AGW/Climategate Reports

[Corlyss_D]

This topic is so hot and so current I'm creating this hub for future posts about AGW/Climategate for the foreseeable future. Randall and Keaggy have been doing yeoman work trying to keep members up on the revelations. It must be said that the expose work is being done not by the US press, which has a vested interest in AGW as a central agenda item of the current administration, but by the UK media, which apparently has been unremitting in its efforts to get to the roots of Climategate and the interlocking conspiracies that it revealed.

NB: Any posts not related directly to AGW/Climategate will be deleted or split. So try to stay on topic if you want to contribute to this thread.

January 31, 2010
Global warming science implodes overseas: American media silent
Rick Moran

The revelations have been nothing short of jaw dropping. Dozens - yes dozens - of claims made in the IPCC 2007 report on climate change that was supposed to represent the "consensus" of 2500 of the world's climate scientists have been shown to be bogus, or faulty, or not properly vetted, or simply pulled out of thin air.

We know this because newspapers in Great Britain are doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates who were pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN.

Glaciergate, tempgate, icegate, and now, disappearing Amazon forests not the result of warming, but of logging. And the report the IPCC based their bogus "science" on was written by a food safety advocate according to this Christopher Booker piece in the Telegraph :

Dr North next uncovered "Amazongate". The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger "up to 40 per cent" of the Amazon rainforest - as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain's two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of "extreme weather events" such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages - when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

This is a great story. It has everything a media outlet could desire; scandal, conflict of interest (IPCC head Pauchuri runs companies that benefited from climate scare stories), government cover ups - why then, has this unraveling of the basis of climate science that posited catastrophic man made warming not been making any news at all in the United States?

It's too easy to simply claim "bias." Media outlets don't pass up juicy stories that could potentially increase their readership and revenue for ideological purposes (except the New York Times - and even they could spin all of this to show skeptics to be using flawed arguments like the liberal Guardian is doing in England).

Perhaps its time to ask why this story being revealed overseas with new revelations almost daily in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Timesonline, and other Fleet Street publications can't get any traction here. Blogs like Watts up with That and Climate Depot are keeping us informed of the latest from England but we hear crickets chirping when it comes to stories from major newspapers and - outside of Fox News - the cable nets.

As global warming the political movement is losing its scientific justification, the American people - who will be asked to foot the bill to the tune of trillions of dollars if Obama goes ahead with his "green" plans - are grossly uninformed about the state of the debate. Until the media starts to give this story the coverage it deserves, that state of affairs will not change.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/201 ... plode.html


The Hottest Hoax in the World



BY Ninad D. Sheth | 30 January 2010

It was presented as fact. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, led by India’s very own RK Pachauri, even announced a consensus on it. The world was heating up and humans were to blame. A pack of lies, it turns out.
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrarywise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see? —Alice in Wonderland

The climate change fraud that is now unravelling is unprecedented in its deceit, unmatched in scope—and for the liberal elite, akin to 9 on the Richter scale. Never have so few fooled so many for so long, ever.

The entire world was being asked to change the way it lives on the basis of pure hyperbole. Propriety, probity and transparency were routinely sacrificed.

The truth is: the world is not heating up in any significant way. Neither are the Himalayan glaciers going to melt as claimed by 2035. Nor is there any link at all between natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and global warming. All that was pure nonsense, or if you like, ‘no-science’!

The climate change mafia, led by Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), almost pulled off the heist of the century through fraudulent data and suppression of procedure. All the while, they were cornering millions of dollars in research grants that heaped one convenient untruth upon another. And as if the money wasn’t enough, the Nobel Committee decided they should have the coveted Peace Prize.

But let’s begin at the beginning. Mr Pachauri has no training whatsoever in climate science. This was known all the time, yet he heads the pontification panel which proliferates the new gospel of a hotter world. How come? Why did the United Nations not choose someone who was competent? After all, this man is presumably incapable of differentiating between ocean sediments and coral terrestrial deposits, nor can he go about analysing tree ring records and so on. That’s not jargon; these are essential elements of a syllabus in any basic course on climatology.

You cannot blame him. His degree and training is in railroad engineering. You read it right. This man was educated to make railroads from point A to point B.

THE GATHERING STORM

There are many casualties in this sad story of greed and hubris. The big victim is the scientific method. This was pointed out in great detail by John P Costella of the Virginia-based Science and Public Policy Institute. Science is based on three fundamental pillars. The first is fallibility. The fact that you can be wrong, and if so proven by experimental input, any hypothesis can be—indeed, must be—corrected.

This was systematically stymied as early as 2004 by the scientific in-charge of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit. This university was at the epicentre of the ‘research’ on global warming. It is here that Professor Phil Jones kept inconvenient details that contradicted climate change claims out of reports.

The second pillar of science is that by its very nature, science is impersonal. There is no ‘us’, there is no ‘them’. There is only the quest. However, in the entire murky non-scientific global warming episode, if anyone was a sceptic he was labelled as one of ‘them’. At the very apex, before his humiliating retraction, Pachauri had dismissed a report by Indian scientists on glaciers as “voodoo science”.

The third pillar of science is peer group assessment. This allows for validation of your thesis by fellow scientists and is usually done in confidence. However, the entire process was set aside by the IPCC while preparing the report. Thus, it has zero scientific value.

The fact that there was dissent within the climate science teams, that some people objected to the very basis of the grand claims of global warming, did not come out through the due process. It came to light when emails at the Climate Research Centre at East Anglia were hacked in November 2009. It is from the hacked conversations that a pattern of conspiracy and deceit emerge. It is a peek into the world of global warming scaremongering—amplify the impact of CO2, stick to dramatic timelines on destruction of forests, and never ask for a referral or raise a contrary point. You were either a believer in a hotter world or not welcome in this ‘scientific fold’.

HOUSE OF CARDS AND COLOUR OF CASH

So we have the fact that a non-expert heads the IPCC. We have the fact that glaciers are not melting by 2035; this major scaremongering is now being defended as a minor error (it was originally meant to be 2350, some have clarified). The date was spouted first by Syed Hasnain, an Indian glacier expert, in an interview to a magazine. It had no scientific validity, and, as Hasnain has himself said, was speculative.

On the basis of that assertion, The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) that Pachauri heads and where Hasnain works in the glaciology team, got two massive chunks of funding. The first was estimated to be a $300,000 grant from Carnegie Corporation and the second was a part of the $2 million funding from the European Union. So you write a report that is false on glaciers melting and get millions to study the impact of a meltdown which will not be happening in the first place. Now if this is not a neat one, what is?

The same goes for dire predictions on Amazon rain forests. The IPCC maintained that there would be a huge depletion in Amazon rain forests because of lack of precipitation. Needless to add, no Amazon rain forest expert could be trusted to back this claim. They depended on a report by a freelance journalist and activist, instead, and now it has blown up in their faces.

There’s plenty more in this sordid tale. For one thing, there is no scientific consensus at all that man-made CO2 emissions cause global warming, as claimed by the IPCC. In a recent paper, Lord Monckton of Brenchley, who has worked extensively on climate change models, argues: ‘There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps—if any—we should take; whether (if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we should take any steps at all.’

An investigation by Dr Benny Peiser, director, Global Warming Policy Foundation, has revealed that only 13 of the 1,117, or a mere 1 per cent of the scientific papers crosschecked by him, explicitly endorse the consensus as defined by the IPCC. Thus the very basis of the claim of consensus on global warming is false. And so deeply entrenched is the global warming lobby, the prestigious journal Science did not publish a letter that Dr Peiser wrote pointing out the lack of consensus.

Speaking to Open, says Dr Peiser, “The IPCC process by which it arrives at its conclusions lacks balance, transparency and due diligence. It is controlled by a tightly knit group of individuals who are completely convinced that they are right. As a result, conflicting data and evidence, even if published in peer-reviewed journals, are regularly ignored, while exaggerated claims, even if contentious or not peer-reviewed, are often highlighted in IPCC reports. Not surprisingly, the IPCC has lost a lot of credibility in recent years. It is also losing the trust of more and more governments who are no longer following its advice. Until it agrees to undergo a root and branch reform, it will continue to haemorrhage credibility and trust. The time has come for a complete overhaul of its structure and workings.”

Another fraud is in the very chart central to Pachauri’s speech at the Copenhagen summit. As Lord Monckton has pointed out, ‘The graph is bogus not only because it relies on made-up data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, but also because it is overlain by four separate trendlines, each with a start-date carefully selected to give the entirely false impression that the rate of warming over the past 150 years has itself been accelerating, especially between 1975 and 1998. The truth, however—neatly obscured by an ingenious rescaling of the graph and the superimposition of the four bogus trend lines on it—is that from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940 the warming rate was exactly the same as the warming rate from 1975 to 1998.’

PACHAURI’S WRONG NUMBERS



This chart, tracking mean global temperature over the past 150 years, was central to the presentation that IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri made at the Copenhagen environment summit. Many scientists believe that the graph is fraudulent. First, there are strong allegations that the data, collected from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, is a tissue of lies. Plus, as British climate change expert Lord Christopher Monckton puts it: “(The main graph, in darker blue) is overlain by four separate lines, each carefully selected to give the entirely false im•pression that the rate of warming over the past 150 years has itself been accelerating, especially between 1975 and 1998. The truth, however... is that from 1860 to 1880 and again from 1910 to 1940, the warming rate was exactly the same as the warming rate from 1975 to 1998.” In other words, the graph has been drawn with a motive to prove one’s point, and not to show the truth.



Thus the earth has warmed at this rate at least twice in the last 100 years and no major catastrophe has occurred. What is more, the earth has cooled after that warming. Why is the IPCC not willing to explore this startling point?

Another total lie has been that the Sunderbans in Bangladesh are sinking on account of the rise in sea level. The IPCC claimed that one-fifth of Bangladesh will be under water by 2050. Well, it turns out this is an absurd, unscientific and outrageous claim. According to scientists at the Centre for Environmental and Geographical Information Services (Cegis) in Dhaka, its surface area appears to be growing by 20 sq km annually. Cegis has based its results on more than 30 years of satellite imagery. IPCC has not retracted this claim. As far as they are concerned, Bangladesh is a goner by 2050, submerged forever in the Bay of Bengal.

THE COOKIE CRUMBLES

The fallout of Climategate is slowly but surely unfolding right where it hurts a large number of special interests—in the field of business. Yes, the carbon trading business is now in the line of fire. Under a cap-and-trade system, a government authority first sets a limit on emissions, deciding how much pollution will be allowed in all. Next, companies are issued credits, essentially licences to pollute, based on how large they are, and what industries they work in. If a company comes in below its cap, it has extra credits which it may trade with other companies, globally.

Post Climategate, this worldwide trade, estimated at about $30 billion in 2006, is finding few takers. It is under attack following the renewed uncertainty over the role of human-generated CO2 in global warming. In the US, which never adopted any of this to begin with, there is a serious move now to finish off the cap-and-trade regime globally. It’s a revolt of sorts. Six leading Democrats in the US Congress have joined hands with many Republicans to urge the Obama Administration to back off from the regime.

The collapse of the international market for carbon credits, a direct fallout of Climategate, has already sent shudders down many spines in parts of the world that were looking forward to making gains from it. It was big business, after all, and Indian businesses were eyeing it as well. In fact, Indian firms were expected to trade some $1 billion worth of carbon credits this year, and with the market going poof, they stand to lose quite some money (notional or otherwise).

Besides the commercial aspect, there is also the issue of wider public credibility. There have been signs of scepticism all along. In a 2009 Gallup poll, a record number of people—41 per cent—elected to say that global warming was an exaggerated threat. This slackening of public support is in sync with a coordinated political movement that is seeking to re-examine the entire issue of global warming from scratch. The movement is led by increasingly vocal Republicans in the US Senate and packs considerable political power.

Pachauri’s position is also becoming increasingly untenable with demands for his resignation becoming louder by the day. In an interview to Open, Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute, a noted US think-tank, who has followed the debate for years, says, “Dr Pachauri should resign because he has a consistent record of mixing his political views with climate science, because of his intolerance of legitimate scientific views that he does not agree with, because of his disparagement of India’s glacier scientists as practising ‘voodoo science’, and because of his incomprehension of the serious nature of what was in the East Anglia emails.”

Richard North, the professor who brought to light the financial irregularities in a write-up co-authored with Christopher Booker, has also said in a TV interview that, “If Dr Pachauri does not resign voluntarily, he will be forced to do so.”

GLOBAL STORMING AHEAD

The world awaits answers, based not on writings of sundry freelance journalists and non-experts, but on actual verifiable data on whether the globe is warming at all, and if so by how much. Only then can policy options be calibrated. As things stand, there is little doubt that the IPCC will need to be reconstituted with a limited mandate. This mess needs investigation and questions need to be answered as to why absurd claims were taken as gospel truth. The future of everything we know as ‘normal’ depends on this. The real danger is that the general public is now weary of the whole thing, a little tired of the debate, and may not really care for the truth, convenient or otherwise.
http://www.openthemagazine.com/print/4699

[Corlyss_D]

Below is a report from the Telegraph.uk on revelations concerning the Stern Report, by Nicholas Stern in 2006 that has formed the basis for legislators world-wide to call for immediate action to limit/eliminate greenhouse gases. Apparently, Stern quietly changed the report without having the revisions peer reviewed (for what that has been proven to be worth), despite the fact that the report was originally peer-reviewed.


Stern report was changed after being published
Information was quietly removed from an influential government report on the cost of climate change after its initial publication because supporting scientific evidence could not be found.

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent
Published: 9:00PM GMT 30 Jan 2010


Claims that eucalyptus and savannah habitats in Australia would also become more common were also deleted from the report The Stern Review on the economics of climate change, which was commissioned by the Treasury, was greeted with headlines worldwide when it was published in October 2006

It contained dire predictions about the impact of climate change in different parts of the world.

But it can be revealed that when the report was printed by Cambridge University Press in January 2007, some of these predictions had been watered down because the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified.

Among the claims that were removed in the later version of the report, which is now also available in its altered form online, were claims that North West Australia has been hit by stronger tropical typhoons in the past 30 years.

Another claim that southern regions in Australia have lost rainfall due to rising ocean temperatures and air currents pushing rain further south was also removed.

Claims that eucalyptus and savannah habitats in Australia would also become more common were also deleted.

The claims were highlighted in several Australian newspapers when the report was initially published, but the changes were never publicly announced.

A figure on the cost of US Hurricanes was also changed after a typographical error was spotted in the original report. The original stated in a table the cost of hurricanes in the US would rise from 0.6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 1.3%.

The later report corrected the error so the increase was from 0.06% to 0.13%. A statement about the correction appeared in a postscript of the report and on the Treasury website.

The Stern Review has been instrumental in helping the UK government draw up its climate change policies while it has also been cited by leading organisations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its assessment reports on climate change.

Details of the changes, which have not been publicly detailed before, have emerged as the IPCC is under fire for errors on the melting of Himalayan glaciers that appeared in their most recent assessment report because of a failure to check the sources of the information.

A spokesman for Lord Stern, who headed the review and is now chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said that the changes to the statements about Australia were made following a quality control check before the report was printed by Cambridge University Press.

He said: "Statements were identified in the section on Australia for which the relevant scientific references could not be located.

They were therefore, as a precaution, omitted from the version published by Cambridge University Press and they were deleted from the electronic version on the HM Treasure website.

"These changes to the text had no implications for any other parts of the report.

"It is perhaps not surprising that in a report of more than 700 pages a few typographic errors and minor but necessary clarifications to the text were identified in November and December 2006 after its launch.

"However, none of these corrections and changes affected the analysis or conclusions in the Stern Review, which is rightly regarded as an important contribution on the economics of climate change."

Professor Roger Pielke, from the centre of Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado who has been a long term critic of the Stern Review, described the changes to the report as "remarkable".

He said: "In any academic publication changes to published text to correct errors or to clarify require the subsequent publication of a formal erratum or corrigendum.

"This is to ensure the integrity of the literature and a paper trail, otherwise confusion would result if past work could be quietly rewritten.

"Such a practice is very much a whitewash of the historical record.

"One would assume – and expect – that studies designed to inform government (and international) policy would be held to at least these same standards if not higher standards."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/enviro ... ished.html

[Corlyss_D]

This and the following Guardian article are significant for two reasons: 1) Pearce is a climate hysteric; and 2) it supplies more weight to the skeptic claims that not only are the models used to predict AGW flawed but the data entered into the models is suspect, biased, or bogus. More critical light thrown on the 2007 IPCC report, whose findings are being discredited with each passing day.

Leaked climate change emails scientist 'hid' data flawsExclusive: Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures
• How the location of weather stations in China undermines data

Fred Pearce guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 February 2010 21.00 GMT Article history

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up".

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN's embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.

Wang was cleared of scientific fraud by his university, but new information brought to light today indicates at least one senior colleague had serious concerns about the affair.

It also emerges that documents which Wang claimed would exonerate him and Jones did not exist.

The revelations come at a torrid time for climate science, with the IPPC suffering heavy criticism for its use of information that had not been rigorously checked – in particular a false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 – and UEA having been criticised last week by the deputy information commissioner for refusing valid requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Guardian has learned that of 105 freedom of information requests to the university concerning the climatic research unit (CRU), which Jones headed up to the end of December, only 10 had been released in full.

The temperature data from the Chinese weather stations measured the warming there over the past half century and appeared in a 1990 paper in the prestigious journal Nature, which was cited by the IPCC's latest report in 2007.

Climate change sceptics asked the UEA, via FOI requests, for location data for the 84 weather stations in eastern China, half of which were urban and half rural.

The history of where the weather stations were sited was crucial to Jones and Wang's 1990 study, as it concluded the rising temperatures recorded in China were the result of global climate changes rather the warming effects of expanding cities.

The IPCC's 2007 report used the study to justify the claim that "any urban-related trend" in global temperatures was small. Jones was one of two "coordinating lead authors" for the relevant chapter.

The leaked emails from the CRU reveal that the former director of the unit, Tom Wigley, harboured grave doubts about the cover-up of the shortcomings in Jones and Wang's work. Wigley was in charge of CRU when the original paper was published. "Were you taking W-CW [Wang] on trust?" he asked Jones. He continued: "Why, why, why did you and W-CW not simply say this right at the start?"

Jones said he was not able to comment on the story.

Wang said: "I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more.

"Some of the location changes were probably only a few metres, and where they were more we corrected for them."

