could handle it, if he or she actually tried. Maybe an editor there should consider tasking the story to a reporter that hasn’t published two global warming books, a reporter that is not personally vested in playing down this breach of public and scientific trust. Finding a serious issue took me about 45 seconds. I simply googled, “our-conclusions-are-wrong site:anelegantchaos.org.” Then looked at this file.
The subject of this email is ‘On “what to do?”‘ Considering that the scientific method prescribes what to do, I thought that was a pretty curious subject. But not nearly as curious as the text itself. We seem to have an IPCC contributor addressing other contributors with his concerns. Ironically, he is iterating some of the basic concerns echoed by the “skeptics”; that the data is cloudy, the techniques are fluid, and the conclusion may be driving the science rather than the other way around. This patient recognized the asylum growing up around him:
First let me say that in general, as my own opinion, I feel rather
unconfortable about using not only unpublished but also un reviewed material as the backbone of our conclusions (or any conclusions).
I realize that chapter 9 is including SRES stuff, and thus we can and need to do that too, but the fact is that in doing so the rules of IPCC have been softened to the point that in this way the IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science (which is its proclaimed goal) but production of results. The softened condition that the models themself have to be published does not even apply because the Japanese model for example is very different from the published one which gave results not even close to the actual outlier version (in the old dataset the CCC model was the outlier). Essentially, I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes. I think this will set a dangerous precedent which might [under]mine the IPCC credibility, and I am a bit unconfortable that now nearly everybody seems to think that it is just ok to do this. Anyways, this is only my opinion for what it is worth.
I take exception to media attempts to ignore this event or declare it a minor “dust up.” This is a big deal. It is a major violation of public trust and it undermines the credibility of the IPCC studies. The CRU emails clearly establish that some of the key scientists advocating for AGW and authoring the IPCC report manipulated data in order to produce their desired outcome, then worked to keep that data and their techniques hidden. They worked to keep dissenting papers from being published in the scientific climate literature then hypocritically dismissed dissenting research because it was not published. When subject to a Freedom of Information Act disclosure they conspired to delete and destroy data. These are scientists? These are the prescribed techniques of the Scientific Method?
It is good and necessary that scientists involve themselves in work that may will shape the world we inhabit. But that comes with responsibility. When scientists make extraordinary claims and charges, they should back it up with extraordinarily careful and diligent research. The global warming scientsts did not. They owed us better than this:
“ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently – I have no memory of this at all – we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?
OH F**K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”
Those interested in further reading will have no shortage of prime material at their disposal (main stream media excluded of course). These two pieces are nice overviews that will introduce a newly alert reader the background story. It’s eye opening material:
