Scientist at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ email scandal broke the law when they refused to give raw data to the public, the privacy watchdog has ruled.
The Information Commissioner’s office said University of East Anglia researchers breached the Freedom of Information Act when handling requests from climate change sceptics.
But the scientists will escape prosecution because the offences took place more than six months ago.
The London Times has more.
A spokesman for the ICO said: “The legislation prevents us from taking any action but from looking at the emails it’s clear to us a breach has occurred.” Breaches of the act are punishable by an unlimited fine.
The complaint to the ICO was made by David Holland, a retired engineer from Northampton. He had been seeking information to support his theory that the unit broke the IPCC’s rules to discredit sceptic scientists.
In a statement, Graham Smith, Deputy Commissioner at the ICO, said: “The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information.”
He added: “The ICO is gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law. We will be advising the university about the importance of effective records management and their legal obligations in respect of future requests for information.”
As these stories make clear, several of the scientists whose e-mail and other documents were disclosed engaged in both unethical and illegal conduct. As I’ve said many times, I do not believe this disproves global warming. I still believe the balance of evidence supports the theory that human activity is causing the climate to become warmer than it would otherwise be, and I still believe that the threat of warming justifies a policy response. But the ClimateGate revelations do provide further evidence that many prominent climate scientists have sought to suppress dissent and exaggerate certain warming-related claims.
In related news, new evidence has emerged of breakdowns in the IPCC drafting and review process that resulted in the inclusion of unsubstantiated claims in portions of the IPCC’s latest reports. More on that later.
geokstr says:
During the Medieval Warming Period, which the CRU and others tried to suppress out of the datasets in order to make the debunked “hockey stick” more frightening, it was warmer than the IPCC predicts even if we do nothing. And there were no SUVs, no capitalist-roaders.
And during that time, they were farming and herding livestock in Greenland. Maybe a little warming isn’t such a bad thing after all. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but maybe that’s why the Vikings called it Greenland. It sure wasn’t because the explorer who found it was named Eric the Green.
Why exactly at this point of our limited knowledge of climate is a “policy response” necessary, especially one that costs trillions of dollars, disrupts the entire world’s economy with probable unintended consequences we have no way to predict, and centralizes power in the hands of a few. I can’t help but notice that the only “solutions” we’re being allowed to consider is basically every wet dream that Progressives ever had, from Karl himself all the down to Hillary/Barack.
And as many times as I and others here and on other threads bring up the ice cores showing that CO2 lags the onset of warming by an average of 800 years, the chicken littles ignore this inconvenient fact and refuse to address it.
January 30, 2010, 10:16 amkdackson says:
Let us not forget that ice core data, in itself, is bogus.
Because CO2 still must follow the laws of diffusion even through ice. Unless someone can convince me that this basic principle of physics is in error, I will have trouble believing in the validity of ice core data.
Now, while the acts of the people in question have been deemed illegal and unethical and no charges are to be brought due to the statute of limitations (which is being reviewed in the UK so stalling like this cannot happen again) I agree that it does not disprove AGW for two very important reasons:
1) AGW has never been conclusively proved. Yes, there are models of what might happen, but the level of confidence is so low as to not be taken seriously (the gold standard is 99%+ LoC; the normally accpted minimum is 95% LoC).
2) The whole episode brings into question the validity of the analysis methods.
Let me ask any of you lawyers out there the following:
If you were confronted that the evidence at a criminal trial were somehow tainted by the actions of a laboratory manager or technician, would you rather be prosecuting or defending based on this type of relevation alone?
January 30, 2010, 10:28 amScott W Somerville says:
Like you, I was confident that global temperatures were rising and the CO2 was at least PARTIALLY responsible for the change. My biggest objection to the Global Warmists was that they were not pushing for nuclear power, which seemed like the simplest workable solution to the problem they were addressing.
Since “Climategate,” I’ve done a lot more digging into what is known and what is controversial in this field. What I’ve learned so far is DEEPLY troubling. I no longer believe that the so-called “consensus” proves that anthropogenic global warming is a real threat–I now believe that the “consensus” proves how politicized and corrupted “climate science” has become.
January 30, 2010, 10:36 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Jonathan, may I respectfully ask what you base these beliefs on?