In an interview with the Observer on Sunday Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, warned of the danger of a public backlash against mainstream climate science over claims that scientists manipulated data. He declared a "battle" against the "siren voices" who denied global warming was real or caused by humans. "It's right that there's rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there," he said.

Last week the Information Commissioner's Office – the body that administers the Freedom of Information Act – said the University of East Anglia had flouted the rules in its handling of an FOI request in May 2008.

Days after receiving the request for information from the British climate change sceptic David Holland, Jones asked Prof Mike Mann of Pennsylvania State University in the United States: "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4? Keith will do likewise.

"Can you also email Gene [Eugene Wahl, a paleoclimatologist in Boulder, Colorado] and get him to do the same ... We will be getting Caspar [Ammann, also from Boulder] to do the same."

The University of East Anglia says that no emails were deleted following this exchange.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... es-chinese


Strange case of moving weather posts and a scientist under siegeIn the first part of a major investigation of the so-called 'climategate' emails, one of Britain's top science writers reveals how researchers tried to hide flaws in a key study

Fred Pearce guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 February 2010 21.00 GMT Article history

It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute. Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China?

But the argument over the weather stations, and how it affects an important set of data on global warming, has led to accusations of scientific fraud and may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN's top climate science body.

It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.

The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.

Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990.

That paper, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature, claimed to answer an important question in climate change science: how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?

It is well-known that the concrete, bricks and asphalt of urban areas absorb more heat than the countryside. They result in cities being warmer than the countryside, especially at night.

So the question is whether rising mercury is simply a result of thermometers once in the countryside gradually finding themselves in expanding urban areas.

The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanising fast even then.

The paper became a key reference source for the conclusions of succeeding reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – including a chapter in the 2007 one co-authored by Jones. It said that globally "the urbanisation influence … is, at most, an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale". In other words, it is tiny.

But many climate sceptics did not believe the claim. They were convinced that the urban effect was much bigger, even though it might not change the overall story of global warming too much. After all, two-thirds of the planet is covered by ocean, and the oceans are warming, too.

But when Jones turned down requests from them to reveal details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study, arguing that it would be "unduly burdensome", they concluded that he was covering up the error.

And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud.

He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the story period, perhaps invalidating their data.

Keenan told the Guardian: "The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres"; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that "there were 'few if any changes' to locations is a fabrication". He demanded that Jones retract his claims about the Chinese data.

The emails, which first emerged online in November last year following a hack of the university's computer systems that is being investigated by police, reveal that Jones was hurt, angry and uncertain about the allegations. "It is all malicious … I seem to be a marked man now," he wrote in April 2007.

Another email from him said: "My problem is I don't know the best course of action … I know I'm on the right side and honest, but I seem to be telling myself this more often recently!"

An American colleague, and frequent contributor to the leaked emails, Dr Mike Mann at Pennsylvania State University, advised him: "This crowd of charlatans … look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised. The last thing you want to do is help them by feeding the fire. Best thing is to ignore them completely."

Another colleague, Kevin Trenberth at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, urged a fightback. "The response should try to somehow label these guys and [sic] lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database."

In August 2007, Keenan submitted a formal complaint about Wang to Wang's employers. The university launched an inquiry. Reporting in May 2008, it found "no evidence of the alleged fabrication of results" and exonerated him. But it did not publish its detailed findings, and refused to give a copy to Keenan.

By then, Keenan had published his charges in Energy & Environment, a peer-reviewed journal edited by a Hull University geographer, Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen.

The paper was largely ignored at the time, but Guardian investigations of the hacked emails now reveal that there was concern among Jones's colleagues about Wang's missing data – and the apparent efforts by Jones and Wang over several years to cover this up.

Those concerns were most cogently expressed to Jones by his ex-boss, and former head of the CRU, Dr Tom Wigley. In August 2007, Wigley warned Jones by email: "It seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (W-C W at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect."

Wigley was concerned partly because he had been director of the CRU when the original paper was published in 1990. As he told Jones later, in 2009: "The buck should eventually stop with me."

Wigley put to Jones the allegations made by the sceptics. "Wang had been claiming the existence of such exonerating documents for nearly a year, but he has not been able to produce them. Additionally, there was a report published in 1991 (with a second version in 1997) explicitly stating that no such documents exist."

This is believed to be a report from the US department of energy, which obtained the original Chinese temperature data.

Wang's defence to the university inquiry says that he had got the Chinese temperature data from a Chinese colleague, although she is not an author on the 1990 Nature paper.

Wang's defence explains that the colleague had lost her notes on many station locations during a series of office moves. Nonetheless, "based on her recollections", she could provide information on 41 of the 49 stations.

In all, that meant that no fewer than 51 of the 84 stations had been moved during the 30-year study period, 25 had not moved, and eight she could not recollect.

Wang, however, maintained to the university that the 1990 paper's claim that "few, if any" stations had moved was true. The inquiry apparently agreed.

Wigley, in his May 2009 email to Jones, said of Wang: "I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I would …not be surprised if he screwed up here … Were you taking W-C W on trust? Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it's not too late." There is no evidence of any doubts being raised over Wang's previous work.

Jones told the Guardian he was not able to comment on the allegations. Wang said: "I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more. Some of the location changes were probably only a few metres, and where they were more we corrected for them."

The story has a startling postscript. In 2008, Jones prepared a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research re-examining temperatures in eastern China. It found that, far from being negligible, the urban heat phenomenon was responsible for 40% of the warming seen in eastern China between 1951 and 2004.

This does not flatly contradict Jones's 1990 paper. The timeframe for the new analysis is different. But it raises serious new questions about one of the most widely referenced papers on global warming, and about the IPCC's reliance on its conclusions.

It is important to keep this in perspective, however. This dramatic revision of the estimated impact of urbanisation on temperatures in China does not change the global picture of temperature trends. There is plenty of evidence of global warming, not least from oceans far from urban influences. A review of recent studies published online in December by David Parker of the Met Office concludes that, even allowing for Jones's new data, "global near-surface temperature trends have not been greatly affected by urban warming trends."

Keenan accepts that his allegations do not on their own change the global picture. But he told the Guardian: "My interest in all this arises from concern about research integrity, rather than about global warming per se. Jones knew there were serious problems with the Chinese research, yet continued to rely upon the research in his work, including allowing it to be cited in the IPCC report."



The emails

From sceptic Doug Keenan to Dr Wei-Chyung Wang and Prof Phil Jones – 20 April 2007

"I ask you to retract your GRL paper, in full, and to retract the claims made in Nature about the Chinese data. If you do not do so, I intend to publicly submit an allegation of research misconduct to your university at Albany."


From Jones to Dr Kevin Trenberth

"I seem to be the marked man now !"


From Prof Michael Mann to Jones

"This is all too predictable. This crowd of charlatans is always looking for one thing they can harp on, where people w/ little knowledge of the facts might be able to be convinced that there is a controversy. They can't take on the whole of the science, so they look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalise that the science is entirely compromised."


From Trenberth to Jones and Mann – 21 April 2007

"I am sure you know that this is not about the science. It is an attack to "undermine the science in some way. In that regard I don't think you can ignore it all … the response should try to somehow label these guys lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database."


From Prof Tom Wigley to Jones – 4 May 2009

"I have always thought W-C W [Wang] was a rather sloppy scientist. I therefore would not be surprised if he screwed up here … Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it's not too late? I realise that Keenan is just a troublemaker and out to waste time, so I apologize for continuing to waste your time on this, Phil. However, I *am* concerned because all this happened under my watch as director of CRU and, although this is unlikely, the buck eventually should stop with me."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ther-fraud

[Corlyss_D]

February 1, 2010
What’s Happened to Global Warming?
Filed under: Climate Forcings, Climate Models —

One of the enduring pillars of the climate change issue is that the temperature of the Earth is increasing at an unprecedented rate … we’ve heard it a million times over the past few decades. However, it is well known that the temperature of the Earth has not increased over the past decade, and the lack of recent warming is now receiving serious consideration in the leading scientific journals. Two recent articles are of particular interest to us at World Climate Report.

The first was published in Geophysical Research Letters by two scientists with the National Climatic Data Center in North Carolina and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The article is entitled “Is the climate warming or cooling?” which must send shivers up the spines of the many folks in the global warming alarmist camp. We are now in 2010, and an article is published in a leading journal questioning whether or not the climate is warming or cooling? Go figure.

Easterling and Wehner begin their piece noting that “Anthropogenic climate change is one of the most contentious scientific issues of our time. Not surprisingly the issue has generated numerous blogs and websites with a wide range of views on the subject. According to a number of these sources the climate is no longer warming, in fact, some claim the planet has been “cooling’’ since 1998”. They immediately admit that “It is true that if we fit a linear trend line to the annual global land-ocean surface air temperature” “for the period 1998 to 2008 there is no real trend”. Correct – the satellite-based, balloon-based, and thermometer-based global temperature records show no warming whatsoever over the past decade. Claims that the Earth’s temperature is rising at an unprecedented rate are clearly false – nothing could be further from reality.

We fully understand that the climate system produces substantial natural variation and even with a robust upward trend, there will be periods of no trend or even cooling. Easterling and Wehner examine historical temperature trends over past decades and model predictions over coming decades, and they conclude “Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that the natural variability of the real climate system can and likely will produce multi-year periods of sustained ‘‘cooling’’ or at least periods with no real trend even in the presence of long-term anthropogenic forced warming. Claims that global warming is not occurring that are derived from a cooling observed over such short time periods ignore this natural variability and are misleading.”

We agree – expecting a monotonic increase in global temperatures is inconsistent with historical temperature records, model predictions, and our general understanding of the climate system. Easterling and Wehner basically show that with little-to-no external forcing of global climate, we will still get decades of warming and cooling. They note that no real cause is needed to produce a decade of cooling – it is all just part of the natural variability of climate. Fair enough.

However, a bombshell article just appeared in the literature providing a possible physical explanation of why the temperature of the Earth flattened out over the past decade. The article also highlights serious deficiencies in the climate models that are expected to provide predictions of climate change in the coming decades.

The article will appear in Science (it is available via Sciencexpress) and was generated by scientists with the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Colorado and the Physics Institute in Bern, Switzerland. These are hardly groups associated with any high level of climate change skepticism, and we could only imagine how the scientists are being treated currently by the colleagues … we applaud their courage.

Solomon et al. begin their article stating “Over the past century, global average surface temperatures have warmed by about 0.75°C. Much of the warming occurred in the last half century, over which the average decadal rate of change was about 0.13°C, largely due to anthropogenic increases in well-mixed greenhouse gases. However, the trend in global surface temperatures has been nearly flat since the late 1990s despite continuing increases in the forcing due to the sum of the well-mixed greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, halocarbons, and N2O), raising questions regarding the understanding of forced climate change, its drivers, the parameters that define natural internal variability, and how fully these terms are represented in climate models.”

Admitting that the trend in global temperatures has been flat over the past decade will not win any awards for this team, so we once again applaud their honesty. The team suggests that part of the reason for the flatness deals with the amount of water high-up in the upper troposphere, the tropopause, and the lower stratosphere. They clearly state “Water vapor is a highly variable gas. Tropospheric water vapor increases in close association with warming and this represents a major climate feedback that is well simulated in global climate models. In sharp contrast, current global models are limited in their representations of key processes that control the distribution and variability of water within the stratosphere”. Furthermore they note “Current global climate models simulate lower stratospheric temperature trends poorly and even up-to-date stratospheric chemistry-climate models do not consistently reproduce tropical tropopause minimum temperatures or recently observed changes in stratospheric water vapor.”

We agree – climate models are terrific constructs of our time, but they do not include many of the potentially important processes that control the global climate system. Solomon et al. provide convincing arguments that stratospheric water vapor levels have a significant impact on global temperatures, and they reveal that recent measurements since 2000 show “strong evidence for a sharp and persistent drop of about 0.4 parts per million by volume (ppmv) after the year 2000. Observations of lower stratospheric tropical ozone changes also reveal a sharp change after 2000”. For whatever reason, the stratosphere has been losing water vapor, and Solomon et al. reveal that this trend should put the brakes on any global temperature increase. They state that “the decline in stratospheric water vapor after 2000 should be expected to have significantly contributed to the flattening of the global warming trend in the past decade, and stratospheric water increases may also have acted to steepen the observed warming trend in the 1990s.”

The article is full of comments about how poorly the climate models represent key features in the Earth-atmosphere system, particularly when dealing with important processes above the troposphere. This flattening of the Earth’s temperature must be very inconvenient for the global warming alarmists, and we suspect many more articles on the subject will be appearing in the literature throughout 2010 … stay tuned!

References:

Easterling, D. R., and M. F. Wehner. 2009. Is the climate warming or cooling? Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L08706, doi:10.1029/2009GL037810.

Solomon, S., K. Rosenlof, R. Portmann, J. Daniel, S. Davis, T. Sanford, G.-K. Plattner. 2010. Contributions of stratospheric water vapor to decadal changes in the rate of global warming. Sciencexpress. www.sciencexpress.org / 28 January 2010 / Page 1 / 10.1126/science.1182488.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index ... l-warming/

[Corlyss_D]

A recap of AGW's history for just the last two to three months.


Sunday, January 31, 2010

Wheels fall off global-warming hysteria
Activist-scientists cooked the books to foster alarm

Lorne Gunter, Edmonton Journal


I can't recall the wheels coming off the bus of any expert-driven hysteria as fast or as completely as they are now coming off the global-warming scare.

I suppose they must have came off faster from Y2K. At 12:00:01 AM on Jan. 1, 2000, when airliners didn't fall from the sky and power plants didn't shut down spontaneously or computers didn't freeze up all over the world, the air came out of the Y2K scare instantly. Billions had been spent on preventing that disaster-that-never-was up until midnight on the final day of 1999, then almost not a penny afterwards.

That is faster than the wheels are coming off the climate-change bus. But AGW -- anthropogenic global warming -- is a very close second.

News of the manipulations, distortions and frauds perpetrated to advance and preserve the environmentalists' cause celebre are so numerous and coming so fast, it's hard to keep up.

First, of course, there were the e-mails and computer files leaked from Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) -one of a handful of climate-research centres around the world that are the pillars of the United Nations' claims about impending climate doom. The CRU leaks showed many of the world's leading climate scientists discussing how they could torque their research to show more recent warming than there has been, conceal their "tricks" from other scientists and government investigators, and pressure scientific journals not to publish reports by dissenting scientists.

Then a couple of weeks ago came the news that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN's climate-change arm, had based its most recent findings on Himalayan glacier melt on an old study that had never been peer-reviewed or even published and which was based entirely on the speculation (not research) of a single Indian scientist who now works at the environmental think-tank run by the head of the IPCC, economist Rajendra Pachauri.

This by itself wouldn't be devastating, except that the scientist in charge of the glacier chapter of the IPCC's latest assessment report (AR4) admitted he had known the melt estimate was wrong but had included it anyway because "we thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action."

That's not climate science, it's environmental activism, pure and simple -- using misleading figures to whip up alarm and bring about political action.

Another revelation of malfeasance this week was the discovery that the chapter on Amazon rainforests in the IPCC's AR4, the one that included the often-repeated claim that 40 per cent of the forest is under imminent threat from climate change, was written not by climate scientists but by an policy analyst who works for environmental groups and a freelance environmental author. Like the glacier chapter, it was written not to present the latest dispassionate scientific data, but to present a propaganda case that would produce the policy outcome the UN and the IPCC want. It confirmed that the UN is a player for one side in the climate debate, not the source for object facts.

In all, so far, at least 16 major claims made in AR4 (the report for which the IPCC won a Nobel Prize) have been shown to have originated with environmental groups rather than scientists, including the claim that climate change is already making tornado, hurricanes, forest fires and floods worse.

This week, we also learned that NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) may have been playing fast and loose with its own calculations of global average temperature. Among the four main repositories of global temperature records, GISS is the only one to show the Earth still warming during the past decade. Now two American climate researchers -- Joseph D'Aleo and Anthony Watts -- believe they know why: Scientists at GISS may have been cherry-picking the weather stations they take their records from to increase global averages artificially.

The pair write that there was a "major" decline in the number of stations GISS scientists were taking readings from "and an increase in missing data from remaining stations, which occurred suddenly around 1990 ... a clear bias was found toward removing higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations -- the cooler stations -- during this culling process." The pre-1990 temperature records, though, continued to include these cooler stations. These changes tended to make temperatures before 1990 appear extra-cool and those after 1990 extra-warm.

This probably shouldn't surprise -- GISS is run by James Hansen, the scientist who first set off the global-warming scare in 1988 and who is an adviser to former U.S. vice-president Al Gore.

Hansen has testified in court on behalf of eco-vandals charged with damaging a British power plant, insisting they are guilty of no crime because they were acting in defence of humanity and he has called coal trains "death trains" and coal-fired power plants "factories of death."

Again, those are the words of an activist, not a scientist.

Does all this prove global warming is a hoax?

I believe it does.

But at the least, it shows the science is far from settled.

lgunter@shaw.ca

© 2010 The National Post Company. All rights reserved. Unauthorized distribution, transmission or republication strictly prohibited.

[Corlyss_D]

The hacking of the East Anglia may not have been a crime after all. Like the expose of ACORN, it just may have been a public service.

David King admits to speculation over source of climate science emailsFormer government adviser backs away from sensational claims over involvement of foreign intelligence or wealthy lobbyists

David Leigh and Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 February 2010 17.26 GMT Article history
Sir David King said he had no inside information about the leaked emails.

The government's former chief scientist has backed away from his sensational claim that a foreign intelligence agency or wealthy US lobbyists were behind the hacking and release of controversial emails between climate scientists.

Sir David King admitted he possessed no inside information about the leaks of embarrassing emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, and had merely been speculating on material already in the public domain. His remarks to a journalist had been a "side-issue", he said.

Sir David said the leak was probably a deliberate and sophisticated attempt to derail the Copenhagen climate summit. The story came a day after the climate change secretary Ed Miliband declared a "battle" against the "siren voices" who denied global warming was real or caused by humans.

Sir David told the Guardian today : "The operation looked amazingly efficient and amazingly sophisticated. It looks very much like an intelligence operation."

But it emerged that he had been misinformed about key facts. One of his grounds for believing a high-powered team of professionals were behind the leak, he said, was that there had been a wide spread of emails going back decades "between very different people". He told the Independent: "The emails date back to 1996, so someone was collecting the data over many years."

