Is Gobal Cooling a Continuing Threat?

[BrainSellz]

it all started with ice and it looks that its all gonna end in fire...slowly but surely....cycle repeat....mo

Lol^ high BB

 

[JWP]

Choose your cycle. How long does it take? Even with records of a full cycle its still statistically insignificant.

Sit back and enjoy the ride lol. Forget the fear..

 

[SilverSurfer_OG]

Here we are again.

There was an esteemed scientist on Australian prime time tv, Dr Stephen Schneider a few months ago. It was a *gasp, shock and horror* a public debate on whether or not AGW was in fact real... the man himself is now dead RIP but this was shown shortly after he died. He was one of the most out-spoken and well known member of the IPCC and a major player in the C02 is the devil prognosis. The debate was not screened live but at least there was one of sorts. It was heavily edited and didnt have any real heavyweights on the 'skeptic' side... there were some well informed individuals.

Anyway, on this show he was forced to ADMIT there had been no significant warming since 1999. He agreed with this statement!!

H3ad your map only runs for a few decades? Is that long enough to study any kind of long term projection? I think not.

 

[Kcar]

The earths path through the solar system is a circle, not an ellipse.

 

[BrainSellz]

dunno why they call it the "world"...no need for the "d" when it seems that we live in a "worl aka whirl"....seems to make more sense...mo

 

[Brother Bear]

The earths path through the solar system is a circle, not an ellipse.

Really i always thought the opposite, off to google.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

Rather that debate against misinformation, I'll simply provide a link to all the pertinent facts either side cares to bring up, fully explained and followed up with discussion by both sides.

Solar Cycles are among the topics addressed.

Main Page: http://www.skepticalscience.com/

Summaries of all the arguments, with tabs explaining things on Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced levels: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

Anyone who is interested in understanding the real science showing AGW to be the case, check it out... Anyone who is not interested in understanding it, why are you arguing a topic you're not interested in comprehending?

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

H3ad your map only runs for a few decades? Is that long enough to study any kind of long term projection? I think not.

Well then you should go look at the other information and maps at the links I have provided... The casee for global warming in no way hinges on that one map... no worries... there's tons of data backing up the scientific consensus.

I think it funny that you think attacking one map (which clearly indicates that the OPs premise is false, even given it's short time frame)...

However... Since you brought it up... Taking a few of the warmer decades on record to use are your baseline average would be a poor way to attempt to skew the records to fake warming... Quite the opposite in fact, it would downplay the warmth some.


AGW is, beyond any reasonable doubt, a fact.

Rather that debate against misinformation, I'll simply provide a link to all the pertinent facts either side cares to bring up, fully explained and followed up with discussion by both sides.

Solar Cycles are among the topics addressed.

Main Page: http://www.skepticalscience.com/

Summaries of all the arguments, with tabs explaining things on Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced levels: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

Anyone who is interested in understanding the real science showing AGW to be the case, check it out... Anyone who is not interested in understanding it, why are you arguing a topic you're not interested in comprehending?

 

[SilverSurfer_OG]

O yeah i forgot to mention the sinister bit of the debate.

The good Dr had presented himself well. Quite arrogant but managed to keep it mostly in check.

Then right at the end he told the audience of his wish for a one-world govt. and how much easier it would be to regulate a carbon tax.

 

[sac beh]

Choose your cycle. How long does it take? Even with records of a full cycle its still statistically insignificant.

Don't be fooled. Just because natural cycles exist which effect global climate, isn't by itself reason to dismiss human-caused climate change if the evidence points to it.

How to explain Milankovitch cycles to a hostile Congressman in 30 seconds

 

[BrainSellz]

the head theory was on point and no mr congressman you dont have a phd in this just a bunch of botox in the brow.....mustve new the camera was gonna be in there...lol

 

[SilverSurfer_OG]

AGW is real. Just not anywhere near the extent we were told re Himalayas gone by 2035 and all the other NOW ADMITTED false hoods. It is a tragedy our figures/projections arent working out, lets hide the decline (climategate) and its fun to explode peoples heads in public for daring to question the church of climateology(splattergate). Thats just off the top of my head.