January 30, 2010, 10:51 amcboldt says:
– My biggest objection to the Global Warmists was that they were not pushing for nuclear power, which seemed like the simplest workable solution to the problem they were addressing. –
January 30, 2010, 10:58 amThat is a bit of big fat clue. The claim was to be addressing CO2 (as cause) and climate warming (as effect), but I believe the agenda was always simpler. “It’s all about control.” There are historical parallels, generally involving control of knowledge and education. That game is always afoot, and will always be afoot.
Fub says:
I just apply the same standard that is often issued to the jurors at at criminal trial.
Jurors are instructed along the lines of “If you believe a sworn witness has failed to tell the truth once in this trial, no matter how trivial the falsehood, you may consider everything else he said to be false.”
So, if any of these “scientists” told me the sun was shining, I’d glance out the window to check.
Ongoing and real anthropogenic environmental catastrophes do exist. Many, maybe most, are readily discernible with unaided human senses. Claims of anthropogenic global warming simply “jump the shark” or go “a bridge too far”, and thereby damage real and ongoing efforts to preserve and maintain a livable and bountiful natural environment.
Real environmentalists should be looking for hemp ropes and sturdy trees to deal with these watermelons. Figuratively speaking, of course.
January 30, 2010, 11:21 amzuch says:
Prof. Adler:
Huh? “[F]urther”? “[M]any”? “[S]ought to suppress”? “[E]xaggerate”? How so?
Have you applied this scalpel to the AGW deniers, BTW?
Cheers,
January 30, 2010, 11:34 amzuch says:
Prof. Adler:
Of course, anti-AGW papers haven’t suffered from any such deficiencies … as there is no such “drafting and review process”….
Cheers,
January 30, 2010, 11:37 amGov98 says:
Fub…I just want to say you stink!
CalCrim 226 came to mind and then I’m about to write it out and you beat me to it!
If you believe a witness deliberately lied about something significant in this case you should consider not believing a thing he says.
Considered and done and done. I don’t trust people who lie to prove a point…if the evidence was there…they wouldn’t lie? Right Right?
Prof. Adler, I think you’re incorrect on this one.
January 30, 2010, 11:40 amDana White says:
This post shows just how powerful the label “climate change denier” has become. That the author feels compelled to throw in the obligatory “but this fraud does not undercut the overwhelming scientific consensus” shows the authors fear of being ridiculed as a “denier”. It reminds me of the old Seinfeld joke. Seinfeld denies being gay, but always adds “not that there’s anything wrong with that!”
January 30, 2010, 11:44 amChrisIowa says:
With this legal opinion, why don’t those who made the initial FOI request resubmit that request? And then keep re-submitting that request every 6 months until its complied with or prosecuted.
January 30, 2010, 12:03 pmFub says:
Precisely. And you smell.
January 30, 2010, 12:17 pmkdackson says:
zuch, you are wrong. There is a peer review process. Unfortunately, since the warmists have stacked the deck by bullying the journals to reject any dissent out of hand, there are too few skeptical papers published.
I believe you lawyers call this “witness tampering”.
Of course, since IANAL, I might be mistaken.
January 30, 2010, 12:20 pmAllan Walstad says:
I second Laura(southernxyl)’s request.
January 30, 2010, 12:41 pmegd says:
Obviously more anti-global warming flat-earther lies based on the mistruths spread by the gigantic oil companies and their willing accomplices in the so-called “science” fields.
Ice is hard, so gas can’t pass through it. Have you ever seen an ice cube? It’s got those little bubbles in it. Therefore, gas can’t pass through ice.
Also, humans expel carbon dioxide. If you blow on an ice cube, you’re causing carbon dioxide to impact the ice cube. What happens if you blow on an ice cube?* That’s right, it melts. Therefore, global warming is real.
* I know people are going to say that breath is hot, but I’m not talking about blowing with an open mouth, but with your lips together so that it’s cold air. Totally different.
Science!
January 30, 2010, 1:18 pmA. Criminal says:
“If what they are saying were true, one signature would have been enough” — Einstein in response to a ‘consensus’ by Nazi scientists that relativity was a Jewsish plot or Jewish science.