In fact, as UEA confirmed today, all the files and emails were archived on a single backup server on the Norwich campus. Once access was gained, it would have been simple to copy all the material.

Guardian inquiries indicate police investigators have no evidence of foreign intelligence involvement.

Similarly, the fact that the leaked files were originally posted on a Russian server, and links to them came from servers in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, does not prove the operation was "highly sophisticated".

Computer hackers say that there are simple pieces of software which can divert a file through layers of so-called open proxy servers. One called TOR can be downloaded from the internet. It renders the origin of the message anonymous.

There has been a marked change of emphasis on the part of police and information commissioner investigators since the leak occurred last November. The university, which had called in the police, talked about illegal hacking and "theft of data". Police said they were investigating "criminal offences in relation to a data breach."

But the most recent statement from the Information Commissioner's Office, which said the University of East Anglia had flouted Freedom of Information regulations in its handling of requests for data from climate sceptics, uses much more cautious phrasing, leaving open the possibility that no crime has actually occurred. It merely says: "Norfolk police are investigating how private emails have become public."

[Corlyss_D]

Caught again! UN climate claims on ice loss melt away
By Fiona Macrae and David Derbyshire
Last updated at 4:07 PM on 01st February 2010

The UN's climate change panel has been caught making unfounded claims for the third time in just two weeks.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used a student's essay and an article from a climbing magazine to make claims about reductions in ice on mountains.

The IPCC has also been found to have used data that had nothing to do with global warming to warn of looming catastrophe in the Amazon rainforest.

The revelations came at the end of a bad month for the climate change body, whose reports are used by governments to make environmental policies.

The head of the panel had already been forced to make a humiliating apology after claims that Himalayan glaciers could vanish within 25 years were exposed as nonsense.

The IPCC also came under fire for exaggerating links between climate change and storms.

Earlier, experts at the University of East Anglia's world-leading research unit were accused of manipulating data on global warming in the 'Climategate' scandal over leaked emails.

Last night the Government's former chief scientist said foreign spies had probably been behind email hacking at the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia.

Sir David King said the leaking of the unit's emails going back 13 years bore all the hallmarks of a skilled intelligence operation from a foriegn government rather than opportunist hackers.

He said more than 1,000 emails and 2,000 documents were stolen from a back-up server used by the University of East Anglia since 1996, and recent links were carefully timed to destabilise the Copenhagen climate change summit.

'It's the sophistication of the operation', he told the Independent.

'A very clever nerd can cause a great deal of disruption and obviously make intelligence services very nervous, but a sophisticated intelligence operation is capable of yielding the sort of results we've seen here.'

The first of the two new blunders centres on a claim in the IPCC's most recent report that global warming was to blame for reductions on mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and in Africa.

A table accompanying the claim cited two papers as sources.

One was an article in Climbing News, based on evidence from climbers about the changes they saw.

The other was a dissertation by a geography student studying for the equivalent of a master's degree in Switzerland and quoting interviews with mountain guides.

Professor Richard Tol, an environmental economist and one of the authors of the 3,000-page report, told The Sunday Times: 'These are essentially a collection of anecdotes. Why do they do this? It is quite astounding.'

He said it was unlikely the claim had influenced any policy decisions, but it indicated 'sloppiness' on the part of those drawing up that particular section of the report.

In the same 2007 report, the IPCC said that up to 40 per cent of the Amazon was at risk of being replaced with barren 'savannahs'.

But the claim came from a report published by the green campaigning charity WWF, which based its findings on a study into logging published in the journal Nature in 1999.

The claims about the Himalayan glaciers was also lifted from an unsubstantiated WWF report.

Critics said the reliance on green lobby groups made a mockery of the IPCC's claim to be impartial and accused the organisation of cherrypicking alarmist papers.

Dr Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said: 'These reports do not appear to be peer-reviewed, but are produced by campaigning organisations which are known to exaggerate problems. It is a clear indication that they are using the wrong literature.'

The Government is understood to have contacted the IPCC about the errors and urged it to ensure scientific standards are 'rigorously' upheld.

But Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said the mistakes should be seen in the light of the thousands of pages of evidence in the report.

Declaring a 'battle' against 'siren voices' who denied global warming was real or caused by humans, he said:

'It is right that there's rigour applied to all the reports but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there.

'We know there are observed effects that point to the existence of manmade climate change.

'That's what the vast majority of scientists tell us


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z0eMdmKZH8

[Corlyss_D]

Penn State inquiry into Mann's actions will be a whitewash.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/01/l ... questions/

[Corlyss_D]

UK Climate secretary Ed Miliband dismisses the implications of recent revelations about the AGW science and urges hysterics to organize, an interestingly political response to a scientific co*ck-up.

Mr Miliband defending the report, pointing to the thousands of pages of evidence in the IPCC's four-volume report in 2007.

'No doubt when the next report comes out it will suggest there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied,' he told the Observer.

He admitted that the Copenhagen summit was a disappointment, with no formal agreement being reached, but said there were some important achievements, including the agreement by countries responsible for 80% of emissions to set domestic carbon targets.

The climate secretary warned activists against despair, saying: 'There's a message for people who take these things seriously: don't mourn, organise.' http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5012

[Dennis Spath]

Given the mass of evidence (Dueling Tabloid stories and echo-chamber Blogs) presented by the prosecution it would appear quite foolish for anyone but a tree-hugging nut case to attempt mounting a defense of the alleged Al Gore/IPCC conspiracy charges.

[ContrapunctusIX]

Yeah, this special sticky thread surely isn't a case of abusing administrative powers.

Corlyss, I have a question, slightly OT: do you believe in evolution? Or is that fake science also?

[jbuck919]

Yeah, this special sticky thread surely isn't a case of abusing administrative powers.

Oh, I'm sure she just didn't want to clutter up the board with Randall's next thread, and his next thread, and his next thread, and his next thread, and......

[Corlyss_D]

You three can be excused for your dim awareness of the problem: your favorite MSM outlets have ignored the story to death. It's not been the exclusive purview of tabloids and echo chambers, as Dennis likes to delude himself, and for a guy who prides himself on his mathematical/scientific abilities, John's persistent dismissal of the story is surprising to say the least. I do hope you all will go right on telling everyone you know that the skeptics are knuckle-dragging superstitious magical-thinkers incapable of rational analysis of the subject because they are not scientists like Al Gore, or climatologists like Pachauri, or UN-approved, or whatever strikes your cynical fancy.

Columbai Journalism Review
The Observatory — January 29, 2010 12:26 PM
MIA on the IPCC
American press largely ignores latest controversies

By Curtis Brainard

Almost two weeks ago, the Sunday Times, a British newspaper, “broke” the story that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had made significant errors in its 2007 report on the impacts of global warming. (Indian journalist Pallava Bagla actually reported this story for the BBC back in December without creating much of a stir.)

The report stated that there was a very high likelihood that glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear by 2035 if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Three days after the Times published its article, the IPCC essentially admitted that this was an error (while glaciers in the region are melting, they are unlikely to vanish that quickly) and apologized (pdf) for the “poorly substantiated” claim.

Much like the controversial cache of e-mails hacked and leaked from a British climate research center in November, the error has caused a worldwide debate about the quality of the IPCC’s reports and processes. Unlike “Climategate,” however, the so-called “Glaciergate” affair has not received much attention in the American press; nor has subsequent criticism that the panel also overstated the link between global warming and a rise in monetary damages related to natural disasters. As the Knight Science Journalism Tracker pointed out in a news roundup on Wednesday:

US media largely have had little in recent days on the troubles at the UN’s climate-watching IPCC – an agency under siege peripherally due to the largely dismissed flap over emails, right in the cross hairs for its Himalaya glacier melt forecast screw-up, and potentially over suggestions of systematic exaggeration of global warming’s signature in specific storms, droughts, or other natural disasters.

But the fracas continues making headlines in the UK, in Europe generally (see Sascha Karberg’s post here on German press), and especially in India, home of the IPCC boss and host to those melting glaciers.
In the days after the story first broke, The New York Times and The Washington Post each ran one print article about the Himalayan glaciers error. The Christian Science Monitor, now published online, produced one piece, and the Associated Press and Bloomberg sent a couple of articles over the wire.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. Meanwhile, outlets in the U.K., India, and Australia have been eating the American media’s lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis. Journalists in the U.S. should take immediate steps to redress that oversight.

Overseas, reporters have already explained many details of IPCC’s gaffe. The glaciers error can be traced back to a 1999 article in New Scientist. The piece quoted Syed Hasnain, an Indian glaciologist who is currently a fellow at the TERI research institute in Delhi (run by IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri), saying that glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035. (That prediction does not exist in any peer-reviewed literature, and Hasnain told The New York Times last week that he was misquoted, but a 1996 study from Russia reported that the glaciers could come close to disappearing by 2350.) In 2005, a status report (pdf) on glaciers by WWF, an environmental group, cited the New Scientist’s article from six years earlier, and it was that report that the IPCC used as the basis for its flawed estimate of glacial retreat.

There is no doubt that glaciers around the world are losing mass at an alarming rate (the Center for Environmental Journalism’s Tom Yulsman had a good blog post on this Wednesday, as did Scientific American on Thursday). To make matters worse for the IPCC, however, the 2035 blunder is actually one of five in a single paragraph (originally highlighted, it appears, by Graham Cogley, a professor of geography and glaciers at Trent University in Canada), which the Associated Press laid out nicely in one of its articles.

Reactions from journalists and scientists have ranged from charges that the error proves the IPCC has intentionally misled the public and can no longer be trusted to claims that it was an isolated and innocent mistake that does not detract from IPCC’s capability and legitimacy. As usual, the best commentary and analyses have presented arguments that fall somewhere between these two extremes, and it is into that breach that American media must go.

In places, that process has already begun. New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin had an insightful post on Tuesday about pressures that the IPCC is facing “from inside and out” to enact certain changes. Lead authors of IPCC reports, a longtime critic of the panel based in academia, and the vice chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission alike have called for improvements in transparency and objectivity in the panel’s next major assessment report, which is expected sometime around 2013.

In a post defending the credibility of the IPCC, RealClimate.org, a blog run by a group of climate modelers (some of who have worked with the panel), offered a suggestion for how the group could improve one aspect of its review process:

In this case, it appears that not enough people with relevant experience saw this text, or if they saw it, did not comment publicly. This might be related to the fact that this text was in the Working Group 2 report on impacts, which does not get the same amount of attention from the physical science community than does the higher profile [Working Group 1] report (which is what people associated with RC generally look at). In WG1, the statements about continued glacier retreat are much more general and the rules on citation of non-peer reviewed literature was much more closely adhered to. However, in general, the science of climate impacts is less clear than the physical basis for climate change, and the literature is thinner, so there is necessarily more ambiguity in WG 2 statements.

… the measure of an organisation is not determined by the mere existence of errors, but in how it deals with them when they crop up. The current discussion about Himalayan glaciers is therefore a good opportunity for the IPCC to further improve their procedures and think more about what the IPCC should be doing in the times between the main reports.
It is also a good opportunity for journalists to try to better explain how the IPCC works (for better or worse) to the public—and RealClimate’s point about the differences between “WG1” and “WG2” is key. The Observatory has repeatedly argued that one of the best ways to improve climate reporting is for journalists to better delineate between points of science where there is a high level of consensus (e.g., that the world is getting warmer and human industry is largely responsible for that) and points where there is still a lot of uncertainty (such as the scale and timing of impacts). If the Himalayan-glacier peg has grown too stale for editors, reporters have another IPCC-related storyline with which to carry out this delineation.

Last Sunday, the Sunday Times was at it again with a story questioning the IPCC’s use of a report supposedly linking global warming to a rise, in recent decades, of monetary damages from natural disasters:

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”


The IPCC issued a rebuttal (pdf) of the Sunday Times’s work the next day, calling it a “meaningless and baseless” attack:

This section of the IPCC report is a balanced treatment of a complicated and important issue. It clearly makes the point that one study detected an increase in economic losses, corrected for values at risk, but that other studies have not detected such a trend. The tone is balanced, and the section contains many important qualifiers. In writing, reviewing, and editing this section, IPCC procedures were carefully followed to produce the IPCC mandate.
Bob Ward, the policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, then penned a column for the Guardian, another British paper, arguing, “‘Disastergate’ is an excuse for IPCC critics to dig up old academic rows.” Ward pointed out that Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, has long criticized the panel for misrepresenting Pielke’s and others’ research on the relationship between global warming and the rising cost of natural disasters.

So, yes, an “old row” it is, but a very important one, to which the American press should pay more attention (taking a cue perhaps from the Guardian, which thought the flap between the Sunday Times, the IPCC, Ward, and Pielke was newsworthy enough). For, indeed, the row continues. Over the last week, Pielke has posted a number of entries on his blog revisiting his criticisms of the IPCC’s work on disaster losses and responding to Ward’s defense of the panel (see here, here, here, here, and here). Today, he announced that next Friday he will debate Ward at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The event is titled, “Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?”

That’s a great question. Unfortunately, the debate is in London, which probably means we’ll be hearing crickets in the U.S. media while coverage of this momentous topic continues elsewhere.

[Update – 2/2, 11:00 a.m.: As Rich Stone of Science pointed out in the comments section, the germ of the “Glaciergate” story cropped up in an article by Pallava Bagla in Science publication in November. It focused on the Raina report, a study that challenged the IPCC’s statements about rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers. Last week’s issue of Science contained an interesting Q&A between Bagla and Rajendra Pachauri, the panel’s chairman, in which Pachauri responded to recent criticisms and discussed the outlook for an international climate accord.]

Links available at CJR http://cjr.org/the_observatory/mia_on_t ... php?page=1

[Corlyss_D]

ABC News Internet
Can Climate Forecasts Still Be Trusted?
Confidence Melting Away: Doubts Grow in Climate Change Debate
By GERALD TRAUFETTER
Jan. 28, 2010 —


The Siachen Glacier is home to the world's highest crisis region. Here, at 6,000 meters (19,680 feet) above sea level, Indian and Pakistani soldiers face off, ensconced in heavily armed positions.

The ongoing border dispute between the two nuclear powers has already claimed the lives of 4,000 men -- most of them having died of exposure to the cold.

Now the Himalayan glacier is also at the center of a scientific dispute. In its current report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the glacier, which is 71 kilometers (44 miles) long, could disappear by 2035. It also predicts that the other 45,000 glaciers in the world's highest mountain range will be virtually gone by then, with drastic consequences for billions of people in Asia, whose life depends on water that originates in the Himalayas. The IPCC report led environmental activists to sound the alarm about a drama that could be unfolding at the "world's third pole."

"This prognosis is, of course, complete nonsense," says John Shroder, a geologist and expert on glaciers at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. The results of his research tell a completely different story.

For the past three decades, the US glaciologist has been traversing the majestic mountains of the Himalayan region, particularly the Karakorum Range, with his measuring instruments. The discoveries he has made along the way are not consistent with the assessment long held by the IPCC. "While many glaciers are shrinking, others are stable and some are even growing," says Shroder.

Untenable Claim

The gaffe over the Himalayan glaciers has triggered an outcry in the world of climatology. Some are already using the word "Glaciergate" in reference to the scandal over a scientifically untenable claim in the fourth IPCC assessment report, which the UN climate body publishes every five years. The fourth assessment report was originally published in 2007. Last week, the IPCC withdrew the erroneous claim and apologized for the error.

German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is also upset about the incident. "The error in the IPCC report is serious and should not have happened," Röttgen told SPIEGEL. "Scientific accuracy is a vital condition to support the credibility of the political conclusions we draw as a result." Although the minister still has confidence in the overall validity of the IPCC report, he wants to see "a thorough investigation into how the error originated and was communicated."

But why wasn't this clearly nonsensical claim noticed long ago by at least one of the 3,000 scientists who contributed to the IPCC report? "What's really amazing is that such a blunder remained uncorrected for so long," says Shroder.

To err is human, say IPCC officials like Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "We shouldn't question the credibility of an almost 3,000-page report because of one error."

But other climatologists are calling for consequences. They insist that IPCC Chairman and Nobel laureate Rajendra Pachauri is no longer acceptable as head of the panel, particularly because of his personal involvement in the affair. "Pachauri should resign, so as to avert further damage to the IPCC," says German climatologist Hans von Storch. "He used the argument of the supposed threat to the Himalayan glacier in his personal efforts to raise funds for research." Storch claims that the Indian-born scientist did not order the retraction of the erroneous prediction until it had generated considerable public pressure.

'Best of My Abilities'

Pachauri, for his part, rejects calls for his resignation*. "I have a commitment to successfully complete the Fifth Assessment Report, a commitment that I am certainly not willing to set aside," the IPCC chairman said.

The prognosis drama began in 1999. The theory of the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 first appeared in an article in the British popular magazine New Scientist, for which Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain was interviewed.

As it turned out, the specification of the year 2035 was the result of a simple mistake. In an article published three years earlier, Russian glaciologist Vladimir Kotlyakov did in fact predict a massive decline in the area covered by glaciers, but not until the year 2350. "All of the IPCC's peer-review procedures failed," says Canadian geographer Graham Cogley.

Indian scientist Hasnain's ties to the IPCC chairman have triggered a public relations crisis. The glaciologist now works at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi, whose director is none other than Rajendra Pachauri. Could this explain why Pachauri suppressed the error in the Himalaya passage of the IPCC report for so long?

The erroneous prediction of a precipitous end for the Himalayan glaciers was already revealed in November, when a glaciologist working for the Indian environment ministry presented a study on Himalayan glaciers that arrived at completely different conclusions than the IPCC report. But Pachauri dismissed the new study as "voodoo science."

Sloppiness

In mid-January, the New Scientist confessed to its own sloppiness, exactly one day after IPCC Chairman Pachauri and his glacier expert Hasnain had announced a joint venture involving TERI, Iceland and the United States to study the Himalayan glaciers, with half a million dollars in funding from the New York-based Carnegie Foundation. "Perhaps Pachauri was so hesitant to look into the matter because he was trying to protect the research projects being conducted by his own institute," says climate statistician Storch. Pachauri, however, claims that he was simply pressed for time: "Everybody in the IPCC was terribly preoccupied with planning for several events that were to take place in Copenhagen," he said, referring to the climate change summit held in the Danish capital in December.