The big lie has been foisted on us by mixing in lots of half-truths, cherry picked data and genuinly human induced tragedies such as plastics in the sea, dead zones and oil spills. None of which has anything to do with c02 levels.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

AGW is real. Just not anywhere near the extent we were told re Himalayas gone by 2035 and all the other NOW ADMITTED false hoods. It is a tragedy our figures/projections arent working out, lets hide the decline (climategate) and its fun to explode peoples heads in public for daring to question the church of climateology(splattergate). Thats just off the top of my head.

Right... every effort is being made by the IPCC to improve the accuracy of each subsequent edition of the report, and include as much accurate pertinent information as possible. There were some minor mistakes made, which were incidental to the core science demonstrating AGW, and should have been more thoroughly vetted...

You must have zero understanding of what was being discussed when the phrase 'hide the decline' was used... since it was absolutely nothing nefarious or dishonest on any level.

The "gates" were debunked completely as much ado about absolutely nothing to everyone who is paying attention to all the facts.


Perhaps you should review the pertinent sections on the websites I posted links to.

If you're really interested in understanding, I've given you the tools... If you're not willing to review all the information that I am familiar with, but instead insist on rehashing old debunked denier propaganda, then we have nothing at all on this topic to discuss.

 

[sac beh]

lets hide the decline (climategate)

Can you give a source for this, other than a soundbite from a media outlet? If you're struggling to find justification for your claim that a decline was hidden and that this act was part of a larger conspiracy to skew climate data to support a non-scientific cause, here's a good place to start with your research:

Climategate: Hiding the Decline?

On a pot site were 90% of the members bitch about how the media and politicians daily deceive us with their soundbites and unsubstantiated claims, you'd think you'd see a lot fewer soundbites and unsubstantiated claims...

 

[grapeman]

Your info is wrong, progressives do not have anything to do with the price of fuel, wall street and our corporate rulers control the prices of all energy. There are thousands of capped oil wells all over the nation that could be used now, no one is stopping that industry except the owners of it.

Tell that to YOUR president obama. he never met an oil well he didn't hate. He never met a piece of shit windmill he didn't love.

 

[grapeman]

Right... every effort is being made by the IPCC to improve the accuracy of each subsequent edition of the report, and include as much accurate pertinent information as possible. There were some minor mistakes made, which were incidental to the core science demonstrating AGW, and should have been more thoroughly vetted...

You must have zero understanding of what was being discussed when the phrase 'hide the decline' was used... since it was absolutely nothing nefarious or dishonest on any level.

The "gates" were debunked completely as much ado about absolutely nothing to everyone who is paying attention to all the facts.


Perhaps you should review the pertinent sections on the websites I posted links to.

If you're really interested in understanding, I've given you the tools... If you're not willing to review all the information that I am familiar with, but instead insist on rehashing old debunked denier propaganda, then we have nothing at all on this topic to discuss.

You drink WAY too much koolaid.

They didn't try to hide anything. LOLOL

A true believer I see. Using the internet to prove his ignorance.

 

[SilverSurfer_OG]

There were some minor mistakes made, which were incidental to the core science demonstrating AGW, and should have been more thoroughly vetted...

You must have zero understanding of what was being discussed when the phrase 'hide the decline' was used... since it was absolutely nothing nefarious or dishonest on any level.

Not minor mistakes in my book. Major fearmongering is how i would put it. The propaganda was coming out of the IPCC in free flow there for a while.

Hiding the decline was the decline in average temps worldwide.

Here is the email

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

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 +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK


Neat "trick" Phil. Why then did he resign when he had done nothing wrong?

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

No... Hide the decline WAS NOT hiding a decline is temperature AT ALL.
There was no decline in temperature to be hidden.

I knew you had no clue what was being discussed.

The 'decline' is a decline in the accuracy of the tree ring proxies due to additional environmental factors (i.e. air pollution)

You really really need to educate yourself. you've been pointed at the truth... why continue to believe the denier distortion? There was NO DECLINE in temperature to hide.

Much ado about nothing.
Phil was exonerated multiple times by independent investigations.
Old news trumped up "gate" bullshit has been completely debunked.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

You drink WAY too much koolaid.

They didn't try to hide anything. LOLOL

A true believer I see. Using the internet to prove his ignorance.

I believe in the irrefutable science... CO2 causing a greenhouse effect has been a 'Known' for over a century... you can buy into the conspiracy theorist hyperbole if you like, or you can learn something... If you choose to remain ignorant, I have nothing to discuss with you since you prefer living in imaginationland.

