Coal in their stockings: climategate Christmas
My nephew sarcastically wrote me yesterday morning from Michigan: “We don’t usually get snow days before Christmas, it must be the global warming.” It’s also snowing in California. Sacramento Valley got a rare snowfall on December 7 while the rest of us were being rained on.
If it weren’t for Climategate, this would all quickly be forgotten. I caught this comment on Ace of Spades:
Today’s Washington Post has a top of the fold/A1 story on Climate Change in Australia. It’s 100% false, but since so few know which end is up in Oz, the story gets legs.
I was involved w/a similar WaPo hitpiece last year when they A1’d a story on the previous winter being “completely snow free” in parts of Eastern Europe. I emailed photos I had taken the 1st week of Jan that year in Budapest, Bratislava, and a few other towns & cities (some showing over 1.5 meters snow).
The then ombudsman replied to me that my photos were “unvetted” and therefore “questionable”.
They’re not interested in either “truth” or “reality”.
The emails make that pretty clear; this was results-driven research. The climategate emails and especially the climategate software highlight that. The software results were faked. Every programmer knows this. English can be ambiguous; computer code cannot. It can look ambiguous, but it can’t be ambiguous.
It’s important to remember, though, that the fakery found in the emails and software isn’t just faking the amount of warming, it’s also faking the shape of temperature trends. The “tricks” appear to take a trend that looks natural and make it look unnatural—make it look as if mankind is the source of warming rather than the sun or other cyclical aspects of nature. Climate changes all the time, and at the end of a “little ice age” we should expect rising temperatures—right up to the point where the cycle switches back down again.
The challenge at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit was to make that natural change look unnatural. The climategate deniers are saying, well, CRU’s bad data isn’t a problem, because other people’s data says the same thing as the faked data does.
Well, think about that for a moment. There are only three sources of climate data. And the other two sources have results that resemble known faked results? This could easily end up being another case of cargo cult science: ignoring data that contradicts their pre-conceived results. At CRU, they knew what they wanted the trends to do, and those other sources know the same thing. If the other sources look like bad data, there’s a good chance they are bad data.
fire
- Cargo Cult Science
- “When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.” Richard Feynman’s famous “cargo cult science”, adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974. Rescued from Donald Simanek’s home page.
- Copenhagen’s political science: Sarah Palin
- “‘Climate-gate,’ as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle—the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.”
- Hiding the Decline: Part 1 - The Adventure Begins: Eric S. Raymond at Armed and Dangerous
- “This is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures… then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century. This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.” (Hat tip to DSM at Reboot Congress)
- The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero: Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That?
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“People say ‘Yes, they destroyed emails, and hid from Freedom of information Acts, and messed with proxies, and fought to keep other scientists’ papers out of the journals… but that doesn’t affect the data, the data is still good.”
(Hat tip to Ace at
Ace of Spades HQ)
ice
- Global Warming Strikes Again!: Russ from Winterset at Ace of Spades HQ
- “Now I’m not saying that this is an epic blizzard, but the pack of wolves rampaging down our street hunting for unlucky morons who dare go out in the elements are all wearing little knitted booties on their paws.”
- Hockey stick observed in NOAA ice core data: J. Storrs Hall at Watts Up With That?
- “Yes, Virginia, there was a Medieval Warm Period, in central Greenland at any rate. But we knew that—that’s when the Vikings were naming it Greenland, after all. And the following Little Ice Age is what killed them off, and caused widespread crop failures (and the consequent burning of witches) across Europe. But was the MWP itself unusual?” (Memeorandum thread) (Hat tip to Purple Avenger at Ace of Spades HQ)
- It is snowing in Sacramento valley right now
- “My friends in Sacramento are all excited because it is so rare for them. We take it for granted don’t we. It is beginning to feel more like the ice age isn’t it?”
More Climategate
- Lord Christopher Monckton in San Diego
- I went to see the Americans Protecting Private Property Rights presentation by Lord Christopher Monckton about the economic and scientific fallacies of the anthropogenic global warming movement last night. It was mostly stuff I’ve seen before, mainly from the climategate emails and software leak.
- Climategate crashes Google?
- Google is claiming that, in order to provide the most relevant, objective results in Google News, they need to toss ones that people want to read and comment on. What?
- Google responds to Climategate-gate
- I’m guessing Google got a lot of questions about this; their response didn’t answer my question.
- The (para)psychology of climate change research
- The “they meant well” circling of the wagons reminds me of a branch of scientific research popular when I was in college: parapsychology. Failure to create a falsifiable model ultimately led to an almost religious belief that even cheating proved the existence of psi.
More global warming
- Climate priests cry wolf one more time?
- In science, if your theory’s predictions don’t happen, you need a new theory. In religion, if your beliefs predict something that doesn’t happen, you just keep moving that prediction further into the future.
- Can Californians drink a train?
- The meme goes that even if we’re wrong about global warming, the money spent will still make the world a better place. That is only true if you can drink a high-speed train.
- Cargo cult climate science
- When your real-world evidence contradicts your theory, that isn’t a boon for deniers; that’s a boon for you, because, if you are a scientist, that is how your scientific knowledge advances. Real scientists are embarrassed when they ignore real-world evidence in favor of a mere theory.
- Republican President must keep Roosevelt’s word
- Even if a future conservative president doesn’t believe Americans of Japanese descent are disloyal, says Irwin Stelzer, he should think twice before rescinding President Roosevelt’s Executive Orders. The President’s honor—and the nation’s—is more important than politics.
- Another victim of climate change: science reporting
- The needs of religious reporting are completely different from the needs of science reporting. Treating climate change as a religion is killing science reporting. If we’re not careful, it will kill science as well.
- 14 more pages with the topic global warming, and other related pages
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)
Blogroll
- According To Hoyt
- Ace of Spades HQ
- The Anchoress
- John Hayward
- Legal Insurrection
- National Motorists blog
- The Other McCain
- samizdata.net
- Sultan Knish