Toyota, the world's largest automaker, also contributed $80,000 to TERI. Last week the Japanese company was awarded the $1.5 million (¬1.05 million) "Zayed Future Energy Prize" for its Prius hybrid car. Pachauri was the chairman of the jury, but he explains that he temporarily suspended his chairmanship because of his consulting activities. Nevertheless, he did manage to praise Toyota at the awards ceremony in Abu Dhabi, saying that the company deserves "the fullest appreciation" for bringing about a radical shift in technology.

Unfortunately, the questions about the IPCC and its president come at a time when the credibility of climatologists has already suffered, partly as a result of the theft of confidential e-mail messages written by scientists, the content of which has led critics to claim that data were manipulated. Although none of these incidents negate the evidence supporting climate change, facts ceased to be the focus of the acrimonious debate long ago. Instead, it now revolves around questions of belief.

'Criticism Has Become Fashionable'

"Confidence in the authority of the science of climatology is currently eroding in the public consciousness," says Roger Pielke Jr., an American social economist and expert on natural disasters. Environmental economist Richard Tol agrees, saying: "Criticism of climate research has become fashionable." And the British science journal Nature warns that climatologists can no longer assume that solid evidence alone will convince the public.

New Ammunition from an E-Mail Scandal

For years, malaria expert Paul Reiter of the Paris-based Pasteur Institute has criticized the warning, as expressed in the third IPCC report, that climate change will lead to the spread of malaria, saying that there is no evidence to support such a claim. Reiter accuses many climatologists of perceiving themselves too strongly as activists who are more interested in spreading an alarmist message.

Scientists already feel that the second part of the IPCC report, which addresses the consequences of global warming, is not as sound as the first part, which deals with the underlying physical factors contributing to climate change. This could, in fact, explain how the erroneous Himalayan prognosis slipped into the report in the first place. The report's lead author, Murari Lal, defends himself by saying that "the melting of the glaciers is such a huge threat to so many people" and, for that reason, had to be included in the report. According to malaria researcher Reiter, it is precisely this passion that is so dangerous to science.

The e-mails hackers stole from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia last November and placed on the Internet have also provided critics with new ammunition. An e-mail exchange between climate modelers that took place in the fall of 1999 suggests that the scientists were biased.

Abnormal Temperature Graph

The exchange involved the validity of a controversial temperature curve. The so-called hockey stick graph was intended to prove that the average global temperature in the last 1,000 years was never as high as it is today. To arrive at the date, several groups of researchers reconstructed past temperatures, to a large extent based on tree-ring data.

But one of the graphs differed markedly from the rest, leading to a controversy in the run-up to a conference of paleo-climatologists in Tanzania in September 1999. The abnormal temperature graph was "a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we'd like to show," paleo-climatologist Michael Mann wrote in an e-mail, adding that he didn't want to be the one to offer "the skeptics & a field day." The lead author of the IPCC chapter, Chris Folland, wrote in another e-mail that the divergent data set "dilutes the message rather significantly."

Keith Briffa, whose team reconstructed the contradictory temperature graph, was furious, and wrote: "I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data.'"

For the IPCC report that was written at the time, the scientists eventually resorted to an underhanded solution to downplay the data behind Briffa's graph, which showed temperatures falling since the 1960s: the graph was simply cut off at 1960 in the IPCC report. "This sort of approach is considered problematic in science," says climate scientist Storch.

Controversial Passages

Briffa's unusually declining temperature graph points to a serious conundrum that no one has been able to explain yet: Since the 1960s, the tree-ring data no longer reflect actual temperature changes. But why, then, should tree-ring data be valid for periods before that?

At least the fourth IPCC report, published in 2007, discusses the problems with the tree-ring data at length. But even the current, valid report contains controversial passages.

Chapter 1.3.8, for example, contains a discussion of the possible relationship between climate change and the increased incidence of natural disasters, which, after Hurricane Katrina in the United States, have now become a politically charged issue.

At the IPCC report, the damage associated with such events "are very likely to increase due to increased frequencies and intensities of some extreme weather events" (italics in original). The report cites as evidence a study that supposedly demonstrates precisely this trend.

The only problem is that the study in question had not been subjected to outside peer review before the IPCC report went to press. This has since been done, and the conclusions are surprising: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses," read the report published in the compendium "Climate Extremes and Society."

Roger Pielke, a leading expert in this field, wrote in his blog: "The claims were not just wrong. The claims were based on knowledge that just doesn't exist."

Calculating Risk

Representatives of the insurance industry hold a completely different view, which presents an additional problem for the IPCC. Reinsurers, such as Munich Re, calculate their premiums on the basis of risk, so that an increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters can translate into additional profits when new policies are concluded.

"We see, in our databases, significant evidence for a correlation between climate change and the increase in natural disasters," says Ernst Rauch, director of German insurer Munich Re's "Corporate Climate Centre." Unlike scientists, he adds, the insurance industry cannot wait until all doubts have been set aside. "We are a business operation that has to act today," says Rauch. He also points out that his company is "extremely satisfied" with the conclusions of the IPCC report. This is hardly surprising: A 2005 publication by Munich Re served as one of the sources for the IPCC's cautionary predictions.

Climatologists are now calling for reforms. Pielke, for example, is concerned about the way authors and peer reviewers work, how they are appointed by the IPCC and how literature is used that, as in the case of the Himalayan glacier, does not come from peer-reviewed professional journals.

One of the problems is that working for the IPCC is a time-consuming honorary appointment for scientists. "This means that it is not always the best people in their field who are willing to contribute their time and effort," says epidemiologist Reiter.

On the other hand, the community is sometimes reluctant to include troublesome critics in its efforts. For instance, when the IPCC recently set up a special working group to address natural disasters, the US government nominated ecologist Pielke. The IPCC declined to appoint him.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Copyright © 2010 ABC News Internet Ventures

*I hope he fights for his job tooth and nail.

I'm reassured by Dennis' frequent reporting on the economic self-interest of climate skeptics that he will surely be as vigilant in doing the same for climate hysterics . . . not.

[Corlyss_D]

A Himalayan gaffe
Published: February 1 2010 20:09 | Last updated: February 1 2010 20:09

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change depends for its influence upon the confidence of the public. It can only assist policymakers if its work is seen to be based upon rigorous inquiry.

Recent events have shown the IPCC falling short of this ideal. It has been seriously shamed by the revelation that it included an unsubstantiated claim about the future disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers in its 2007 report. The claim came from a paper produced by a lobby group, which was itself repeating a quote once given to some journalists. This is the scientific equivalent of dodgy dossier land. To compound the error, the IPCC’s head, Rajendra Pachauri, then obfuscated when challenged.

This Himalayan gaffe comes on the heels of “climategate” – a British scandal in which scientists at the University of East Anglia were accused of deflecting requests for information and data from known climate sceptics. It has also stirred up a series of further allegations about other claims contained in the IPPC’s report. This drumbeat of criticism threatens to undermine trust in the good faith of the climate science community.

Climate science is a highly emotive area. There is so much at stake. If the more doom-laden observers are correct, the outcome for the world is almost too frightful to contemplate. Of course, scientists are always going to have a view about the politics. What is vital is that there should never be the suggestion that enthusiasm for the cause has led to the “reverse engineering” of findings.

The amateurishness of the Himalayan claim makes it look more like a blunder than something sinister. But given the IPCC’s central role in climate science, it needs to be whiter than white. To restore confidence, it should commission an independent audit. This would look at all the claims in the 2007 report and remove any that were not soundly based. The auditor might also look at the IPCC’s decision to report only those findings that fall within a certain consensus. Is it really right to exclude scientifically rigorous but outlying opinions, especially when this hands ammunition to its critics, who accuse it of suppressing dissenting views? Lastly, the IPPC must be smarter in the way it engages with the wider world. Mr Pachauri’s handling of the allegations has been lamentable. Considerably more humility in the face of criticism is required.

The IPCC must learn from this gaffe. Not only is its own credibility at stake, but possibly the cause of climate science also.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/76573ac6-0f69 ... ck_check=1

[keaggy220]

Yeah, this special sticky thread surely isn't a case of abusing administrative powers.

Corlyss, I have a question, slightly OT: do you believe in evolution? Or is that fake science also?

There's nothing stopping you from posting articles in defense of your position.

[keaggy220]

Yeah, this special sticky thread surely isn't a case of abusing administrative powers.

Oh, I'm sure she just didn't want to clutter up the board with Randall's next thread, and his next thread, and his next thread, and his next thread, and......

With all of the revelations that have come about over the last 6 months, doesn't it even give you a moment of hesitation? Doesn't a thought creep into your mind like, "Maybe we should look into these inconsistencies before we move forward with something on the level of cap-n-trade?"

[keaggy220]

How the alarmists kept the skeptics out...

Climate change emails between scientists reveal flaws in peer review
A close reading of the hacked emails exposes the real process of science, its jealousies and tribalism


The coastline of Lake Baikal, Siberia, one of the areas where analysis of temperature change was severely disputed. Photograph: Olivier Renck/Getty Images/Aurora Creative

Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. What makes science special is that data and results that can be replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the end.

But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid detail.

Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics. And the correspondence raises awkward questions about the effectiveness of peer review – the supposed gold standard of scientific merit – and the operation of the UN's top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The scientists involved disagree. They say they were engaged not in suppressing dissent but in upholding scientific standards by keeping bad science out of peer-reviewed journals. Either way, when passing judgment on papers that directly attack their own work, they were mired in conflicts of interest that would not be allowed in most professions.

The cornerstone of maintaining the quality of scientific papers is the peer review system. Under this, papers submitted to scientific journals are reviewed anonymously by experts in the field. Conducting reviews is seen as part of the job for academics, who are generally not paid for the work.

The papers are normally sent back to the authors for improvement and only published when the reviewers give their approval. But the system relies on trust, especially if editors send papers to reviewers whose own work is being criticised in the paper. It also relies on anonymity, so reviewers can give candid opinions.

Cracks in the system have been obvious for years. Yesterday it emerged that 14 leading researchers in a different field – stem cell research – have written an open letter to journal editors to highlight their dissatisfaction with the process. They allege that a small scientific clique is using peer review to block papers from other researchers.

Many will see a similar pattern in the emails from UEA's Climatic Research Unit, which brutally expose what happens behind the scenes of peer review and how a chance meeting at a barbecue years earlier had led to one journal editor being suspected of being in the "greenhouse sceptics camp".

The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, was regularly asked to review papers and he sometimes wrote critical reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising his work.

Here is how it worked in one case.

A key component in the story of 20th-century warming is data from sparse weather stations in Siberia. This huge area appears to have seen exceptional warming of up to 2C in the past century. But in such a remote region, actual data is sparse. So how reliable is that data, and do scientists interpret it correctly?

In March 2004, Jones wrote to Professor Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, saying that he had "recently rejected two papers [one for the Journal of Geophysical Research and one for Geophysical Research Letters] from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised".

He did not specify which papers he had reviewed, nor what his grounds for rejecting them were. But the Guardian has established that one was probably from Lars Kamel a Swedish astrophysicist formerly of the University of Uppsala. It is the only paper published on the topic in the journal that year.

Kamel analysed the temperature records from weather stations in part of southern Siberia, around Lake Baikal. He claimed to find much less warming than Jones, despite analysing much the same data.

Kamel told the Guardian: "Siberia is a test case, because it is supposed to be the land area with most warming in the 20th century." The finding sounded important, but his paper was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) that year.

Kamel was leaving academic science and never tried to publish it elsewhere. But the draft seen by the Guardian asserts that the difference between his findings on Siberia temperatures and that of Jones is "probably because the CRU compilation contains too little correction for urban warming." He does not, however, justify that conclusion with any data or analysis.Kamel says he no longer has a copy of the anonymous referee judgments on the paper, so we don't know why it was rejected. The paper could be criticised for being slight and for not revealing details about its methods of analysis. A reviewer such as Jones would certainly have been aware of Kamel's views about mainstream climate research, which he had called "pseudo-science". He would also have known that its publication in a journal like GRL would have attracted the attention of professional climate sceptics. Nonetheless, the paper raised important questions about the quality of CRU's Siberian data, and was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones's analysis. On those grounds alone, some would have recommended its publication.

Kamel's paper admits the discrepancy "does not necessarily mean the CRU surface record for the entire globe is in error". But it argues that the result suggests it "should be checked in more regions and even globally". Jones was not able to comment on the incident.

Critics of Jones such as the prominent sceptical Stephen McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit blog have long accused him of preventing critical research from having an airing. McIntyre wrote on his web site in December: "CRU's policies of obstructing critical articles in the peer-reviewed literature and withholding data from critics have unfortunately placed issues into play that might otherwise have been settled long ago." He also says obstructing publication undermine claims that all is well in scientific peer review.

Dr Myles Allen, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford and Professor Hans von Storch, a climate scientist at the Institute for Coastal Research, in Geesthacht, Germany signed a joint column in Nature when the email hacking story broke, in which they said that "no grounds have arisen to doubt the validity of the thermometer-based temperature record since it began in about 1850." But that argument is harder to make if such evidence, flawed though it might be, is actively being kept out of the journals.

In another email exchange CRU scientist Dr Keith Briffa initiates what looks like an attempt to have a paper rejected. In June 2003, as an editor of an unnamed journal, Briffa emailed fellow tree-ring researcher Edward Cook, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, saying: "Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting [an unnamed paper] – to support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can. Please."

Stahle is a tree-ring professor from the University of Arkansas. This request appears to subvert the convention that reviewers should be both independent and anonymous.

Cook replied later that day: "OK, today. Promise. Now, something to ask from you." The favour was to provide some data to help Cook review a paper that attacked his own tree-ring work. "If published as is, this paper could really do some damage," he said. "It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved [inverse regression] method is actually better in a practical sense."

Briffa was unable to comment. Cook told the Guardian: "These emails are from a long time ago and the details are not terribly fresh in my mind."

Jonesdid not restrict his harsh criticism of papers he saw as flawed to pre-publication reviews. He and Mann also had a reputation for harsh criticism of journals that published papers they disagreed with.

In March 2003, Mann discussed encouraging colleagues to "no longer submit [papers] to, or cite papers in" Climate Research. He was angry about that journal's publication of a series of sceptical papers "that couldn't get published in a reputable journal", according to Mann. His anger at the journal had evidently been building for some time, but was focused in 2003 on a paper published in January that year and written by the Harvard astrophysicists Willie Soon and Sally Balunias. The pair claimed that Mann's famous hockey stick graph of global temperatures over the past 1,000 years was wrong. After analysing 240 studies of past temperatures from tree rings and other sources, they said "the 20th century is neither the warmest century over the last 1,000 years, nor is it the most extreme". It could have been warmer a thousand years before, they suggested.

Harvard press-released the paper under the headline "20th century climate not so hot", which would have pleased lobbyists against the climate change consensus from the American Petroleum Institute and George C Marshall Institute, both of which had helped pay for the research. Mann told me at the time the paper was "absurd, almost laughable". He said Soon and Balunias made no attempt in the paper to show whether the warmth they found at different places and times round the world in past eras was contemporaneous in the way current global warming is. If they were just one-off scattered warm events they did not demonstrate any kind of warm era at all. Soon did not respond to Guardian requests to discuss the paper.

The emails show Mann debating with others what he should do. In March 2003, he told Jones: "I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they wanted – the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper"

But Jones told Mann: "I think the sceptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set [the field of paleoclimate research] back a number of years if it goes unchallenged." He was right. The Soon and Balunias paper was later read into the Senate record and taken up by the Bush administration, which attempted to get it cited in a report from the Environmental Protection Agency against the wishes of the report's authors.

Persuaded that the paper could not be ignored, Mann assembled a group of colleagues to review it. The group included regular CRU emailers Jones, Dr Keith Briffa, Dr Tom Wigley and Dr Kevin Trenberth. They sent their findings to the journal's editorial board, arguing that Soon's study was little more than anecdote. It had cherry-picked data showing warm periods in different places over several centuries and had provided no evidence that they demonstrated any overall warming of the kind seen in the 20th century.

The emails reveal that when the journal failed to disown the paper, the scientists figured a "coup" had taken place, and that one editor in particular, a New Zealander called Chris de Freitas, was fast-tracking sceptical papers on to its pages. Mann saw an irony in what had happened. "This was the danger of always criticising the sceptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal." But Mann had a solution. "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues … to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

Was this improper pressure? Bloggers responding to the leaking of these emails believe so. Mann denies wanting to "stifle legitimate sceptical views". He maintains that he merely wanted to uphold scientific standards. "Please understand the context of this," he told the Guardian after the scandal broke. "This was in response to a very specific, particularly egregious incident in which one editor of the journal was letting in a paper that clearly did not meet the standards of quality for the journal."

Naturally de Freitasdefends his actions during the incident. "I was never ever found to have done anything wrong, even in the rumpus over the Soon and Balunias paper. All accusations against me were fully investigated and my performance as editor of this journal was shown to be flawless."

But many on the 10-man editorial board agreed with Mann. They concluded that their colleague de Freitas had ignored the anonymous advice of four reviewers to reject the paper. There was a revolt. Their chief editor von Storch wrote an editorial saying the Soon paper shouldn't have appeared because of "severe methodological flaws". After their publisher Otto Kinne refused to publish the editorial, von Storch and four other board members resigned in protest. Subsequently Kinne himself admitted that publication had been an error and promised to strengthen the peer review process. Mann had won his argument.

Sceptical climatologist and Cato Institute fellow Pat Michaels alleged in the Wall Street Journal in December last year that the resignations by von Storch and his colleagues were a counter-coup initiated by Mann and Jones. This is vehemently denied by von Storch. While one of the editors who resigned was a colleague of Jones at CRU, von Storch had a track record of independence. If anything, he was regarded as a moderate sceptic. Certainly, he had annoyed both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics.

Also writing in the Wall Street Journal in December, he said: "I am in the pocket of neither Exxon nor Greenpeace, and for this I come under fire from both sides – the sceptics and alarmists – who have fiercely opposing views but are otherwise siblings in their methods and contempt ... I left the post [as chief editor of Climate Research] with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper – a sceptic's paper, at that."

The bad blood over this paper lingered. A year later, in July 2004, Jones wrote an email to Mann about two papers recently published in Climate Research – the Soon and Balunias paper and another he identified as by "MM". This was almost certainly a paper from the Canadian economist Ross McKitrick and Michaels that returned to an old sceptics' theme. It claimed to find urbanisation dominating global warming trends on land. Jones called it "garbage".

More damagingly, he added in an email to Mann with the subject line "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL": "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!"