 

[Grat3fulh3ad]

Here you go SilverSurfer... read and be enlightened, or ignore and remain ignorant.

The Fake Scandal of Climategate

It’s bad enough that global warming contrarians are successfully misleading the public by propagating misconceptions about climate science. But recently it has become popular to attack climate scientists themselves, to accuse them of fraud and conspiracy. Exhibit No. 1 of the climate conspiracy theory is a collection of emails stolen (or possibly leaked) from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA), which appeared on the internet in November 2009.

Founded in 1972, CRU is only a small research unit with around 16 staff. CRU is best known for its work, since 1978, on a global record of instrumental temperature measurements from 1850 to the present, or CRUTEM. CRU’s land surface temperatures are combined with the UK Met Office Hadley Centre’s sea surface temperatures to form the global land-ocean record HadCRUT. CRU has also published reconstructions of pre-1850 temperatures based on tree rings, and CRU scientists have been involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The 1,073 emails span 13 years of correspondence between colleagues at CRU. Much of it is mundane, but in this digital age it took only a matter of hours for contrarians to do some quote-mining. Contrarians alleged that the CRU scientists had manipulated data to support predetermined conclusions, that they had stonewalled Freedom of Information (FoI) requests for data, and that they had corrupted the peer review and IPCC processes.

The story was quickly dubbed “Climategate”, and it spread rapidly from arcane contrarian blogs through conservative columnists to the mainstream media. The hyperbole was turned up to eleven. Conspiracy theorists had a field day, claiming that anyone even mentioned in the emails, or remotely connected to CRU, must also be part of a conspiracy. In this way, the Climategate conspiracy theory snowballed to include the entire field of climate science. The Climategate emails were held up as “the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming”, and the media were only too happy to play up the controversy.

The CRU scientists have been cleared

In the months that followed, there were several inquiries into the allegations resulting from the emails. When a few of the more suggestive email quotes are reeled off by pundits without much context, they can sound pretty damning. But each and every one of these inquiries has found no fraud and no conspiracy.

The most comprehensive inquiry was the Independent Climate Change Email Review led by Sir Muir Russell, commissioned by UEA to examine the behaviour of the CRU scientists (but not the scientific validity of their work). It published its final report in July 2010 (all quotes are taken from this report unless otherwise specified). This inquiry was no whitewash: it examined the main allegations arising from the emails and their implications in meticulous detail. It focused on what the CRU scientists did, not what they said, investigating the evidence for and against each allegation. It interviewed CRU and UEA staff, and took 111 submissions including one from CRU itself. And it also did something the media completely failed to do: it attempted to put the actions of CRU scientists into context.

The Review went back to primary sources to see if CRU really was hiding or falsifying their data. It considered how much CRU’s actions influenced the IPCC’s conclusions about temperatures during the past millennium. It commissioned a paper by Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, on the context of scientific peer review. And it asked IPCC Review Editors how much influence individuals could wield on writing groups. Many of these are things any journalist could have done relatively easily, but few ever bothered to do.

The Review also commented on the broader context of science in the 21st century. To paraphrase from Chapter 5: the emergence of the blogosphere requires significantly more openness from scientists. However, providing the details necessary to validate large datasets can be difficult and time-consuming, and how FoI laws apply to research is still an evolving area. Meanwhile, the public needs to understand that science cannot and does not produce absolutely precise answers. Though the uncertainties may become smaller and better constrained over time, uncertainty in science is a fact of life which policymakers have to deal with. The chapter concludes: “the Review would urge all scientists to learn to communicate their work in ways that the public can access and understand”.

The Review points out the well-known psychological phenomenon that email is less formal than other forms of communication: “Extreme forms of language are frequently applied to quite normal situations by people who would never use it in other communication channels.” The CRU scientists assumed their emails to be private, so they used “slang, jargon and acronyms” which would have been more fully explained had they been talking to the public. And although some emails suggest CRU went out of their way to make life difficult for their critics, there are others which suggest they were bending over backwards to be honest. Therefore the Review found “the e-mails cannot always be relied upon as evidence of what actually occurred, nor indicative of actual behaviour that is extreme, exceptional or unprofessional.” [section 4.3]

So when put into the proper context, what do these emails actually reveal about the behaviour of the CRU scientists? The report concluded (its emphasis):

Climate science is a matter of such global importance, that the highest standards of honesty, rigour, and openness are needed in its conduct. On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.