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but…
January 30, 2010, 1:37 pmhttp://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=20841572
“We use noble gases (Xe/Ar and Kr/Ar), electrical conductivity and Ca2+ ion concentrations to show that substantial CO2 diffusion may occur in ice on timescales of thousands of years. We estimate the permeation coefficient for CO2 in ice is ∼4 x 10-21 mol m-1 s-1 Pa-1 at -23°C in the top 287m (corresponding to 2.74 kyr).”
ChrisTS says:
egd:
Yay, Anaximenes!
January 30, 2010, 1:43 pmkdackson says:
egd:
Do you always strive to show your lack of knowledge? Steel is hard and hydrogen can diffuse through it. Ice is hard, but it’s not the hardness that matters. CO2 can certainly diffuse through ice.
And before you once again show your ignorance of physics, I suggest you consider exactly how your arguments sound.
January 30, 2010, 1:44 pmChrisTS says:
Well, the data IS available now, so ..?
January 30, 2010, 1:45 pmAnonsters says:
I like how absolutely no one noticed that all they apparently looked at are the stolen emails. Note that the stolen emails are only a portion of the total number of emails sent over the period of time, so they’ve obviously been culled by someone. Also note that there are other investigations on-going to inquire in detail about what actually happened, not solely relying on a selected set of stolen emails.
I love how the “skeptics” latch onto anything that makes them look credible, without expressing the least bit of skepticism about the sources and methods used to generate the thing latched onto.
But why let facts get in the way of a good trolling opportunity?
January 30, 2010, 1:53 pmEarle Williams says:
kdackson,
It is often difficult to distinguish between a sarcastic spoof of an extremist position and the uninformed rant of a bona fide extremist. My vote is that egd’s post is a well done spoof. Of course it could be that egd is in fact as dumb as a post. At least one can hope that he/she is twice as good looking.
January 30, 2010, 1:54 pmBritish Newspapers and American Bloggers Only Source of Climategate News « TeeJaw says:
[...] Analysis of these two stories at The Volokh Conspiracy [...]
January 30, 2010, 1:59 pmskeeter69 says:
The false claims about PEER-REVIEWED science from the IPCC are UNDENIABLE. Their CATASTROPHIC errors have reached a TIPPING POINT, resulting in their UNPRECEDENTED lack of credibility.
January 30, 2010, 2:08 pmSoronel Haetir says:
I do think a six month statute of limitations for something generally honor based like FOIA is incredibly short. That is such a short stall time that I wonder how anyone is to be punished for deliberate breeches. Perhaps that is the idea, make it a crime, but since government employees are often the target, make it unprosecutable. Somewhat like the statutes of limitations I’ve seen attached to police misconduct.
January 30, 2010, 2:19 pmPansy says:
“I still believe …”
How sad, how pathetic from a contributor to this wonderfully reflective blog, with a skeptical, inquisitive mind in all matters of knowledge.
Did you really tally all of the relevant scientific evidence to achieve a “balance”? You couldn’t have: You are no scientist–unless I missread your CV–and I bet you never spent an hour studying the matter other than reading the leftist media.
I never thought I’d read here a sentence like “I still believe…” in a matter that concerns a scientic issue that isn’t settled but has been infected by political/financial interests: more taxes, more wealth redestribution, more bureaucrats in charge of our gas emissions/our lives so that they could emit more “gas” themselves with impunity.
Other than that, let me channel Joe Wilson:
You lie, sir.
January 30, 2010, 2:20 pmJonathan H. Adler says:
Laura(southernxyl), Mr. Walstad, et al. –
I’m reluctant to get into a detailed discussion of the scientific evidence for reasons I explained in this post. That said, here is a very brief response.
My belief that human activity is contributing to climatic warming is based upon my understanding of the accumulated scientific evidence about how our climate works and the effect of increasing contributions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that I have reviewed and considered over the past 15-plus years during which I’ve been following and often working on this issue, including the nine years I spent at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, during which time I edited this book on climate change policy and authored a 1998 National Review cover story on how many risks of climate change are overstated. Much of the relevant scientific research is summarized (if occasionally exaggerated) in the IPCC’s Working Group I report on the basic science of warming (which is a separate report from the Working Group II report on impacts, some claims from which are unfounded and/or not properly cited).