This has, rightly, become one of the most famous of the emails. And for once, it means what it seems to mean. Jones and Trenberth, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, had recently become joint lead authors for a key chapter in the next IPCC assessment report, called AR4.

They had considerable power over what went into those chapters, and to have ruled them out in such a manner would have been a clear abuse of the IPCC process.

Today, neither man attempts to deny that Jones's promise to keep the papers out was a serious error of judgment. Trenberth told the Guardian: "I had no role in this whatsoever. I did not make and was not complicit in that statement of Phil's. I am a veteran of three other IPCC assessments. I am well aware that we do not keep any papers out, and none were kept out. We assessed everything [though] we cannot possibly refer to all literature … Both of the papers referred to were in fact cited and discussed in the IPCC."

In an additional statement agreed with Jones, he said: "AR4 was the first time Jones was on the writing team of an IPCC assessment. The comment was naive and sent before he understood the process."

Some will not be content with that. Jones had been a contributing author to IPCC assessment reports for more than a decade and should have been aware of the rules.

Climate Research is a fairly minor journal. Not so Geophysical Research Letters, published by the august American Geophysical Union (AGU). But when it began publishing what Mann, Wigley, Jones and others regarded as poor quality sceptical papers, they again responded angrily. GRL provided a home for one of a series of papers by McIntyre and McKitrick challenging the statistical methods used in the hockey stick analysis. When Mann's complaints to the journal were rebuffed, he wrote to colleagues in January 2005: "Apparently the contrarians now have an 'in' with GRL."

Mann had checked out the editor responsible for overseeingthe papers . a Yale chemical engineer called James Saiers, and noted his "prior connection" with the same department at the University of Virginia, where sceptic Pat Michaels worked.

He added, "we now know" how various other sceptically tinged papers had got into GRL.

Wigley appeared to agree. "This is truly awful," he said, suggesting to Mann: "If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted."

A year after the row erupted, in 2006, Saiers gave up the GRL post.Sceptics have claimed that this was due to pressure from Wigley, Mann and others. Saiers says his three-year term was up. "My departure had nothing to do with attempts by Wigley or anyone else to have me sacked," he told the Guardian. "Nor was I censured, as I have seen suggested on a blog posting written by McKitrick."

As for Mann's allegation, Saiers does not remember ever talking to Michaels "though I did attend a barbecue at his home back in the early 1990s. Wigley and Mann were too keen to conclude that I was in league with the climate-change sceptics. This kerfuffle could have been avoided if the parties involved would have done more to control their imaginations".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... eer-review

[Dennis Spath]

I appreciate the strategy of your "volume of evidence" Corlyss, and yet anyone schooled in logic understands what it means to Generalize from Particulars....i.e., "A few IPCC reports/claims may be misleading/junk science, therefore ALL IPCC reports/claims are misleading/junk science".

It's rather obvious your propaganda tactic is to shower us with references to the same two stories from multiple "News" sources, which would lead the typical Glen Beck fan to understand that the "Evidence" is overwhelming > This IPCC Global Warming nonsense is nothing but a Socialist Plot to destroy the U.S. Economy and bring about One World Government!!

Then you have the hutzpah to challenge us to dueling evidentiary articles, another tactic which many FOX fanatics among the Conservative Religious Right "Base" will find most convincing given their impressive grasp of logic rules and the scientific method. You definitely deserve an "A" for Tactics Corlyss!

[keaggy220]

I appreciate the strategy of your "volume of evidence" Corlyss, and yet anyone schooled in logic understands what it means to Generalize from Particulars....i.e., "A few IPCC reports/claims may be misleading/junk science, therefore ALL IPCC reports/claims are misleading/junk science".

It's rather obvious your propaganda tactic is to shower us with references to the same two stories from multiple "News" sources, which would lead the typical Glen Beck fan to understand that the "Evidence" is overwhelming > This IPCC Global Warming nonsense is nothing but a Socialist Plot to destroy the U.S. Economy and bring about One World Government!!

Then you have the hutzpah to challenge us to dueling evidentiary articles, another tactic which many FOX fanatics among the Conservative Religious Right "Base" will find most convincing given their impressive grasp of logic rules and the scientific method. You definitely deserve an "A" for Tactics Corlyss!

So Dennis, let me ask you... If you went to a widely regarded and influential Christian church with attendance of 10,000 people and one of the deacons of the church one day got up and said, "Christ did not rise from the grave and I've published this report on it and plan to give a speech as well." Don't you think it would be appropriate for someone, (dare I say everyone?) within church leadership to stand up and say this is heresy and we don't support it? Hmmm...?

How long did the lies and deceitful claims made by prominent scientists continue to go on as truth? Even after conservative forces flushed out the truth the shameful denial game began. This is evidence of a casue with a political foundation, not a scientific foundation.

[keaggy220]

From Penn State:

University Park, Pa. — An internal inquiry by Penn State into the research and scholarly activities of a well-known climate scientist will move into the investigatory stage, which is the next step in the University’s process for reviewing research conduct.

A University committee has concluded its inquiry into allegations of research impropriety that were leveled in November against Professor Michael Mann, after information contained in a collection of stolen e-mails was revealed. More than a thousand e-mails are reported to have been “hacked” from computer servers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England, one of the main repositories of information about climate change.

During the inquiry, all relevant e-mails pertaining to Mann or his work were reviewed, as well as related journal articles, reports and additional information. The committee followed a well-established University policy during the inquiry (http://guru.psu.edu/policies/ra10.html ).

In looking at four possible allegations of research misconduct, the committee determined that further investigation is warranted for one of those allegations. The recommended investigation will focus on determining if Mann “engaged in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” A full report (http://www.research.psu.edu/orp) concerning the allegations and the findings of the inquiry committee has been submitted.

In the investigatory phase, as in the inquiry phase, the committee will not address the science of global climate change, a matter more appropriately left to the profession. The committee is charged with looking at the ethical behavior of the scientist and determining whether he violated professional standards in the course of his work.

The investigatory committee will consist of five tenured full professor faculty members who will assess the evidence in the case and make a determination on Mann’s conduct.

http://biggovernment.com/bmccarty/2010/ ... is-needed/

[Dennis Spath]

What does the alleged impropriety of Mann's conduct have to do with CO2 emissions into the atmosphere...given one ton of coal burned to produce electricity is contributing 2.38 tons of CO2 going into our atmosphere...or are you among those who believe this concern is a socialist plot to destroy the U.S. Economy??

[ContrapunctusIX]

So Dennis, let me ask you... If you went to a widely regarded and influential Christian church with attendance of 10,000 people and one of the deacons of the church one day got up and said, "Christ did not rise from the grave and I've published this report on it and plan to give a speech as well." Don't you think it would be appropriate for someone, (dare I say everyone?) within church leadership to stand up and say this is heresy and we don't support it? Hmmm...?

this has to be one of the worst attempts at logical comparison I've ever seen. The phrase "straw-man" comes to mind.

[Dennis Spath]

I appreciate the strategy of your "volume of evidence" Corlyss, and yet anyone schooled in logic understands what it means to Generalize from Particulars....i.e., "A few IPCC reports/claims may be misleading/junk science, therefore ALL IPCC reports/claims are misleading/junk science".

It's rather obvious your propaganda tactic is to shower us with references to the same two stories from multiple "News" sources, which would lead the typical Glen Beck fan to understand that the "Evidence" is overwhelming > This IPCC Global Warming nonsense is nothing but a Socialist Plot to destroy the U.S. Economy and bring about One World Government!!

Then you have the hutzpah to challenge us to dueling evidentiary articles, another tactic which many FOX fanatics among the Conservative Religious Right "Base" will find most convincing given their impressive grasp of logic rules and the scientific method. You definitely deserve an "A" for Tactics Corlyss!

So Dennis, let me ask you... If you went to a widely regarded and influential Christian church with attendance of 10,000 people and one of the deacons of the church one day got up and said, "Christ did not rise from the grave and I've published this report on it and plan to give a speech as well." Don't you think it would be appropriate for someone, (dare I say everyone?) within church leadership to stand up and say this is heresy and we don't support it? Hmmm...?

How long did the lies and deceitful claims made by prominent scientists continue to go on as truth? Even after conservative forces flushed out the truth the shameful denial game began. This is evidence of a casue with a political foundation, not a scientific foundation.

Conservative forces flushing out the "Truth"....Now That's a real knee-slapper!!

[Corlyss_D]

anyone schooled in logic understands what it means to Generalize from Particulars....i.e., "A few IPCC reports/claims may be misleading/junk science, therefore ALL IPCC reports/claims are misleading/junk science".

Then you should understand what it means to dink with the data so you get the result you want, and what it means when you eliminate 5500 cold weather reporting stations from the data you use to average global temperatures, and what it means when you locate all your reporting stations in heat-islands like cities, and what it means when you use the bad or biased data to construct models that can't account for objectively observed phenomena like El Nino, and what it means when you use the models so constructed to persuade world governments that they need to give you more money so you can solve the problem.

So nice to know you're vigilantly watching out for the use of logic in this instance. Not your usual role, you must admit.

[Corlyss_D]

this has to be one of the worst attempts at logical comparison I've ever seen. The phrase "straw-man" comes to mind.

Keaggy's not our resident expert at those. For that you have to read Dennis more often.

But we digress don't we? Don't you want to say anything remotely credible in defense of AGW and it's ambitions rather than just sniping at people who are putting up facts?

[Corlyss_D]

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guardian.co.uk Environment Web
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Environment Hacked climate science emails Climate scientists withheld Yamal data despite warnings from senior colleaguesAncient trees dragged from frozen Siberian bogs do not undermine climate science, despite what the sceptics say

Leaked climate change emails scientist 'hid' data flaws
Climate change emails reveal flaws in peer review
Controversy behind climate science's 'hockey stick' graph
Comments (…) Buzz up! Digg it
Fred Pearce guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 3 February 2010 16.52 GMT larger | smaller Article history

Weather station on the Yamal peninsula, Siberia, where scientists took samples of trees from the permafrost. Photograph: Steve Morgan/Greenpeace

It seems hard to believe that a handful of tree trunks dragged from frozen bogs in Siberia could undermine the argument about man-made climate change. But that is the claim that has been made by sceptics in recent months.

The claim is wide of the mark, but in the 1,073 emails stolen from the University of East Anglia last November the row over the trees and what they tell us about climate change is played out in detail. The scientists are shown clinging to their data to prevent it getting into the hands of sceptics even as at least one senior colleague advised greater openness to avoid the charge that "bogus science" was being "hidden".

Measuring the width of annual growth rings in trees is a sensitive measure of temperatures. And the secrets of those Siberian trees, some of them thousands of years old, have assumed an important place in the reconstruction of past temperatures for the whole planet. Steve McIntyre, a Canadian and former minerals prospector and climate sceptic who has analysed the data, suggests that one tree alone, known as YAD06, could be "the most influential tree in the world".

In the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one word looms large: Yamal. The first and last emails and more than a hundred in between include it. When I phoned Prof Phil Jones, the director of CRU, on the day the emails were published online and asked him what he thought was behind it he said: "It's about Yamal, I think."

On 6 March 1996, a Russian tree ring researcher called Stepan Shiyatov contacted Dr Keith Briffa, CRU's top tree ring researcher. He was asking for money to take a helicopter to measure tree rings in timber hauled from the permafrost of the Yamal peninsula on the shores of the Arctic ocean.

Briffa was keen, and he published a series of papers on what those tree rings showed. But by late last year, in the final emails, he is mired in allegations of fraud, and the Yamal data had become a virus infecting reconstructions of past climate.

The Yamal data turned up in many studies of global temperature that were cited in the UN's top climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Cliamte Change's report published in 2007, where the relevant section was authored by Briffa. It supported the conclusion that temperatures over the last thousand years followed a "hockey stick" shape, with stable temperatures over a thousand years followed by sharp 20th century warming.

By then, McIntyre was on the trail, however. He claimed that Briffa had not used all the tree rings data available, only a subset. Briffa said there were technical reasons for that. But McIntyre complained Briffa hadn't spelled out those reasons clearly.

And in 2008, when Briffa published some data after a long delay, McIntyre charged that Briffa's analysis of the most recent warming was based on just 12 trees: the "Yamal-12". McIntyre said this was far too small a sample to draw any conclusions, and he claimed that if the analysis were redone with other tree ring data from the region, the hockey stick shape disappeared.

It looked like a scientific stalemate. But last year political bloggers moved in. Ross Kaminsky, a columnist on the American Spectator magazine claimed: "One implication, supported by Briffa's near-decade long refusal to share his data, is that he cherry-picked the dataset that supported the conclusion he wanted to find."

Worse was the charge that other scientists had incorporated the suspect Yamal data into their reconstructions of past climate. Ross McKitrick, a climate sceptic and environmental economist at the University of Guelph wrote that they are "the key ingredient in most of the studies that have been invoked to support the hockey stick". Daily Telegraph blogger James Delingpole went even further in an article headlined: "How the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie."

Briffa denies any wrongdoing. He said last autumn that "we would never select or manipulate data in order to arrive at some preconceived or regionally unrepresentative result". And there is nothing in the emails or anywhere else to suggest that isn't true. In September last year Briffa put out a statement on the CRU website defending his research. "We do not select tree-core samples based on comparison with climate data. Chronologies are constructed independently and are subsequently compared with climate data to measure the association and quantify the reliability of using the tree-ring data as a proxy for temperature variations. One British colleague of Briffa wrote to me last month: "Why should Briffa – one of the world leaders in this field – have to both explaining himself to people who are not even specialists in this area – who are in fact amateurs?"

But others believe Briffa does have a duty to explain himself. In October last year, Briffa's old boss at CRU, Tom Wigley, said in an email to Briffa's current boss Phil Jones: "Keith does seem to have got himself into a mess." Wigley felt Briffa had not answered McIntyre's charges fully. "How does Keith explain the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And how does he explain the apparent 'selection' of the less well-replicated chronology rather than the later (better replicated) chronology?... The trouble is that withholding data looks like hiding something, and hiding something means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden."

The Yamal data has become important for scientists trying to analyse past climates. But it is not true that the Yamal rings are an omnipresent virus in reconstructions of past temperature. They were not in the original data that produced the "hockey stick" graphs. According to Jones, of the 12 reconstructions of temperatures over the past 1,000 years used in the last IPCC assessment, only three included Yamal data. And other reconstructions of temperature based on retreating glaciers, or water temperatures in boreholes, or core sunk into ice sheets, self evidently do not contain Yamal tree rings. But they too reproduce a hockey stick shape.

Even McIntyre denounces the more vocal sceptics with their conspiracy theories. In an apparent response to a challenge from the climate scientists' website RealClimate, he wrote to the American Spectator last October, saying that: "While there is much to criticise in the handling of this [Yamal] data, the results do not in any way show that AGW [anthropogenic global warming] is a 'fraud', nor that this particular study was a 'fraud'. There are many serious scientists who are honestly concerned about AGW and your commentary... is unfair to them." Sadly, when checked last week, there was no sign of this comment on the magazine website, though the magazine had found room for another feature on "The great hoax" of climate change.


guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

[Corlyss_D]

From The Times February 3, 2010

Phil Jones, scientist in climate data row, promises to be more open
Ben Webster, Environment Editor

Professor Jones says he stands by the part of the IPCC's report to which he had contributed
The scientist at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails has admitted that he and his colleagues need to be more open with their data.

Professor Phil Jones, of the University of East Anglia, has been accused of blocking requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.

He said: “We are facing more and more public scrutiny and any future work we do is going to have much greater scrutiny by our peers and by the public. We do need to make more of the data available, I fully accept that.

“We need to work differently, making more data available and making our assumptions clear. Everything needs to be more and more open and we will be striving to do that in the future.”

Professor Jones has stood down from his post as director of the University’s Climatic Research Unit while an inquiry takes place into allegations that he manipulated and suppressed data concerning global temperature changes.

In one e-mail, he asked a colleague to delete e-mails relating to the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

A climate sceptic had asked the university to publish correspondence between Professor Jones and other climate scientists because he believed an attempt had been made to discredit scientists who questioned the link between manmade emissions and global warming.

In an interview with the Press Association, Professor Jones said: “I feel tremendously pressurised by all this but I’m trying to continue my work in the science. I think it’s very important and it’s potentially very serious for the future of mankind in decades to come.”

He said he “wholeheartedly” stood by the part of the IPCC’s report to which he had contributed.

He added: “The work we do at the University of East Anglia is only a small part of [climate science], there’s thousands of climate scientists around the world supporting our results.”

He said he was concerned that scepticism about climate change appeared to be growing.

“It makes me quite worried people are beginning to doubt the climate has warmed up.”

Last November, shortly after the e-mails were leaked, Professor Jones said: “Some of the e-mails probably had poorly chosen words and were sent in the heat of the moment, when I was frustrated. I do regret sending some of them.

“We’ve not deleted any e-mails or data here at CRU.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/e ... 013060.ece

[Corlyss_D]

India to 'pull out of IPCC'
India has threatened to pull out of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and set up its on climate change body because it "cannot rely" on the group headed by its own Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr R K Pachauri.

By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
Published: 3:47PM GMT 04 Feb 2010

The Indian government's move is a snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation that his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his claims. In Autumn, its environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, said that while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing despite global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed the government's claims as "voodoo science", but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalised the IPC chairman even further.

He announced that the Indian government will establish a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world's "third ice cap", and an "Indian IPCC" to use "climate science" to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report ... [the] IPCC doesn't do the original research which is one of the weaknesses ... they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

"I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA)," he said.

It will bring together 125 research institutions throughout India, work with international bodies and operate as a "sort of Indian IPCC," he added.

The body, which he said will not rival the UN's panel, will publish its own climate assessment in November this year, with reports on the Himalayas, India's long coastline, the Western Ghat highlands and the north-eastern region close to the borders with Bangladesh, Burma, China and Nepal.

"Through these we will demonstrate our commitment to climate science," he said.

The UN panel's claims of glacial meltdown by 2035 "was clearly out of place and didn't have any scientific basis," he said, while stressing the government remained concerned about the health of the Himalayan ice flows.

"Most glaciers are melting, they are retreating, some glaciers, like the Siachen glacier, are advancing. But overall one can say incontrovertibly that the debris on our glaciers is very high the snow balance is very low. We have to be very cautious because of the water security particularly in north India which depends on the health of the Himalayan glaciers," he added.

The new National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology will be based in Dehradun, in Uttarakhand, and will monitor glacial changes and compare results with those from glaciers in Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan.