In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.

But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognize not only the significance of statutory requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the University and indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science. [1.3]

These general findings are more or less consistent across the various allegations the Review investigated. Its specific findings will be summarized in the coming posts in this series.

Do the emails reveal a conspiracy?

The argument that Climategate reveals an international climate science conspiracy is not really a very skeptical one. Sure, it is skeptical in the weak sense of questioning authority, but it stops there. Unlike true skepticism, it doesn’t go on to objectively examine all the evidence and draw a conclusion based on that evidence. Instead, it cherry-picks suggestive emails, seeing everything as incontrovertible evidence of a conspiracy, and concludes all of mainstream climate science is guilty by association. This is not skepticism; this is conspiracy theory.

In reality, Climategate has not thrown any legitimate doubt on CRU’s results, let alone the conclusions of the entire climate science community. The entire work of CRU comprises only a small part of the evidence for AGW. There are all sorts of lines of evidence for global warming, and for a human influence on climate, which in no way depend on the behaviour of the CRU scientists. Global warming has been observed not just on land but also over the oceans and in the troposphere, as well as being confirmed by many other indicators such as ocean heat content, humidity, sea level, glaciers, and Arctic sea ice. And while the hockey stick tells us that humans have caused a profound disturbance to our climate system, we don’t need it to know that humans are causing global warming. The pattern of warming we observe is the same as that long predicted for greenhouse warming: the stratosphere is cooling, nights have warmed faster than days, and winters faster than summers.

But this reality doesn’t fit into the narrative that the contrarians would like to tell: that AGW is a house of cards that is falling down. It is very difficult to attack all of these diverse lines of evidence for global warming. Instead they tend to focus on some of the better publicized ones and try to associate them with a few individuals, making a much easier target. Yet while contrarians have been nosing around in scientists’ emails, the actual science has, if anything, become more concerning. Many major studies during 2009 and 2010 found things may be worse than previously thought.

The media dropped the ball

There is a famous quotation attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This is more true in the internet age than it was when Mark Twain was alive. Unfortunately, it took months for the Climategate inquiries to put on their shoes, and by the time they reported, the damage had already been done. The media acted as an uncritical loudspeaker for the initial allegations, which will now continue to circulate around the world forever, then failed to give anywhere near the same amount of coverage to the inquiries clearing the scientists involved. For instance, Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian published no less than 85 stories about Climategate, but not one about the Muir Russell inquiry.

Even the Guardian, who have a relatively good track record on environmental reporting and were quick to criticize the worst excesses of climate conspiracy theorists, could not resist the lure of stolen emails. As George Monbiot writes, journalists see FoI requests and email hacking as a way of keeping people accountable, rather than the distraction from actual science which they are to scientists. In contrast, CRU director Phil Jones says: “I wish people would spend as much time reading my scientific papers as they do reading my e-mails.”

In defending the CRU scientists, I don’t want to come across as someone who thinks people with respectable jobs can’t do anything wrong. That’s not it at all. Scientists are human like everyone else, they make mistakes all the time, and sometimes they may behave badly. My complaint is that the media seem to expect scientists to be perfect; those who expect perfection are always going to be disappointed.

This is part of a broader problem with climate change reporting: the media holds scientists to far higher standards than it does contrarians. Climate scientists have to be right 100% of the time, but contrarians apparently can get away with being wrong nearly 100% of the time. The tiniest errors of climate scientists are nitpicked and blown out of all proportion, but contrarians get away with monstrous distortions and cherry-picking of evidence. Around the same time The Australian was bashing climate scientists, the same newspaper had no problem publishing Viscount Monckton’s blatant misrepresentations of IPCC projections (not to mention his demonstrably false conspiracy theory that the Copenhagen summit was a plot to establish a world government).

Scientists attempted to defend themselves from these attacks. 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences signed an open letter calling for an end to the politically motivated attacks on climate scientists and urging immediate action on climate change. They submitted the letter as an op-ed to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. All of these newspapers had reported the attacks on climate scientists without any qualms, yet all of them refused to publish the letter. Instead the scientists submitted their open letter to Science.