Most so-called “skeptics” within the scientific community also accept the basic claims about the likely anticipated effect of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. The primary areas of disagreement are over the nature and extent of various feedback mechanisms in the climate which could augment or dampen greenhouse warming and the practical effects of climatic warming. So, for instance, noted climate skeptics Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling Jr. write in their recent book for the Cato Institute, Climate of Extremes: The Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know, that there is a warming trend and that human activity shares some of the blame. As they summarize on page 27: “AGW (anthropogenic global warming), yes. But DAGW [dangerous anthropogenic global warming]? We think not!”
I believe that certain policy responses are justified because even if one accepts a fairly “skeptical” view of the science, the best estimate is that human activity will produce some warming that will have deleterious effects in some parts of the globe, particularly in areas that have not done much to contribute to the warming. As I explain in this paper (and in shorter pieces here, here, and here), these effects should be sufficient to justify a policy response if one believes in the importance of property rights, as I do. I also believe that taxes on consumption, including energy consumption, are preferable to taxes on income, and so would welcome a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
JHA
January 30, 2010, 2:23 pmmethodact says:
I am reminded of certain prosecutors whose Achilles’ heel is Brady violations and so then go on attack of the judges that call them on it.
If the law is not on the side of these errant climate scientists…
And the facts are not on the side of said climate scientists…
Will they bang the table?
January 30, 2010, 2:23 pmMike McDougal says:
Is that because the AGW contingent has worked to lock the anti-AGW contingent out of peer-reviewed journals?
January 30, 2010, 2:45 pmAllan Walstad says:
JHA:
January 30, 2010, 2:51 pmThank you, I’ll have a look.
ChrisTS says:
JHA:
But, Pansy told us you have never read anything on the topic and only read leftist media tripe! Who am I to believe?
January 30, 2010, 2:58 pmegd says:
Like sarcasm, I hope.
Three times, at least.
January 30, 2010, 3:16 pmskeeter69 says:
Here is a home experiment that proves AGW.
January 30, 2010, 3:17 pmyou will need the following:100 friends with outdoor thermometers, a speadsheet program.
1) have everyone read their thermometers at the same time everyday for 100 days and email the readings to you.
2) Enter the readings into speadsheet.
3) Average the daily readings.
4) The first 80 days will be your baseline or normal temperatures
5) Day 81-90, use only the 50 warmest readings.
6) Day 91-95, use the 20 warmest readings.
7) Day 96-100, use 10 warmest readings.
8) Graph the trend line.
9) If the results don’t show dramatic warming, you can homogenize (adjust) the data. For instructions, google “Darwin Zero”
10) Don’t let anyone see the original data, they’ll just use it to try and prove you’re wrong.
petB says:
Probably not, but he probably knows that in technical discussion between sientists and laymens, it never happened that laymens were right and scientists mistaken.
January 30, 2010, 3:20 pmpetB says:
Ups, should read the next comment before responding.
January 30, 2010, 3:27 pmOren says:
Except that the phase space of CO2 in ice is not ergodic — it’s significantly frustrated. The CO2 is effectively trapped by crystal defects (line disclinations) in the ice and hence it’s motion is highly sub-diffusive.
I’ve been in condensed matter physics for the better part of a decade, and I don’t know anyone that would cite “diffusion” as a universal law. As a principle, it seems to be respect more in breach (see, e.g. superdiffusion, anomalous diffusion, glassy-substance, granular materials, …) than in compliance. Diffusion stands to modern condensed matter as classical mechanics to modern mechanics — it’s right except when it’s not.
You are confusing two things.
(1) Whether human CO2/CH4 emissions have significantly altered the climate up to this point.
(2) What are the likely future effects of particular emissions levels.
I happen to share your skepticism about the latter, which is highly dependent on models. The former, however, is an entirely different question unrelated to climate models.
January 30, 2010, 3:27 pmmethodact says:
I used to be a True Believer Just Like Everybody Else and dutifully sounded my Paul Revere, “the sky is falling”, hue and cry and alarm, wake up! we must act now before it’s too late, for God’s sake, let’s DO SOMETHING! until a 15-year-old straight-A student from Sweden questioned my beliefs in the IPCC, some 5 years ago.
I later assisted a university friend with research into said topic and concluded it to be a hoax, and where I at least touched on here.