[Corlyss_D]

Interesting how when data from cold weather stations is omitted or the cold weather stations don't exist in cold regions, there's no counterbalancing data for the warm weather stations data. Isn't sample size, distribution, and relevance Science 101?

Despite the hot air, the Antarctic is not warming up
A deeply flawed new report will be cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:45PM GMT 24 Jan 2009

Comments 101 | Comment on this article

The measures being proposed to meet what President Obama last week called the need to "roll back the spectre of a warming planet" threaten to land us with the most colossal bill mankind has ever faced. It might therefore seem peculiarly important that we can trust the science on which all the alarm over global warming is based, But nothing has been more disconcerting in this respect than the methods used by promoters of the warming cause over the years to plug some of the glaring holes in their scientific argument.

Another example last week was the much-publicised claim, contradicting all previous evidence, that Antarctica, the world's coldest continent, is in fact warming up, Antarctica has long been a major embarrassment to the warmists. Al Gore and co may have wanted to scare us that the continent which contains 90 per cent of all the ice on the planet is heating up, because that would be the source of all the meltwater which they claim will raise sea levels by 20 feet.

However, to provide all their pictures of ice-shelves "the size of Texas" calving off into the sea, they have had to draw on one tiny region of the continent, the Antarctic Peninsula – the only part that has been warming. The vast mass of Antarctica, all satellite evidence has shown, has been getting colder over the past 30 years. Last year's sea-ice cover was 30 per cent above average.

So it predictably made headlines across the world last week when a new study, from a team led by Professor Eric Steig, claimed to prove that the Antarctic has been heating up after all. As on similar occasions in the past, all the usual supporters of the cause were called in to whoop up its historic importance. The paper was published in Nature and heavily promoted by the BBC. This, crowed journalists such as Newsweek's Sharon Begley, would really be one in the eye for the "deniers" and "contrarians".

But then a good many experts began to examine just what new evidence had been used to justify this dramatic finding. It turned out that it was produced by a computer model based on combining the satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations.

The problem with Antarctica, though, is that has so few weather stations. So what the computer had been programmed to do, by a formula not yet revealed, was to estimate the data those missing weather stations would have come up with if they had existed. In other words, while confirming that the satellite data have indeed shown the Antarctic as cooling since 1979, the study relied ultimately on pure guesswork, to show that in the past 50 years the continent has warmed – by just one degree Fahrenheit.

One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed "it is hard to make data where none exists". A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for Nasa, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: "with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage."

But it was also noticed that among the members of Steig's team was Michael Mann, author of the "hockey stick", the most celebrated of all attempts by the warmists to rewrite the scientific evidence to promote their cause. The greatest of all embarrassments for the believers in man-made global warming was the well-established fact that the world was significantly warmer in the Middle Ages than it is now. "We must get rid of the Mediaeval Warm Period," as one contributor to the IPCC famously said in an unguarded moment. It was Dr Mann who duly obliged by getting his computer-model to produce a graph shaped like hockey stick, eliminating the mediaeval warming and showing recent temperatures curving up to an unprecedented high.

This instantly became the warmists' chief icon, made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report. But Mann's selective use of data and the flaws in his computer model were then so devastatingly torn apart that it has become the most comprehensively discredited artefact in the history of science.

The fact that Dr Mann is again behind the new study on Antarctica is, alas, all part of an ongoing pattern. But this will not prevent the paper being cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore, when he shortly addresses the US Senate and carries on advising President Obama behind the scenes on how to roll back that "spectre of a warming planet". So, regardless of the science, and until the politicians finally wake up to how they have been duped, what threatens to become the most costly flight from reality in history will continue to roll remorselessly on its way.

Not the least shocking news of the week was the revelation by that admirable body the Taxpayers Alliance that last year the number of "middle managers" in Britain's local authorities rose by a staggering 22 percent. Birmingham City Council alone has more than 1,000 officials earning over £50,000 a year. All over Britain senior council officials are now earning salaries which 10 years ago would have seemed unthinkable.

Future historians will doubtless find it highly significant that just when Britain's economy was about to collapse, an already hopelessly bloated public sector was expanding faster than ever. One of the more dramatic changes in British life over the past two decades has been how, aided by their counterparts in Whitehall and Brussels, the officials who run our local authorities have become separated from the communities they used to serve. Floating free of political control, they have become a new privileged class, able to dictate their own salaries and extend their own empires, paid for by a public to whom they are no longer accountable.

But if this gulf has already become wide enough, how much more glaring is it going to become now that the private sector is shrinking so fast? Already last year an astonishing 2.5 million people were in court for failing or being unable to pay ever soaring council taxes. Tellingly, the only response of the Local Government Association to these latest revelations was plaintively to point out that as many as "2,700" council jobs have already been lost in the economic downturn. But outside those walls three millon may soon be out of work. Who will then be left to pay for those salaries and pensions that our new privilegentsia have arranged for themselves?

How appropriate that Kenneth Clarke should become "shadow" to Business Secretary Peter Mandelson. As fervent "Europeans", both men know that almost all the policies of the ministry laughably renamed the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform are now decided at "European level". There is therefore hardly any job left for them to do. Mr Clarke will be free to continue advising Centaurus, one of the largest hedge funds in Europe. Lord Mandelson can carry on running the Labour Party, But the last thing either will want to admit is that all the powers they claim or seek to exercise have been handed over to Brussels.

The Government last week announced that in March it is to sell off 25 million "carbon credits". These European Union Allowances permit industry and electricity companies to continue emitting CO2, ultimately paid for by all of us through our electricity bills. Last summer, when these permits were trading at 31 euros each, this sale might have raised more than £500 million pounds, Today, however, thanks to the economic meltdown creating a surplus of credits no longer needed, their value is dropping so fast that Mr Darling will be lucky to get £100 million. That should help reduce our electricity bills – even though Mr Darling will merely have to extract the cash from us in other ways.

[keaggy220]

I appreciate the strategy of your "volume of evidence" Corlyss, and yet anyone schooled in logic understands what it means to Generalize from Particulars....i.e., "A few IPCC reports/claims may be misleading/junk science, therefore ALL IPCC reports/claims are misleading/junk science".

It's rather obvious your propaganda tactic is to shower us with references to the same two stories from multiple "News" sources, which would lead the typical Glen Beck fan to understand that the "Evidence" is overwhelming > This IPCC Global Warming nonsense is nothing but a Socialist Plot to destroy the U.S. Economy and bring about One World Government!!

Then you have the hutzpah to challenge us to dueling evidentiary articles, another tactic which many FOX fanatics among the Conservative Religious Right "Base" will find most convincing given their impressive grasp of logic rules and the scientific method. You definitely deserve an "A" for Tactics Corlyss!

So Dennis, let me ask you... If you went to a widely regarded and influential Christian church with attendance of 10,000 people and one of the deacons of the church one day got up and said, "Christ did not rise from the grave and I've published this report on it and plan to give a speech as well." Don't you think it would be appropriate for someone, (dare I say everyone?) within church leadership to stand up and say this is heresy and we don't support it? Hmmm...?

How long did the lies and deceitful claims made by prominent scientists continue to go on as truth? Even after conservative forces flushed out the truth the shameful denial game began. This is evidence of a casue with a political foundation, not a scientific foundation.

Conservative forces flushing out the "Truth"....Now That's a real knee-slapper!!

And who do you believe exposed the lies??? Keith Olbermann?

[keaggy220]

Interesting how when data from cold weather stations is omitted or the cold weather stations don't exist in cold regions, there's no counterbalancing data for the warm weather stations data. Isn't sample size, distribution, and relevance Science 101?

Despite the hot air, the Antarctic is not warming up
A deeply flawed new report will be cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:45PM GMT 24 Jan 2009

Comments 101 | Comment on this article

The measures being proposed to meet what President Obama last week called the need to "roll back the spectre of a warming planet" threaten to land us with the most colossal bill mankind has ever faced. It might therefore seem peculiarly important that we can trust the science on which all the alarm over global warming is based, But nothing has been more disconcerting in this respect than the methods used by promoters of the warming cause over the years to plug some of the glaring holes in their scientific argument.

Another example last week was the much-publicised claim, contradicting all previous evidence, that Antarctica, the world's coldest continent, is in fact warming up, Antarctica has long been a major embarrassment to the warmists. Al Gore and co may have wanted to scare us that the continent which contains 90 per cent of all the ice on the planet is heating up, because that would be the source of all the meltwater which they claim will raise sea levels by 20 feet.

However, to provide all their pictures of ice-shelves "the size of Texas" calving off into the sea, they have had to draw on one tiny region of the continent, the Antarctic Peninsula – the only part that has been warming. The vast mass of Antarctica, all satellite evidence has shown, has been getting colder over the past 30 years. Last year's sea-ice cover was 30 per cent above average.

So it predictably made headlines across the world last week when a new study, from a team led by Professor Eric Steig, claimed to prove that the Antarctic has been heating up after all. As on similar occasions in the past, all the usual supporters of the cause were called in to whoop up its historic importance. The paper was published in Nature and heavily promoted by the BBC. This, crowed journalists such as Newsweek's Sharon Begley, would really be one in the eye for the "deniers" and "contrarians".

But then a good many experts began to examine just what new evidence had been used to justify this dramatic finding. It turned out that it was produced by a computer model based on combining the satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations.

The problem with Antarctica, though, is that has so few weather stations. So what the computer had been programmed to do, by a formula not yet revealed, was to estimate the data those missing weather stations would have come up with if they had existed. In other words, while confirming that the satellite data have indeed shown the Antarctic as cooling since 1979, the study relied ultimately on pure guesswork, to show that in the past 50 years the continent has warmed – by just one degree Fahrenheit.

One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed "it is hard to make data where none exists". A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for Nasa, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: "with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage."

But it was also noticed that among the members of Steig's team was Michael Mann, author of the "hockey stick", the most celebrated of all attempts by the warmists to rewrite the scientific evidence to promote their cause. The greatest of all embarrassments for the believers in man-made global warming was the well-established fact that the world was significantly warmer in the Middle Ages than it is now. "We must get rid of the Mediaeval Warm Period," as one contributor to the IPCC famously said in an unguarded moment. It was Dr Mann who duly obliged by getting his computer-model to produce a graph shaped like hockey stick, eliminating the mediaeval warming and showing recent temperatures curving up to an unprecedented high.

This instantly became the warmists' chief icon, made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report. But Mann's selective use of data and the flaws in his computer model were then so devastatingly torn apart that it has become the most comprehensively discredited artefact in the history of science.

The fact that Dr Mann is again behind the new study on Antarctica is, alas, all part of an ongoing pattern. But this will not prevent the paper being cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore, when he shortly addresses the US Senate and carries on advising President Obama behind the scenes on how to roll back that "spectre of a warming planet". So, regardless of the science, and until the politicians finally wake up to how they have been duped, what threatens to become the most costly flight from reality in history will continue to roll remorselessly on its way.

Not the least shocking news of the week was the revelation by that admirable body the Taxpayers Alliance that last year the number of "middle managers" in Britain's local authorities rose by a staggering 22 percent. Birmingham City Council alone has more than 1,000 officials earning over £50,000 a year. All over Britain senior council officials are now earning salaries which 10 years ago would have seemed unthinkable.

Future historians will doubtless find it highly significant that just when Britain's economy was about to collapse, an already hopelessly bloated public sector was expanding faster than ever. One of the more dramatic changes in British life over the past two decades has been how, aided by their counterparts in Whitehall and Brussels, the officials who run our local authorities have become separated from the communities they used to serve. Floating free of political control, they have become a new privileged class, able to dictate their own salaries and extend their own empires, paid for by a public to whom they are no longer accountable.

But if this gulf has already become wide enough, how much more glaring is it going to become now that the private sector is shrinking so fast? Already last year an astonishing 2.5 million people were in court for failing or being unable to pay ever soaring council taxes. Tellingly, the only response of the Local Government Association to these latest revelations was plaintively to point out that as many as "2,700" council jobs have already been lost in the economic downturn. But outside those walls three millon may soon be out of work. Who will then be left to pay for those salaries and pensions that our new privilegentsia have arranged for themselves?

How appropriate that Kenneth Clarke should become "shadow" to Business Secretary Peter Mandelson. As fervent "Europeans", both men know that almost all the policies of the ministry laughably renamed the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform are now decided at "European level". There is therefore hardly any job left for them to do. Mr Clarke will be free to continue advising Centaurus, one of the largest hedge funds in Europe. Lord Mandelson can carry on running the Labour Party, But the last thing either will want to admit is that all the powers they claim or seek to exercise have been handed over to Brussels.

The Government last week announced that in March it is to sell off 25 million "carbon credits". These European Union Allowances permit industry and electricity companies to continue emitting CO2, ultimately paid for by all of us through our electricity bills. Last summer, when these permits were trading at 31 euros each, this sale might have raised more than £500 million pounds, Today, however, thanks to the economic meltdown creating a surplus of credits no longer needed, their value is dropping so fast that Mr Darling will be lucky to get £100 million. That should help reduce our electricity bills – even though Mr Darling will merely have to extract the cash from us in other ways.

No one has hurt the alarmists cause more than alarmists... The hyperbole and out right lies have reduced their credibility to the level of a charlatan. If they want to continue this farce, then they need to clean up their act and try to reestablish trust with the average logical person.

[keaggy220]

India to 'pull out of IPCC'
India has threatened to pull out of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and set up its on climate change body because it "cannot rely" on the group headed by its own Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr R K Pachauri.

By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
Published: 3:47PM GMT 04 Feb 2010

The Indian government's move is a snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation that his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his claims. In Autumn, its environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, said that while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing despite global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed the government's claims as "voodoo science", but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalised the IPC chairman even further.

He announced that the Indian government will establish a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world's "third ice cap", and an "Indian IPCC" to use "climate science" to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report ... [the] IPCC doesn't do the original research which is one of the weaknesses ... they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

"I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA)," he said.

It will bring together 125 research institutions throughout India, work with international bodies and operate as a "sort of Indian IPCC," he added.

The body, which he said will not rival the UN's panel, will publish its own climate assessment in November this year, with reports on the Himalayas, India's long coastline, the Western Ghat highlands and the north-eastern region close to the borders with Bangladesh, Burma, China and Nepal.

"Through these we will demonstrate our commitment to climate science," he said.

The UN panel's claims of glacial meltdown by 2035 "was clearly out of place and didn't have any scientific basis," he said, while stressing the government remained concerned about the health of the Himalayan ice flows.

"Most glaciers are melting, they are retreating, some glaciers, like the Siachen glacier, are advancing. But overall one can say incontrovertibly that the debris on our glaciers is very high the snow balance is very low. We have to be very cautious because of the water security particularly in north India which depends on the health of the Himalayan glaciers," he added.

The new National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology will be based in Dehradun, in Uttarakhand, and will monitor glacial changes and compare results with those from glaciers in Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan.

When the shaky foundation of trust falls, this is what happens. India recognizes billions are on the line and the alarmists have nothing but lies from the IPCC.

[Corlyss_D]

This was going to happen regardless of Climategate. Some adults in Congress were not going to allow the tin-hats in EPA to destroy the American economy in the name of some dodgy "science." Like the man said 10 days ago, the only place AGW is taken seriously from a public policy POV is in Washington and Sydney, and I dare say Sydney will not much longer. The movement to get Pachauri fired has come a cropper on the man's egotism and his Nobel Peace Prize. Skeptics are clamoring to keep him on the job, and Penn State's whitewash of Mann as well as the whitewash of Phil Jones will tend to preserve Pachauri's job. A salutary development IMO.


E&E News: House Ag chairman co-sponsors bid to block EPA regs
February 3, 2010


Posted by: David Lungren David_Lungren@epw.senate.gov

In Case You Missed It . . .

E&E News

House Ag chairman co-sponsors bid to block EPA regs

By: Robin Bravender, E&E reporter

February 03, 2010

Link to Article

A trio of House lawmakers yesterday introduced a bill to block U.S. EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases, marking the latest in a string of bipartisan attacks against forthcoming climate rules.

The measure from Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Missouri Reps. Ike Skelton (D) and Jo Ann Emerson (R) would amend the Clean Air Act to prohibit EPA from regulating greenhouse gases based on their effects on global climate change.

The bill would also advance several of the farm state lawmakers' other priorities by stopping EPA from calculating land-use changes in foreign countries for determining U.S. renewable fuels policy, and broadening the definition of renewable biomass.

"It appears the clean energy bill moving through Congress is stalled," Skelton said. "Let us set that bill aside and pass this scaled-back energy legislation."

This bill, Skelton said, "represents a responsible way to move forward on energy legislation, gets the EPA under control, provides good things for American farmers and builds upon bipartisan objectives that will help curb climate change and make our nation more energy independent."

The effort comes as EPA prepares to begin regulating greenhouse gases next month with its final tailpipe standard. That rule will trigger stationary source regulations, and the agency is expected to continue crafting greenhouse gas standards for other sectors.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision that EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The bill is the latest congressional efforts to stall EPA climate rules. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is planning to seek a vote next month on a disapproval resolution that would effectively veto EPA's determination that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare.

In the House, Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) has introduced a separate bill to strip EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions unless it receives explicit authority to do so by Congress.

Indirect land use, biomass

In addition to blocking climate regulations, the new bill seeks to block EPA from considering greenhouse gas emissions from international "indirect" land-use changes when implementing the renewable fuel standard, or RFS.

The 2007 energy bill expanded the RFS and increased goals for the use of ethanol and other biofuels in U.S. transportation fuels, reaching 36 billion gallons a year in 2022. The standard requires EPA to assess the "lifecycle" emissions of biofuels -- weighing the emissions from growing crops, producing fuels made from them, and distributing and using the fuels.

EPA proposed last year to measure emissions from indirect land-use changes associated with biofuels -- such as land that is deforested in other countries because of increased crop growth in the United States. The agency concluded, depending on the time frames modeled, that traditional corn ethanol could have a slightly larger emissions footprint than gasoline when land-use changes are factored in.

But those draft regulations drew the ire of biofuels advocates and farm-state lawmakers -- including Peterson and Emerson -- who maintained the agency was unfair to ethanol.

Last summer, Peterson reached an agreement with the Democratic authors of energy and climate legislation to include language to bar EPA from considering including emissions from indirect land-use changes abroad for five years (E&E Daily, June 24, 2009). But that bill has languished as climate talks have stalled in the Senate.