This appalling double standard must come to an end. Where is the 12-part Guardian investigation on climate denial? Where are all the inquiries into Monckton’s misrepresentations of climate science, and the misinformation he is conveying to policymakers? Why doesn’t the InterAcademy Council review the scholarship of the Wegman report instead of the IPCC? (Wegman’s inquiry into the hockey stick was commissioned by and presented to the US Congress. The blogger Deep Climate has recently alleged that a large fraction of the text in his report was plagiarized. If the media applied the same standards to contrarians as they do to mainstream scientists, this should have been a huge scandal, but the media have given it almost no coverage.)

In the current model of environmental reporting, the contrarians do not lose anything by making baseless accusations. In fact, it is in their interests to throw as much mud at scientists as possible to increase the chance that some of it will stick in the public consciousness. But there is untold damage to the reputation of the scientists against whom the accusations are being made. We can only hope that in future the media will be less quick to jump to conclusions. If only editors and producers would stop and think for a moment about what they’re doing: they are playing with the future of the planet.

What are the scandal’s repercussions?

So the science is unchanged by Climategate. But politically, as many others have lamented, the affair has been very damaging both to public trust in science and to the prospects of mitigating future warming. Less has been written on the repercussions for the scientists themselves.

For one thing, the CRU scientists and other prominent climatologists are being targeted by unbelievably vitriolic and paranoid hate mail. Phil Jones told the Sunday Times he had received a number of death threats including two in one week, and considered suicide. In the US (where freedom of speech means the police cannot do anything about it), the late Stephen Schneider said he’d received hundreds of abusive emails. A number of climate scientists allegedly appeared on a neo-Nazi death list. In Australia too, climate scientists get hate mail, as do environmental journalists and Greens politicians.

Before you dismiss these emailers as nutcases unconnected with more sophisticated contrarians, consider that Marc Morano, communications director for US Republican Senator James Inhofe and owner of the website Climate Depot, makes a habit of posting the email addresses of those he disagrees with. Morano has also been quoted as saying about climate scientists: “I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down. They deserve to be publicly flogged.” Michael Mann told the Guardian some of his hate mail looked “cut-and-paste”. And during the Copenhagen conference, The Australian attacked Ian Fry, an Australian representing Tuvalu, because he lives away from the coast; the front-page story included a photo of his house, making it possible to deduce his address.

Schneider said he noticed a dramatic increase in hate mail whenever certain right-wing commentators attacked climate scientists. When the CRU email story broke, popular Fox News personality Glenn Beck lamented that “there’s not enough knives on planet Earth” for the “dishonored scientists” to kill themselves. Talk radio personality Rush Limbaugh, said they should be “drawn and quartered”. Another talk radio host, Alex Jones, called proponents of AGW a “devil cult” who “want your property”, “a bunch of eugenicist killers” who “know it’s a scam” and “hate freedom”, “bloodthirsty control freaks” who “want to kill you and your family” (though he insisted he was “not trying to demonise them”).

Meanwhile, the US Republican Party has stepped up its war on science. In March, Republican Senator James Inhofe called for a criminal prosecution of at least 17 climate scientists — a witch-hunt against anyone even remotely associated with the CRU emails. The Republican Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, went further. In April, alleging that Michael Mann committed fraud against taxpayers, Cuccinelli demanded that the University of Virginia (UVA) provide documents relating to all of Mann’s government research grants while he was at UVA between 1999 and 2005; as well as all Mann’s correspondence with anybody on a list of 40 individuals, correspondence referencing any of those people, and correspondence with UVA administrators; and more. After this was thrown out of court in August because the grants in question were out of Cuccinelli’s jurisdiction, Cuccinelli came back with a narrower case concerning a single grant which had nothing to do with the hockey stick, alleging that some of Mann’s conclusions were not statistically rigorous. As RealClimate pointed out: “This is not just an attack on Mike Mann, it is an attack on the whole scientific enterprise.”

All in all, it has been a pretty terrible year to be a climate scientist. These hard-working scientists should be the real heroes of this story, yet instead they have been the recipients of political bullying tactics.