January 30, 2010, 3:28 pmkeith says:
Hi,
the real issue in all of this is how different the ‘model’ of operation of the underlying scientific workflows around climatic science is and how that has made it very possible for a small group of scientists and government bodies to have a massive impact on the whole area of research. For instance the CRU effectively wore 3 hats: the first receiving and then distributing aggregate data sets to other academics; the second being in charge of ‘adjusting’ said data on the way through; the third then enacting research and producing papers on said research. CRU data is then used as part of the NASA GISS analysis; etc.
The other thing which drives me nuts, is how little regard has been shown in keeping and maintaining raw data; i.e. the underlying measurements from which all the monthly averages are calculated. To loose such data is a real crime, we cannot go back and measure again – the ‘experiment’ cannot be repeated.
For more details on my POV and blow by blow coverage on the whole climategate/global warming issue – please see Climategate, Global Warming, emails, the ‘hockey stick’,data manipulation and Copenhagen… or my weblink.
January 30, 2010, 3:35 pmAllan Walstad says:
JHA: I confess to not reading the book, but I did look at the shorter pieces. The upshot (or so it appears to me) is that you decline to cite, much less defend, the evidence by which you are convinced of the reality and significance of anthropogenic global warming and ill effects thereof. On the assumption that it exists and will cause significant losses for societies that did little to generate AGW itself, you endorse the idea of some range of policies for mitigation or compensation.
Now granted, CO2 is a greenhouse gas and IF mankind causes the atmospheric concentration to rise, and IF there are not compensating other effects (such as more clouds increasing reflectivity), then AGW occurs and may have negative effects for some. I agree that property rights come into play here, upon demonstration of actual such negative effects of AGW.
The problem with advocating any (coercively-enforced) policy measures at this point goes right back to those climategate emails. Natural climate change occurs continually, and it has had enormous effects on human development and civilization going far back in time. If global temperatures increased toward the end of the 20th Century (and leveled off or even decreased slightly since), are those changes within natural variation? The answer is yes if temperatures were even higher than they are now a few centuries ago. So what’s the story with the tree ring temperatures? It seems pretty obvious that the data were heavily massaged to get results desired by the climate alarmists. Until such matters are resolved via a completely independent examination of all the primary data and analyses, grave pronouncements to the effect that science has spoken on this issue are not very persuasive to me, and I see little reason to endorse policy recommendations that assume what has not been established.
January 30, 2010, 3:38 pmPansy says:
# 26:
Mr Adler, you are, unwittingly, so in keeping with the dictator I grew up with, Mr Ceasescu, who couldn’t tax citizens because there was so little income–all state-paid salaries–that taxes would have all but annihilated the working class.
Instead, he chose to impose rations on consumption of staple food and energy to fund huge industrial projects. In the mid 80′s, when the country went, several years in a row, thru extremely cold winters, heat was cut off in most homes, and scores of people died. There were many suicides. There were those who died after leaving gas stoves on during the night–the only source of heating. Others, perfectly upright citizens, messed with their in-house power panels to steal a few Kw/h to survive… Ceausescu went on TV to tell people to put one more layer of clothing on and brave the elements.
Same with food, in the midst of the worst shortage of food in Romania’s history … Just dont’t consume as much, he and slavish scientists said on TV and in the newspapers…Romanians are obese…They need a better diet.
You, sir, are clueless.
January 30, 2010, 3:40 pmPAULV says:
Anonster,
January 30, 2010, 3:42 pmWouldn’t CO2 diffusion lower CO2 concentration in Ice? GW alarmists do not think that there was higher CO2 concentrations in past when temperature were lower. If you c\knew how to apply laws of physics you would realize that it goes against your argument.
The emails were likely complied because of FOIA request and were released by a whistleblower when request was spiked.
Perhaps if they release emails as requested we could tell whether emails were represented or culled. Why do alarmists still stonewall?
kdackson says:
My apologies. I had my sarcasm filter off.
My condolences if you are only 3 times better looking than a post.
January 30, 2010, 3:44 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Thanks, Jonathan.
There are so many questions now about the data that I wonder whether anyone even with the best intentions has been able to draw a valid conclusion.
For instance, the urban heat island effect that calls into question whether the surface temperature stations are giving data representative of the region.
And the rethinking of issues dealing with carbon dioxide – example here</a.
I think there’s going to be some more shaking out before this is done.
January 30, 2010, 3:46 pmskeeter69 says:
A few PEER-REVIEWED papers from the other side.