Meanwhile, the White House completed its review of EPA's proposal for implementing the RFS earlier this week, paving the way for the agency to finalize the rule (E&ENews PM, Feb. 2).

"I'm proud to help sponsor this bill because if Congress doesn't do something soon, the EPA is going to cram these regulations through all on their own," Peterson said in a statement yesterday.

Emerson has also sought to bar EPA from measuring emissions from indirect land-use changes as part of the overall calculation of biofuels emissions. During consideration of the EPA fiscal 2010 appropriations bill last year, Emerson introduced a failed amendment that would have blocked EPA from considering the indirect emissions (E&E Daily, June 19, 2009).

The new measure would also expand the definition of what classifies as "renewable biomass" that can be used for biofuels under the RFS.

The definition largely mirrors an amendment that Peterson negotiated to include in the House-passed energy and climate bill, although language barring the use of components of federal forests and conservation areas was notably absent in the bill introduced yesterday (Greenwire, June 25, 2009).

Peterson and Skelton voted for the House climate and energy bill (H.R. 2454); Emerson voted against it.

Click here to read the bill.

[Corlyss_D]

India forms new climate change body

The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri.

By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
Published: 3:47PM GMT 04 Feb 2010

Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the HImalayan glaciers to disappear Photo: ALAMY The move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation that his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing despite global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on “voodoo science”, but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalized the IPC chairman even further.

He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses… they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.

It will bring together 125 research institutions throughout India, work with international bodies and operate as a “sort of Indian IPCC,” he added.

The body, which he said will not rival the UN’s panel, will publish its own climate assessment in November this year, with reports on the Himalayas, India’s long coastline, the Western Ghat highlands and the north-eastern region close to the borders with Bangladesh, Burma, China and Nepal. “Through these we will demonstrate our commitment to climate science,” he said.

The UN panel’s claims of glacial meltdown by 2035 “was clearly out of place and didn’t have any scientific basis,” he said, while stressing the government remained concerned about the health of the Himalayan ice flows. “Most glaciers are melting, they are retreating, some glaciers, like the Siachen glacier, are advancing. But overall one can say incontrovertibly that the debris on our glaciers is very high the snow balance is very low. We have to be very cautious because of the water security particularly in north India which depends on the health of the Himalayan glaciers,” he added.

The new National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology will be based in Dehradun, in Uttarakhand, and will monitor glacial changes and compare results with those from glaciers in Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/enviro ... -body.html

[Corlyss_D]

More bogus data in IPCC report exposed:

Sea level blunder enrages Dutch minister
Published on : 4 February 2010 - 9:24am | By Rob Kievit

A United Nations report wrongly claimed that more than half of the Netherlands is currently below sea level.*

In fact, just 20 percent of the country consists of polders that are pumped dry, and which are at risk of flooding if global warming causes rising sea levels. Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer has ordered a thorough investigation into the quality of the climate reports which she uses to base her policies on.

Climate-sceptic MPs were quick to react. Conservative MP Helma Neppérus and Richard de Mos from the right-wing Freedom Party want the minister to explain to parliament how these figures were used to decide on national climate policy. "This may invalidate all claims that the last decades were the hottest ever," Mr De Mos said.

The incorrect figures which date back to 2007 were revealed on Wednesday by the weekly Vrij Nederland. The Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency told reporters that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) added together two figures supplied by the agency: the area of the Netherlands which is below sea-level and the area which is susceptible to flooding. In fact, these areas overlap, so the figures should not have been combined to produce the 55 percent quoted by the IPCC.

The discovery comes just a week after a prediction about glaciers in the Himalayas proved wrong. Rather than disappearing by 2035, as IPCC reports claim, the original research underlying the report predicted the mountain ice would last until 2350.

Urbanisation

Questions are being asked on a broader scale too about climate-change data. US researchers Joseph D'Aleo and Anthony Watts, quoted in Dutch daily De Telegraaf, say the perceived global temperature rise may be an result of changes in the measuring methods.

There used to be 6,000 measuring posts, they say, but now there are just 1,500. A number of weather stations in colder areas like Siberia and the Arctic were dismantled, while the remaining stations were in more moderate zones. As a consequence, data from colder areas was no longer used in the calculations.

D'Aleo and Watts also point to discrepancies between terrestrial and satellite measurements. Satellite weather stations report that the temperature of the earth's atmosphere has remained stable, with a slight fall since 2001.

Earth-based weather stations report an increase in warmth which, according to the two Americans, reflects the process of urbanisation. Measuring posts that used to be in remote rural areas have gradually been surrounded by roads, buildings or industry, all of which produce heat.

Solar activity

Dutch researchers reporting to Minister Cramer on Wednesday said that global warming appears to be slower than had been assumed. In a brochure published by the Dutch Platform for Communication on Climate Change (PCCC) the academics say that sunspot activity was relatively low over the past decade and will continue to be low for the foreseeable future.

The lower the solar activity, the smaller the warming effect. According to the PCCC, the average temperature may even decrease by between 0.2 and 0.4 degrees, but they warn that this is just a slight dent in the much stronger rising trend. "The heat is still on," according to the PCCC report.

Source URL: http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/sea-l ... h-minister
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/sea-l ... h-minister

*As Freeman Dyson observed a while back, "[A]ny model that fails to predict [El Nino] is clearly deficient." Perhaps that holds for assertions about climate that can be easily verified, but are not.

[keaggy220]

More bogus data in IPCC report exposed:

Sea level blunder enrages Dutch minister
Published on : 4 February 2010 - 9:24am | By Rob Kievit

A United Nations report wrongly claimed that more than half of the Netherlands is currently below sea level.*

In fact, just 20 percent of the country consists of polders that are pumped dry, and which are at risk of flooding if global warming causes rising sea levels. Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer has ordered a thorough investigation into the quality of the climate reports which she uses to base her policies on.

Climate-sceptic MPs were quick to react. Conservative MP Helma Neppérus and Richard de Mos from the right-wing Freedom Party want the minister to explain to parliament how these figures were used to decide on national climate policy. "This may invalidate all claims that the last decades were the hottest ever," Mr De Mos said.

The incorrect figures which date back to 2007 were revealed on Wednesday by the weekly Vrij Nederland. The Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency told reporters that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) added together two figures supplied by the agency: the area of the Netherlands which is below sea-level and the area which is susceptible to flooding. In fact, these areas overlap, so the figures should not have been combined to produce the 55 percent quoted by the IPCC.

The discovery comes just a week after a prediction about glaciers in the Himalayas proved wrong. Rather than disappearing by 2035, as IPCC reports claim, the original research underlying the report predicted the mountain ice would last until 2350.

Urbanisation

Questions are being asked on a broader scale too about climate-change data. US researchers Joseph D'Aleo and Anthony Watts, quoted in Dutch daily De Telegraaf, say the perceived global temperature rise may be an result of changes in the measuring methods.

There used to be 6,000 measuring posts, they say, but now there are just 1,500. A number of weather stations in colder areas like Siberia and the Arctic were dismantled, while the remaining stations were in more moderate zones. As a consequence, data from colder areas was no longer used in the calculations.

D'Aleo and Watts also point to discrepancies between terrestrial and satellite measurements. Satellite weather stations report that the temperature of the earth's atmosphere has remained stable, with a slight fall since 2001.

Earth-based weather stations report an increase in warmth which, according to the two Americans, reflects the process of urbanisation. Measuring posts that used to be in remote rural areas have gradually been surrounded by roads, buildings or industry, all of which produce heat.

Solar activity

Dutch researchers reporting to Minister Cramer on Wednesday said that global warming appears to be slower than had been assumed. In a brochure published by the Dutch Platform for Communication on Climate Change (PCCC) the academics say that sunspot activity was relatively low over the past decade and will continue to be low for the foreseeable future.

The lower the solar activity, the smaller the warming effect. According to the PCCC, the average temperature may even decrease by between 0.2 and 0.4 degrees, but they warn that this is just a slight dent in the much stronger rising trend. "The heat is still on," according to the PCCC report.

Source URL: http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/sea-l ... h-minister
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/sea-l ... h-minister

*As Freeman Dyson observed a while back, "[A]ny model that fails to predict [El Nino] is clearly deficient." Perhaps that holds for assertions about climate that can be easily verified, but are not.

This is what happens when there is no accountability. Picking apart the alarmist data is embarrassingly easy. It's obvious there has been almost no regard to veracity - only a deep dedication to the cause... It's frightening how many 1000's of scientists saw the mountains of flawed data and said nothing. I can't think of a bigger fraud.

[Corlyss_D]

I can't think of a bigger fraud.

I've been thinking about some of the more spectacular recent ones. There was that Korean doctor who claimed to have cloned a human. Piltdown Man. The scam where Alan Sokal submitted a paper consisting of nonsense to see if it would pass peer review, which it did. The Tasaday tribe scam. The vaccine hoax just posted by Steve. The Cold Fusion scam from the 1990s. The Kinsey sex studies. There are a lot of "falsified data" frauds uncovered routinely.

[keaggy220]

I can't think of a bigger fraud.

I've been thinking about some of the more spectacular recent ones. There was that Korean doctor who claimed to have cloned a human. Piltdown Man. The scam where Alan Sokal submitted a paper consisting of nonsense to see if it would pass peer review, which it did. The Tasaday tribe scam. The vaccine hoax just posted by Steve. The Cold Fusion scam from the 1990s. The Kinsey sex studies. There are a lot of "falsified data" frauds uncovered routinely.

A recent one is H1N1. I was so fooled by the H1N1 hysteria that I bought a 40oz bottle of hand sanitizer and I was actually thinking about getting a flu shot. I feel so ashamed. Why do I ever believe the MSM???

[Dennis Spath]

I can't think of a bigger fraud.

I've been thinking about some of the more spectacular recent ones. There was that Korean doctor who claimed to have cloned a human. Piltdown Man. The scam where Alan Sokal submitted a paper consisting of nonsense to see if it would pass peer review, which it did. The Tasaday tribe scam. The vaccine hoax just posted by Steve. The Cold Fusion scam from the 1990s. The Kinsey sex studies. There are a lot of "falsified data" frauds uncovered routinely.

Again, Corlyss, you feel it necessary to pat the troubled heads of Glen Beck fans with a torrent of "evidence" implying that ALL IPCC concerns are boneheaded/a Socialist Prot to destroy the American Economy, because a FEW of their reported claims have been challenged on the grounds of rigged data/faulty Climate Model assumptions. That is a classic example of "Generalizing from Particulars" as you well know. And you continue to shower us with multiple articles by way of rehashing the same story....as if repeating them over and over should end all debate on the subject. You've got Keaggy so excited by the process he's gleefully joined you in this classic propaganda tactic. We are not impressed.

[keaggy220]

I can't think of a bigger fraud.

I've been thinking about some of the more spectacular recent ones. There was that Korean doctor who claimed to have cloned a human. Piltdown Man. The scam where Alan Sokal submitted a paper consisting of nonsense to see if it would pass peer review, which it did. The Tasaday tribe scam. The vaccine hoax just posted by Steve. The Cold Fusion scam from the 1990s. The Kinsey sex studies. There are a lot of "falsified data" frauds uncovered routinely.

Again, Corlyss, you feel it necessary to pat the troubled heads of Glen Beck fans with a torrent of "evidence" implying that ALL IPCC concerns are boneheaded/a Socialist Prot to destroy the American Economy, because a FEW of their reported claims have been challenged on the grounds of rigged data/faulty Climate Model assumptions. That is a classic example of "Generalizing from Particulars" as you well know. And you continue to shower us with multiple articles by way of rehashing the same story....as if repeating them over and over should end all debate on the subject. You've got Keaggy so excited by the process he's gleefully joined you in this classic propaganda tactic. We are not impressed.

The problem I have is that when the rigged data and bogus claims were being published as truth with the purpose of frightening the world into some action, why didn't so called legitimate climate scientists stand up and refute these obviously fraudulent claims?

[rwetmore]

Again, Corlyss, you feel it necessary to pat the troubled heads of Glen Beck fans with a torrent of "evidence" implying that ALL IPCC concerns are boneheaded/a Socialist Prot to destroy the American Economy, because a FEW of their reported claims have been challenged on the grounds of rigged data/faulty Climate Model assumptions. That is a classic example of "Generalizing from Particulars" as you well know.

OK, what are the remaining 'MAJORITY' of claims by the IPCC, and on what scientific basis - isolated from now known to be rigged data, faulty climate model assumptions, etc, etc. - do these claims rest?

And you continue to shower us with multiple articles by way of rehashing the same story....as if repeating them over and over should end all debate on the subject.

Uh...it was the IPCC and Al Gore that claimed all debate on the subject was over - not Corlyss.

[Corlyss_D]

this has to be one of the worst attempts at logical comparison I've ever seen. The phrase "straw-man" comes to mind.

Again, Corlyss, you feel it necessary to pat the troubled heads of Glen Beck fans with a torrent of "evidence" implying that ALL IPCC concerns are boneheaded/a Socialist Prot to destroy the American Economy,

See, Contrapunctus? A true artist!

[rwetmore]

What does the alleged impropriety of Mann's conduct have to do with CO2 emissions into the atmosphere

Nothing, but that wasn't the implication.

...given one ton of coal burned to produce electricity is contributing 2.38 tons of CO2 going into our atmosphere...

That actually sounds about right. The entire atmosphere, however, contains roughly over 6,000,000,000,000 tons of CO2.

[Dennis Spath]

What does the alleged impropriety of Mann's conduct have to do with CO2 emissions into the atmosphere

Nothing, but that wasn't the implication.

...given one ton of coal burned to produce electricity is contributing 2.38 tons of CO2 going into our atmosphere...

That actually sounds about right. The entire atmosphere, however, contains roughly over 6,000,000,000,000 tons of CO2.

It would be useful to provide the ignorant masses with the additional fact that the Oceans contain Fifty times the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that our contributions to the atmosphere have increased approximately 35% since the dawn of the industrial age....population explosion. I first became aware of this cycle upon reading Lovelock's "GAIA" in the early 1990's. Wikipedia has some interesting and relatively easy to read articles on the subject at the links provided below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dio ... atmosphere

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle

[rwetmore]

[It would be useful to provide the ignorant masses with the additional fact that the Oceans contain Fifty times the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that our contributions to the atmosphere have increased approximately 35% since the dawn of the industrial age....population explosion.

Yes, but it's not known how much is a result of man and how much is a result of nature (warming oceans).

[Corlyss_D]

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Legacy: Billions of Dollars and Unmeasured Loss of Lives
IPCC And CRU Are The Same Corrupt OrganizationBy Dr. Tim Ball Monday, February 8, 2010

Cost of the corruption of climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) is likely a trillion dollars already and there is no measure of the lives lost because of unnecessary reactions like biofuels affecting food supplies. Stories appear about the corruption at the IPCC and others about the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most people, including the media, don’t seem to realize the IPCC is the CRU. Some articles mention both but don’t make the connection. A recent article in the Globe and Mail is a good example.

The article is a small shift because the Globe has consistently promoted human caused warming and attacked skeptics. However, failure to make the connection allows people involved to develop defenses, withdraw from associations or go into hiding.

A Very Large Cast

Universities and governments are already whitewashing the behavior of prominent individuals like Phil Jones and Michael Mann. Nobody else involved with the scandal is facing even biased internal investigation. Many are not mentioned in the limited media reports on the scandal. People like Mike Hulme, Tom Wigley, Benjamin Santer, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa, Malcolm Hughes, Raymond Bradley, John Holdren, Jonathan Overpeck, Caspar Amman, Michael Oppenheimer, Tom Crowley, Gavin Schmidt, William Connolley, Tim Osborn, Thomas Karl, Andrew Weaver, Eric Steig, and all names on the CRU emails require investigation. They had to know what was going on, partly because they all used the same vehicles of attack and deception. By investigating only two individuals the collective culpability of the CRU and the IPCC goes unchallenged. Investigation of two individuals underscores the false claim there are one or two “bad apples” but the overall science is unaffected. The IPCC received a Nobel Prize collectively; they must bear the blame collectively.

There are also those in government who acted in extremely questionable ways. Chief among these are members of the United Kingdom Meteorological Office (UKMO) including John Mitchell. He was review editor of the IPCC and initially denied access to information then claimed it was erased. The UKMO later said the information existed but said it was protected information. The Telegraph newspaper said of this, Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that the Met Office’s stonewalling was part of a co-ordinated, legally questionable strategy by climate change academics linked with the IPCC to block access to outsiders.

What was the role of government officials who selected their country’s representatives to prevent skeptics participating. Such was apparently the case in Canada, the UK and likely the US. UK Science advisor John Beddington has already said failure to include skeptics was a mistake. “I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper scepticism. Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed.” The problem is exacerbated when it is still an active policy of government. Work for the next IPCC Report is underway and there’s no apparent change in participants or procedures. CRU people were involved from the start and triggered the first problems

Corruption From the Start

After the IPCC was formed at Villach Austria in 1988 work began on the first Report that appeared in 1990. This report is no longer available on the IPCC website. It included Figure 7.1c the diagram of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) that challenged the CRU claim the 20th century was the warmest ever. (Figure 1). This led to the first major corruption as they rewrote the historic record by creating the hockey stick.



Figure 1: The controversial Figure 7.1c in IPCC 1990 Report

There is extensive discussion of the origin of the diagram in a January 5, 2007 email from Phil Jones, disgraced Director of the CRU and Wikipedia exploiter William Connolley. As Jones says, I’ve added a few extra names in the cc of this email list to see if we can definitively determine where the figure in the subject title comes from. The background is that the skeptics keep referring back to it and I’d like to prove that it is a schematic and it isn’t based on real data, but on presumed knowledge at some point around the late 1980s. If you think it is based on something real. What we’d like to do is show this either on ‘Real Climate’ or as background in a future paper, or both. The diagram contradicted the hockey stick graph in the 2001 Report so proving it was not valid strengthened the case. At the same time they undermined the credibility of Soon and Baliunas who proved existence of the MWP in a multitude of other records.

The first public exposure was dubbed the Chapter 8 scandal and involved Benjamin Santer. He was lead author of that chapter and rewrote portions without consulting other authors. As Lord Monckton explains, “In comes Santer and re-writes it for them, after the scientists have sent in their finalized draft, and that finalized draft said at five different places, there is no discernable human effect on global temperature — I’ve seen a copy of this — Santer went through, crossed out all of those, and substituted a new conclusion, and this has been the official conclusion ever since.” Santer originally denied the accusations and said his actions were covered by the rules that required the Scientific Report agree with the Summary for Policymakers (SPM). It was an early measure of the way the CRU people used the rules to control the results. They even stared down a senior US scientist Dr Frederick Seitz, former President of the National Academy of Sciences over the issue.