Far from exposing a global warming fraud, “Climategate” merely exposed the depths to which contrarians are willing to sink in their attempts to manufacture doubt about AGW. They cannot win the argument on scientific grounds, so now they are trying to discredit researchers themselves. Climategate was a fake scandal from beginning to end, and the media swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. The real scandal is the attacks on climate science which have done untold damage to the reputation of the scientists involved, the reputation of climate science (maybe even science generally), and the fight to save the planet.

The first set of allegations against the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) concern its main area of research, the instrumental temperature record CRUTEM. The CRUTEM analysis is very similar to those produced by independent groups such as NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Nevertheless, the contrarians allege that CRU manipulated data to fabricate a global warming trend; that CRU prevented critics from accessing the raw data and other information required to check its conclusions; and that CRU director Phil Jones failed to admit having cited fraudulent data twenty years ago. Thus they claim CRUTEM cannot be trusted.

To create the CRUTEM surface temperature analysis, CRU scientists take temperature data from 4,138 stations, and for each station they calculate the mean temperature for 1961-1990 and temperature anomalies relative to that period. They then arrange all this data into a 5x5 degree grid. This process requires that adjustments be made to account for sources of error such as changing station locations or urban heat island effect.

Following Climategate, several amateur climate bloggers have attempted their own analyses of global temperature trends, and arrived at very similar results to CRU, GISS, and NCDC. The Muir Russell Review took a similar approach, going back to primary sources and obtaining raw station data to see if it was possible for critics to replicate CRU’s results. They were able to acquire as much data as necessary from both the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). They proceeded to write the computer code needed to analyse the data in the space of two days, without requiring any information from CRU.

Thus the Review demonstrated that CRU was not hiding anything: sufficient data was available to replicate CRU’s results, and any competent researcher would be able to analyse it. Furthermore, they had nothing to hide: both adjusted and unadjusted data yielded very similar results to CRUTEM, and CRU’s homogenisation adjustments make no significant difference to the global average. Although the Review stopped short of drawing scientific conclusions, it appears that CRU’s conclusions are robust. So Climategate is not “the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming”.

Based on this, the Review concluded (its emphasis):

CRU was not in a position to withhold access to [temperature] data or tamper with it. We demonstrated that any independent researcher can download station data directly from primary sources and undertake their own temperature trend analysis.

On the allegation of biased station selection and analysis, we find no evidence of bias. Our work indicates that analysis of global land temperature trends is robust to a range of station selections and to the use of adjusted or unadjusted data. The level of agreement between independent analyses is such that it is highly unlikely that CRU could have acted improperly to reach a predetermined outcome. [1.3.1]

This is stated more explicitly in Chapter 6:

It is impossible for a third party to tamper improperly with the data unless they have also been able to corrupt the GHCN and NCAR sources. We do not consider this to be a credible possibility, and in any case this would be easily detectable by comparison to the original NMO records [6.4]

Of course, this means nothing to the diehard conspiracy theorists, but hopefully it will help to convince the public.

The Review also considered the availability of metadata; that is, whether there was enough information available to identically replicate CRUTEM. As noted above, the computer code was no problem. Getting an exact list of temperature stations included in CRUTEM was more of an issue. Such a list was provided with the first version of CRUTEM in 1986, but CRU neglected to update it in the latest version, CRUTEM3, published in 2006.

An up-to-date list was not released until October 2007, in response to an FoI request. Even then, the Review Team found it was not straightforward to identify all the stations, due to a lack of standardisation. However, 90% could be matched with stations in the GHCN database, and CRU informed them that the remaining 10% could be obtained from other sources such as the relevant National Meteorological Office. As a “test case”, the Review did obtain data directly from the Japanese NMO.

The Review makes the following criticism of CRU:

CRU should have made available an unambiguous list of the stations used in each of the versions of [CRUTEM] at the time of publication. We find that CRU’s responses to reasonable requests for information were unhelpful and defensive. [1.3.1]

The inquiry also briefly dealt with the allegation “that Jones was complicit in malpractice in failing to respond appropriately to allegations of fraud made against […] Professor Wei-Chyung Wang”, whose data Jones cited in a 1990 paper on the urban heat island effect. The allegedly “fabricated” claim was that few if any of a certain selection of Chinese weather stations had moved over time. Wang’s university investigated and rejected the accusation of fraud. Meanwhile, Jones admitted that the stations “probably did move” and responded within one year with a peer-reviewed analysis confirming the original conclusions. In any case, this was only one paper and does not change anything we know about the urban heat island effect.