Chylek, P., and U. Lohmann (2008), Aerosol radiative forcing and climate sensitivity deduced from the Last Glacial Maximum to Holocene transition. Geophysical Research Letters, 35, L04804, doi:10.1029/2007GL032759.
Chylek, P., U. Lohmann, M. Dubey, M. Mishchenko, R. Kahn, and A. Ohmura (2007), Limits on climate sensitivity derived from recent satellite and surface observations, Journal of Geophysical Research, 112, D24S04, doi:10.1029/2007JD008740.
Douglass, D. H., and R. S. Knox (2005), Climate forcing by the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo, Geophysical Research Letters, 32, L05710, doi:10.1029/2004GL022119.
Idso, S. B., (1998)Lindzen, R. S., and Y-S. (2009) On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data, Geophysical Research Letters, in press.
Scafetta, N., and B. J. West (2007), Phenomenological reconstructions of the solar signature in the Northern Hemisphere surface temperature records since 1600, Journal of Geophysical Research, 112, D24S03, doi:10.1029/2007JD008437.
Schwartz, S. E., (2007) Heat capacity, time constant, and sensitivity of Earth’s climate system. Journal of Geophysical Research, 112, D24S05, doi:10.1029/2007JD008746
Schwartz, S. E., (2008) Reply to comments by G. Foster et al., R. Knutti et al., and N. Scafetta on “Heat capacity, time constant, and sensitivity of Earth’s climate system”. Schwartz S. E. Journal of Geophysical Research, 113, D15105 (2008), doi:10.1029/2008JD009872.
Spencer, R. W., and W. D. Braswell (2008), Potential biases in feedback diagnosis from observations data: a simple model demonstration, Journal of Climate, 21, 5624-5628.
Wyant, M. C., M., Khairoutdinov, and C. S. Bretherton (2006), Climate sensitivity and cloud response of a GCM with a superparameterization. Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L06714
January 30, 2010, 3:46 pmClimateGate Scientists’ Conduct: Unethical and Illegal « Daniel Joseph Smith says:
[...] ClimateGate Scientists’ Conduct: Unethical and Illegal [...]
January 30, 2010, 3:50 pmkdackson says:
Oren:
Not to argue with an expert in the field, but what about the second law of thermodynamics – that entropy (disorder) will increase over time? (I sure hope Obama does not task the congress with overturning that decision).
This leads to the not so unsuprising outcome that in the long run the the local concentration of CO2 in a fixed volume of ice will equal the average concentration. It says nothing of the mechanism, but I would think that molecular CO2 could travel along crystal grain boundaries.
Of course, the macro process breaks down in the quantum mechanical realm, but for the way they do these samples, and the resulting reduction in pressure (which would enhance the process), how can thesampling methods or analysis be trusted? In other words, Heisenburg strikes again (observing something necessarily changes it).
But that’s just equilibrium talking. What do I know? I am a lowly engineer who is interested in the bulk diffusivity, not the micro process.
Unless Fick’s law has also been recently repealed, which might actually be possible,
January 30, 2010, 3:58 pmPansy says:
P.S. at # 39:
I forgot to mention that a lot of Romania’s PGB was transferred to savages like Mobutu Sese Seko and cannibal Jean Bedel Bokassa (heck, he even managed to get a blonde Romanian girl as as one of his wives after his visit to Romania) and many other dictators in Africa
January 30, 2010, 4:05 pmEric Rasmusen says:
Don’t too quickly believe claims that the statute of limitations bars them. Maybe it does, but this looks like posturing to me– an attempt to confuse the public by obscuring the idea of “tolling”. See my lengthy blogpost and comment to Parliament on the legal problem, at
http://rasmusen.dreamhosters.com/b/2010/01/an-interesting-ex-post-facto-law-case/
As one commenter said, this by no means disproved global warming, but it means the credibility of the most widely used world temperature data is destroyed. There are three or four such data sets. One down, three to go? These guys were thought to be less political than NASA, the number two source.
January 30, 2010, 4:56 pmAnonsters says:
There’s absolutely no evidence of that.
And there’s an investigation on-going about what actually happened, as I said.
Good to see how many climate trolls populate VC, though. Not that I should be surprised. I’ve been seeing a correlation recently between climate “skeptics” and people with libertarian leanings. (Which also doesn’t surprise me, because of the government intervention implications if it is true. So just deny the science. It makes sense, in a way that is kind of sad for science itself.)