CRU control increased in degree and extent. It became arrogant and bullying so they believed they could control all aspects. They accepted as fact the unproven hypothesis that increasing human CO2 in the atmosphere leads to a runaway global temperature. With the help of bureaucrats they ensured exclusion of skeptics. They falsified the weather record of stations and used a reduced number to prove their claims. Phil Jones refused to disclose how he calculated the increase of 0.6°C since the end of the 19th century. This with the hockey stick was pivotal in the claim for human causes in the 2001 IPCC Report. Jones still fails to disclose the information. They built models with inadequate data and programmed them to produce the results they wanted. They left out major parts of the natural system of climate effectively ignoring the Sun, water vapor, and geothermal heat among others. They controlled published literature, the peer review process, and what was included in the Reports. They controlled and falsified the world’s view of climate change by deliberately releasing the Summary For Policymakers (SPM) with all its exaggerations and limitations. That the factual Technical Reports were required to agree with the political SPM indicates deliberate deception.

The Cost Is Enormous
The CRU is the IPCC. Their work has cost the world an enormous amount of grief, conflict and money. It is time to total the massive amounts of money given to narrowly directed research; the cost of the impact on energy policy and economies; the lost jobs and opportunities from industries forced out of business; the unnecessary subsidies to research and businesses chasing unworkable alternate energies; the taxes and legislative restrictions on businesses and other activities. They provided the false vehicle to carry left wing policies of tax and total control followed by President Obama. Their deception has set world progress back at massive cost and it is time they are all held accountable.

Dr. Tim Ball, is a member of CFP’s Speakers’ Bureau.

Tim Ball is a renowned environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Ball employs his extensive background in climatology and other fields as an advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition, Friends of Science and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Dr. Ball can be reached at: Letters@canadafreepress.com

Printed from: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/19788

[Corlyss_D]

NYT Discovers the Climategate Controversy! Someone alert the media! Do you suppose the editor glanced at his copy of CJR?

February 9, 2010
U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Just over two years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri seemed destined for a scientist’s version of sainthood: A vegetarian economist-engineer who leads the United Nations’ climate change panel, he accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the panel, sharing the honor with former Vice President Al Gore.

But Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called for Dr. Pachauri’s resignation last week.

Critics, writing in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere, have accused Dr. Pachauri of profiting from his work as an adviser to businesses, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus Capital Advisors, a New York investment firm — a claim he denies.

They have also unearthed and publicized problems with the intergovernmental panel’s landmark 2007 report on climate change, which concluded that the planet was warming and that humans were likely to blame.

The report, they contend, misrepresents the state of scientific knowledge about diverse topics — including the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers and the rise in severe storms — in a way that exaggerates the evidence for climate change.

With a global climate treaty under negotiation and legislation pending in the United States, the climate panel has found itself in the political cross hairs, its judgments provoking passions normally reserved for issues like abortion and guns. The panel is charged by the United Nations with reviewing research to create periodic reports on climate risks, documents that are often used by governments to guide decisions, and its every conclusion is being dissected under a microscope.

Several of the recent accusations have proved to be half-truths: While Dr. Pachauri does act as a paid consultant and adviser to many companies, he makes no money from these activities, he said. The payments go to the Energy and Resources Institute, the prestigious nonprofit research center based in Delhi that he founded in 1982 and still leads, where the money finances charitable projects like Lighting a Billion Lives, which provides solar lanterns in rural India.

“My conscience is clear,” Dr. Pachauri said in a lengthy telephone interview.

The panel, in reviewing complaints about possible errors in its report, has so far found that one was justified and another was “baseless.” The general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions.

Still, the escalating controversy has led even many of them to conclude that the Nobel-winning panel needs improved scientific standards as well as a policy about what kinds of other work its officers may pursue.

“When I look at Dr. Pachauri’s case I see obvious and egregious problems,” said Dr. Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist and professor of environmental science at the University of Colorado. He said that serving as an adviser to financial companies was inappropriate for the chairman of the United Nations’ panel, whether Dr. Pachauri received payment directly or not.

Dr. Pachauri bristles at the accusations, which he says are “lies” or “distortions” promulgated by groups hoping to undermine climate legislation and a treaty.

“These people want to distort the picture for their own ends,” Dr. Pachauri said, noting that the report was released two years ago and that the criticisms were only now coming into the limelight. “What we’re doing is not only above-board, but laudable,” he said. “These guys want me to resign, but I won’t.”

Dr. Pachauri, 69, said the only work income he received was a salary from the Energy and Resources Institute: about $49,000, according to his 2009 Indian tax return, which he provided to The New York Times. The return also lists $16,000 in other income, most of it interest on accounts in Indian banks.

Dr. Pachauri acknowledged his role as an adviser and consultant to businesses, but he said that it was his responsibility as the panel’s chairman to disseminate its findings to industry.

Nonetheless, Christopher Monckton, a leading climate skeptic, called the panel corrupt, adding: “The chair is an Indian railroad engineer with very substantial direct and indirect financial vested interests in the matters covered in the climate panel’s report. What on earth is he doing there?”

A former adviser to Margaret Thatcher who also assailed Dr. Pachauri in a critique in Copenhagen that has since been widely circulated, Lord Monckton is now the chief policy adviser to the Science and Public Policy Institute, a Washington-based research and education institute that states on its Web site: “Proved: There is no climate crisis.”

As the accusations have snowballed in the last six weeks, Dr. Pachauri remains widely admired for his work on the intergovernmental panel, which relies on the collaborative work of hundreds of volunteer scientists to sift through current scientific evidence for its reports. He has served in an elected, unpaid position as chairman of the panel, often known by its initials, I.P.C.C., since 2002.

“There is no evidence that outside interests affected Pachauri’s leadership of the I.P.C.C. at all,” said Hal Harvey, chief executive of ClimateWorks, a foundation based in San Francisco that focuses on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The panel’s process is so “robust and transparent” that it could not be undercut by “personalities or errors,” he said.

He added, “Anyone who is qualified to chair the I.P.C.C. will have interests in academics, science, politics or business; there are thousands of scientists on the I.P.C.C., and you need their expertise and they all have to come from somewhere.”

Many government panels in the United States tolerate overt conflicts of interest in order to get expert advice, Mr. Harvey said, noting that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase on its board.

But most scientific agencies have explicit conflict-of-interest policies to ensure that expert advice is impartial. The Food and Drug Administration, for example, asks doctors who serve on drug advisory panels to disclose payments from pharmaceutical companies and can disqualify those whose financial involvement is too great.

Dr. Pielke, the University of Colorado professor, said the United Nations panel, which has no explicit conflict policy, should do the same, adding, “You need to make sure that advice is advice and not stealth advocacy.”

Some critics have said that the intergovernmental panel’s chairman should be employed full time by the United Nations while in office, and should eschew outside commitments.

The accusations of errors in the panel’s report — most originating from two right-leaning British papers, The Sunday Telegraph and The Times of London — have sullied the group’s reputation. They follow a controversy that erupted late last year over e-mail messages and documents released without authorization from a climate research center in Britain.

In one case, the report included a sentence that said the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. The sentence was based on a decade-old interview with a glaciologist in a popular magazine; the scientist now says he was misquoted. The panel recently expressed “regret” for the error.

The panel was also criticized for citing a study about financial losses after extreme weather events that found an increase in such losses of 2 percent a year from 1970 to 2005. That study had not been peer reviewed at the time, although it was later on.

The panel has called the complaint “baseless,” noting that the study was cited appropriately and that other scientific data pointed to a recent rise in severe storms.

Lord Monckton said the incidents reflected a pattern of willful misrepresentation by scientists with financial and professional interests that render them unsuitable to give neutral advice.

In response to the recent criticisms, Dr. Pachauri provided an accounting of some of his outside consulting fees paid to the Energy and Resources Institute. Those include about $140,000 from Deutsche Bank, $25,000 from Credit Suisse, $80,000 from Toyota and $48,750 from Yale. He has recently begun work as a strategic adviser for Pegasus, the investment firm, but has not yet attended a meeting, and no money has yet been paid to the Energy and Resources Institute. He has also provided advice free of charge to groups like the Chicago Climate Exchange.

The energy institute has financial interests in a number of companies. For example, it was awarded stock by the founders of GloriOil, a start-up based in Houston, in exchange for permission to use a method developed at the institute to extract residual oil from older wells.

“We thought about it long and hard, and decided to get involved in this because the U.S. has the largest number of these wells and it is better than drilling offshore or in Alaska,” Dr. Pachauri said.

The institute also provides paid consulting. For example, engineers at the institute are designing two Indian solar parks for the Clinton Climate Initiative. Dr. Pachauri added that research institutes in poorer countries like India could not depend on government largess, as those in the United States did. The institute gets its money from a variety of sources, including the European Union, foundations and private companies.

“We have to generate our own resources from our work,” he said. “This is an institute that has pulled itself up by its bootstraps.”

But even some academics who accept that climate change is a problem are concerned about such activities.

“This is not about whether this is a good person or a good cause; it’s about the integrity of the scientific process,” Dr. Pielke said, adding: “This has become so polarized, it’s like you must be in cahoots with the bad guys if you are at all negative about Pachauri.”

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

[Corlyss_D]

Drama Queen Climatologist "Wasn't Ready for the Reaction" to the Climategate emails; contemplated suicide.

From The Sunday Times February 7, 2010

The leak was bad. Then came the death threats

Phil Jones said he and his colleagues were targeted by climate change sceptics
Richard Girling

PHOTOGRAPHS of Professor Phil Jones show a handsome, smiling, confident-looking man. Not chubby exactly, but in blooming good health. The man who meets me at the University of East Anglia (UEA) looks grey-skinned and gaunt, as if he has been kept in prison.

In a way, he has. Since November last year he has been a prisoner of public opprobrium and a target of such vilification that was he was almost persuaded to comply with the wishes of those who wanted him dead.

In bare outline, the story of the Climatic Research Unit emails — “Climategate” — is well known.

Unidentified hackers broke into the UEA website and made off with more than a thousand emails, plus some data and program files dating back over 13 years. The thieves’ eureka moment came when they found messages from Jones, the unit’s director, and others apparently encouraging climate scientists to refuse freedom of information (FoI) requests from known climate sceptics, and even to destroy data rather than surrender them to anyone they feared might misuse them.

At the worst possible time, in the days immediately before the Copenhagen climate summit in December, it enabled sceptics across the globe to claim that climate science was fatally flawed and its practitioners a shifty gang who twisted the facts to suit their agenda and shut out anyone who disagreed with them.

Jones insists that is not the way it was, but concedes it was the way it may have looked. He now accepts that he did not treat the FoI requests as seriously as he should have done. “I regret that I did not deal with them in the right way,” he told The Sunday Times. “In a way, I misjudged the situation.”

But he pleads provocation. Last year in July alone the unit received 60 FoI requests from across the world. With a staff of only 13 to cope with them, the demands were accumulating faster than they could be dealt with. “According to the rules,” says Jones, “you have to do 18 hours’ work on each one before you’re allowed to turn it down.” It meant that the scientists would have had a lot of their time diverted from research.

A further irritation was that most of the data was available online, making the FoI requests, in Jones’s view, needless and a vexatious waste of his time. In the circumstances, he says, he thought it reasonable to refer the applicants to the website of the Historical Climatology Network in the US.

He also suspected that the CRU was the target of a co-ordinated attempt to interfere with its work — a suspicion that hardened into certainty when, over a matter of days, it received 40 similar FoI requests. Each applicant asked for data from five different countries, 200 in all, which would have been a daunting task even for someone with nothing else to do. It was clear to Jones that the attack originated from an old adversary, the sceptical website Climate Audit, run by Steve McIntyre, a former minerals prospector and arch climate sceptic.

“We were clearly being targeted,” says Jones. “Only 22% of the FoI enquiries were identifiably from within the UK, 39% were from abroad and 39% were untraceable.” What irked him was that the foreign applicants would all have had sources closer to hand in their own countries.

“I think they just wanted to waste our time,” he says. “They wanted to slow us down.”

It was pure irritation, he says, that provoked him and others to write the notorious emails apparently conspiring to destroy or withhold data. “It was just frustration. I thought the requests were just distractions. It was taking us away from our day jobs. It was written in anger.”

But he insists that no data were destroyed. “We have no data to delete. It comes to us from institutions around the world. We interpret data. We don’t create or collect it. It’s all available from other sources.”

If the leak itself was bad, the aftermath was the stuff of nightmares. Even now, weeks later, Jones seems rigid with shock. “There were death threats,” he says. “People said I should go and kill myself. They said they knew where I lived.” Two more death threats came last week after the deputy information commissioner delivered his verdict, making more work for Norfolk police, who are already investigating the theft of the emails.

The effect on Jones was devastating. The worldwide outcry plunged him into the snakepit of international politics. It was, he agrees, “a David Kelly moment”.

“I did think about it, yes. About suicide. I thought about it several times, but I think I’ve got past that stage now.” With the support of his family, and particularly the love of his five-year-old granddaughter, he began to look forward again. He is still unwell, getting through the day on beta-blockers and the night on sleeping pills, and he has lost a stone in weight. But at last there is optimism.

Until the inquiry is over, he will stand aside from his directorship of the CRU. On the question of the science, however, he remains bristlingly defiant. He may have tripped up over the FoI requests, but nobody has laid a glove on the science. To prove his point, he spreads the table with graphs, tracing the outlines with his fingertip. He shows how the warming trend plotted by the CRU precisely matches the plots from two independent sources in America. “There, you see!” The three coloured lines precisely overlay each other, proof positive of scientific probity.

“I am obviously going to be much more careful about my emails in future. I will write every email as if it is for publication. But I stand 100% behind the science. I did not manipulate or fabricate any data, and I look forward to proving that to the Sir Muir Russell inquiry [the UEA’s independent review into allegations against the unit].”

Then, he believes, at the age of 57 he will be ready to resume his career and get on quietly and invisibly with what he does best. His hope for the future? “I wish people would read my scientific papers rather than my emails.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/e ... 017905.ece

[Corlyss_D]

New study using satellite data: Alaskan glacier melt overestimated
From a press release provided by Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, France:

Improved estimate of glacier decline in Alaska.

Glaciologists at the Laboratory for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography (LEGOS – CNRS/CNES/IRD/Université Toulouse 3) and their US and Canadian colleagues (1) have shown that previous studies have largely overestimated mass loss from Alaskan glaciers over the past 40 years. Recent data from the SPOT 5 and ASTER satellites have enabled researchers to extensively map mass loss in these glaciers, which contributed 0.12 mm/year to sea-level rise between 1962 and 2006, rather than 0.17 mm/year as previously estimated.

Mountain glaciers cover between 500 000 and 600 000 km2 of the Earth’s surface (around the size of France), which is little compared to the area of the Greenland (1.6 million km2) and Antarctic (12.3 million km2) ice sheets. Despite their small size, mountain glaciers have played a major role in recent sea-level rise due to their rapid melting in response to global climate warming.

Of all the ice-covered regions of the planet, ice loss has been the greatest in Alaska and northwestern Canada, where glaciers cover 90 000 km2. Results from the LEGOS glaciologists and their US and Canadian colleagues, published in the February issue of Nature Geoscience, lead them to conclude that these glaciers have contributed 0.12 mm/year to sea-level rise over the period 1962-2006, rather than 0.17 mm/year as previously estimated by a team at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska (Fairbanks). The new estimate was obtained by comparing recent topographies, derived from Spot 5-HRS (SPIRIT project (2) funded by CNES) and ASTER (GLIMS/NASA project), with maps from the 1950-60s, which enabled loss from three quarters of the Alaskan glaciers to be measured.

How did the team from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska estimate that the contribution of these glaciers to sea-level rise was 0.17 mm/year? In 1995, and then again in 2001, the researchers used an airborne laser to measure the surface elevation of 67 glaciers along longitudinal profiles. These elevations were then compared with those mapped in the 1950s and 1960s. From this, the researchers inferred elevation changes and then extrapolated this to other glaciers. Their results, published in Science (3), pointed to a major contribution to sea-level rise for the 1950-1995 period (0.14 mm/year sea-level rise), which then doubled in the recent period (after 1995).

Why did they overestimate ice loss from these glaciers by 50%? The impact of rock debris that covers certain glacier tongues (4) and protects them from solar radiation (and thus from melting) was not taken into account in the previous work. Moreover, their sampling was limited to longitudinal profiles along the center of a few glaciers, which geometrically led to overestimation of ice loss.

This new study confirms that the thinning of Alaskan glaciers is very uneven, and shows that it is difficult to sample such complex spatial variability on the basis of a few field measurements or altimetry profiles. Thanks to their regional coverage, satellite data make it possible to improve observations of glacial response to climate change and to specify the contribution of glaciers to sea-level rise.

Ice loss from Alaskan glaciers since1962 is evidently smaller than previously thought. However, thinning (sometimes over 10 m/year, as in the Columbia glacier) and glacial retreat remain considerable. Moreover, the spectacular acceleration in mass loss since the mid 1990s, corresponding to a contribution of 0.25 to 0.30 mm/year to sea-level rise, is not in question and proves to be a worrying indication of future sea-level rise.

NOTES:

(1) from Northern Arizona University (US) and two universities in Canada (University of British Columbia and University of Northern British Columbia).

(2) During the 4th International Polar Year (2007-2009), the glaciologists had free access to SPOT 5-HRS data thanks to the SPIRIT project (SPOT 5 stereoscopic survey of Polar Ice: Reference Images and Topographies). The high-resolution images from this satellite can be used to reconstruct precisely the topography of polar ice and thus study its past and future evolution in response to climate fluctuations. LEGOS is the scientific coordinator for this project, which was carried out with CNES, Spot Image and IGN Espace.

(3) Arendt et al, Rapid wastage of Alaska glaciers and their contribution to rising sea level. Science 297, 382-386 (2002)

(4) The lower parts of a valley glacier.

References:
Berthier E., Schiefer E., Clarke G.K.C., Menounos B. & Remy, F. Contribution of Alaskan glaciers to sea level rise derived from satellite imagery. Nature Geoscience, 3(2), 92-95, doi: 10.1038/ngeo737, 2010