The overall implication of the allegations was to cast doubt on the extent to which CRU’s work in this area could be trusted and should be relied upon and we find no evidence to support that implication. [1.3.1]

A second set of allegations relate to the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU)’s paleoclimate reconstructions, which use tree rings as a proxy for temperature change. Although this is a relatively obscure branch of climate science, it was prominently featured in the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR). Consequently, it has become a prime target for contrarians; as the Muir Russell Review puts it, they have long argued that the way CRU handled data was “intended to bias the scientific conclusions towards a specific result and to set aside inconvenient evidence.”

In what is probably the most notorious of the CRU emails, dated 16/11/1999, Jones wrote:

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) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

This email is often quoted by commentators with little or no understanding of what it refers to, so it is worth taking some time to explain the context. Jones was discussing a graph for the cover of an obscure 1999 World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report, which depicted both instrumental temperature data and reconstructed temperatures based on tree rings. The “decline” refers to the fact that some tree ring series (though not all) diverge from instrumental records in recent decades, for reasons that are not fully understood (although there are grounds for believing it is only a recent phenomenon). The “trick” was a way of presenting the data in this one particular graph, namely to truncate the tree ring data at the point when it diverged.

Anyway, contrarians take the use of the words “trick” and “hide the decline” as evidence that this was done to deceive, and this was the allegation that the inquiry examined. More generally, the contrarians claim that the divergence problem “may not have been properly taken into account when expressing the uncertainty associated with reconstructions”.

Contrarians have also accused CRU researchers (in particular their leading expert on tree ring reconstructions, Keith Briffa) of cherry-picking tree ring series that would produce a favoured result, namely that the late 20th century was warmer than the Medieval Warm Period. They allege that Briffa’s selection of an obscure tree ring chronology from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia “had an undue influence on all of the lines appearing in Chapter 6 of the 4th IPCC Report” (AR4); and that CRU withheld access to the Yamal data. And they use all these alleged flaws in CRU’s work to claim that less confidence should be placed in the conclusions of that AR4 chapter (specifically, the conclusion that current temperatures are likely the warmest in 13 centuries).

Regarding the “hide the decline” email, Jones has explained that when he used the word “trick”, he simply meant “a mathematical approach brought to bear to solve a problem”. The inquiry made the following criticism of the resulting graph (its emphasis):

[T]he figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain — ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text. [1.3.2]

But this was one isolated instance that occurred more than a decade ago. The Review did not find anything wrong with the overall picture painted about divergence (or uncertainties generally) in the literature and in IPCC reports. The Review notes that the WMO report in question “does not have the status or importance of the IPCC reports”, and concludes that divergence “is not hidden” and “the subject is openly and extensively discussed in the literature, including CRU papers.” [1.3.2]

As for the treatment of uncertainty in the AR4’s paleoclimate chapter, the Review concludes that the central Figure 6.10 is not misleading, that “[t]he variation within and between lines, as well as the depiction of uncertainty is quite apparent to any reader”, that “there has been no exclusion of other published temperature reconstructions which would show a very different picture”, and that “[t]he general discussion of sources of uncertainty in the text is extensive, including reference to divergence”. [7.3.1]

Regarding CRU’s selections of tree ring series, the Review does not presume to say whether one series is better than another, though it does point out that CRU have responded to the accusation that Briffa misused the Yamal data on their website. The Review found no evidence that CRU scientists knowingly promoted non-representative series or that their input cast doubt on the IPCC’s conclusions. The much-maligned Yamal series was included in only 4 of the 12 temperature reconstructions in the AR4 (and not at all in the TAR).

What about the allegation that CRU withheld the Yamal data? The Review found that “CRU did not withhold the underlying raw data (having correctly directed the single request to the owners)”, although “we believe that CRU should have ensured that the data they did not own, but on which their publications relied, was archived in a more timely way.” [1.3.2]

In summary, while the inquiry did criticize an individual graph, it found no evidence of CRU intentionally manipulating tree ring data or downplaying the associated uncertainties to mislead the public

http://www.skepticalscience.com/fake-scandal-Climategate.html