January 30, 2010, 5:01 pmmethodact says:
kdackson:
The Second Law of Thermodynamics and Heisenburg (observer effect) in one comment :)
If I might add, there’s also The Zodiac Paradox “… the more we look for patterns, the more likely we are to find them, particularly when we don’t begin with a particular question… Then we leap to conclusions… for why we saw the results we did.” ~~Peter Austin, PhD, Clinical Evaluation Science
January 30, 2010, 5:01 pmAnonsters says:
And sometimes, we find patterns because there are actually patterns to find.
January 30, 2010, 5:07 pmmethodact says:
Anonsters:
Say like Schrödinger’s cat?
January 30, 2010, 5:17 pmpmorem says:
And sometimes, we find patterns because there are actually patterns to find.
Deception, dishonesty, fudging data, concealing data, criminal conduct…
Yes, a pattern.
Why would anyone do a thing like that?
It’s not like they’re getting paid for it…
January 30, 2010, 5:32 pmkdackson says:
Ah, so now anyone who questions the motivations of the warmists are now to be tarred with an ideological brush?
I could also make the case that the warmists are a bunch of left wing control freaks who won’t be happy until the US is back to an agrarian society. High correllation there. And I know it does not imply causation. But the correllation exists.
And I thought it wasn’t political.
January 30, 2010, 5:47 pmpmorem says:
kdackson
I was referring to Phil Jones and James Hansen most particularly, but also to many other advocates of AGW as well.
I realize that argument is normally directed the other way.
It seems to me to be far more applicable to the likes of Jones than, say, Steve McIntyre.
January 30, 2010, 6:00 pmkdackson says:
pmorem:
I was not referring to you. It was directed to “Anonsters”. Sorry for any confusion.
January 30, 2010, 6:03 pmpmorem says:
kdackson, that’s fine.
I’ll leave for “Anonsters” to explain how servants of The State are somehow exempted from any consideration of self-interest.
January 30, 2010, 6:42 pmvic says:
Not so…… the dog ate the homework….. the raw data is lost
of course there is this juicy email by Phil Jones saying that he would rather destroy the raw data than give in to the FOI
January 30, 2010, 7:05 pmkdackson says:
Vic:
Don’t you realize that since the e-mails were stolen they can’t be used as evidence of malfeasance.
/sarc
January 30, 2010, 7:07 pmAnonsters says:
Notice I didn’t say that all who are “skeptics” are libertarian-leaning, or that if you’re a “skeptic,” then, necessarily, you’re libertarian-leaning, or vice-versa.
You may now unbunch your panties.
January 30, 2010, 7:11 pmkdackson says:
Anonsters:
Then why even bring it up? It is a non-sequitor of the first order.
But cheap shots and misdirection is a favorite tactic of the
January 30, 2010, 7:17 pmwarmistslefists. Seems you are no different.Anonsters says:
I like how persistent this myth is. If you cared to take two seconds to investigate, you may find that the data that ultimately was withheld (which was only a portion) was withheld because the scientists had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the people who actually generated the data. That is more troubling to me than the rest of it (which is just a bunch of smoke and mirrors). That is, it’s more troubling that governments are collecting data and then selling it, with the stipulation that it not be disclosed to third parties, so that third parties have to pay to see the data. I’ve said it before, and it’s well-known, the U.S. is fairly unique in how open we are with data collected by federal agencies, or federally funded programs. Personally, I think any data generated by government, or on the government dime, should be open and freely accessible.
Notice that the problem here isn’t the scientists “hiding” data.
But please, don’t let me stop you dreaming of a world-wide conspiracy of scientists, in league with hippie enviros, hell-bent on world domination. Everyone’s entitled to their fantasies, after all.
January 30, 2010, 7:18 pmMr. Xyz says:
This spoof of climate science may be of interest:
January 30, 2010, 7:18 pmhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-6U5MwyDM
Anonsters says:
I was noting the extremely high proportion of denialists on VC, as compared to other websites I had seen, and it struck me that, actually, I wasn’t all that surprised by that. Then I asked myself why I wasn’t surprised by that. That’s why.
By the way, I didn’t know it was considered a “cheap shot” to identify someone as libertarian. Good to know, in future, VCers.
January 30, 2010, 7:20 pmOren says:
No trouble at all, your questions seem to be in earnest and you seem to be open to reading the responses.
Entropy must be non-decreasing, not strictly increasing. Moreover, that’s true only for a closed system — ice that’s in contact with the ocean/sun/wind is surely not closed.
Glassy materials (one in which the relaxation time goes to infinity at finite temperature) are an open field of scientific inquiry. The short answer is that, for many real-life systems (glass, of course, but also polymer gels, granular systems …), the “long run” is effectively “never” and the system is not “thermal” in the sense of obeying the right equilibrium distribution.
The CO2 will eventually average out, that much is true, but you have no way of saying whether the time scale for that process is days, centuries, millennia or eons.
Well, I don’t know about the experiments, so I hedge, but it seems obvious that the time scale for the experiment is much shorter than the natural time scale of the system, meaning that you are making an (approximately) instantaneous observation.
Bulk diffusivity is a fine thing (I’m quite happy my radiator works, after all) but it’s a near-equilibrium problem. Out here in condensed, we live far from equilibrium in systems that often have relaxation times much longer than the age of the universe. :-)
Fick’s law only holds on times much longer than a single relaxation event. For instance, if you were to view an atom of water for times much shorter than the mean-free-time (and hence lengths shorter than the mean free length), you would conclude that it was ballistic, not diffusive. If you want to observe Fick’s law and extract the diffusion tensor, you must do your observations over many many collisions.
So for a glassy system where the relaxation time high, Fick’s law becomes irrelevant.
January 30, 2010, 7:32 pmAnonsters says:
You’re right!
Because as we all know, it’s usual and normal for the people who’s job is to enforce the FOIA to legally assess the conduct of someone that they haven’t actually investigated, except for reading a selection of that person’s (or those persons’) e-mails that have been hacked and posted on the internet, without further inquiry, context, or anything!
The problem with logic is it can cut both ways, if you aren’t careful.
January 30, 2010, 7:56 pmkdackson says:
Oren:
Spoken as a true physicist. NTTAWWT.
In reality, one can (and has) measured bulk diffusivity in ice. And other condensed phases (such as H2 through various steels, which is a real engineering problem).
And for very small volumes down, oh about a mile or so, the surface effects are negligible. And where an inch can cover a period of years slow diffusion through the bulk of the ice can surely cause different that what was supposedly captured at the time of the original ice formation.
Practically speaking, diffusion over milenia can occur through ice; at least enough to screw up the “pristene” results the warmists would have you believe.
Oh, and not to pick nits, but even though it’s called a “radiator”, the bulk of the heat is transferred by natural convection of the air over the surface. And, I am sure you would agree that thermal diffusivity, while analogous to mass diffusivity, is a different process.
And we do use Fick’s law all the time. Because it is a reasonable, time and experimentally tested model of how the world works. Because if it didn’t you would not be able to drive your car.
January 30, 2010, 8:09 pmpmorem says:
It seems to me that signing an NDA with the intent of placing the material where it would be subject to disclosure would be an act of bad faith.
“To do or not do some lawful thing”… in this case, one party’s obligation is not, in fact, lawful.
The NDAs (at least any covering information after FOI went in) should be void.
January 30, 2010, 8:10 pmkdackson says:
Anonster:
Ah back to the “hacked or stolen” trope again? I wonder if you were this indignant when the NYT released classified information illegally during Bush’s term – specifically the programs to trace wire transfers of cash.
Whether they were stolen or not is not the point. They were legally requested and illegally withheld. If the EA CAR had followed the law, the e-mails would all be in the public domain at this time. So the “hacked or stolen” shouldn’t make a difference.
Whoever posted them can be accused of following the law.
So, in layman’s terms: No harm, no foul.
January 30, 2010, 8:14 pmAnonsters says:
I would agree that an NDA signed after a FOI request was sent would be questionable. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that NDAs were signed when the data were originally acquired, as part of the purchase, apparently. And FOI requests in the UK clearly do not reach such things. See sections 41 & 43.
January 30, 2010, 8:22 pmkdackson says:
Ah, well. Seems Dr. Jones might not be going back to his job as head of the EA CRU.
Serves the lying, duplicitous SOB right.
January 30, 2010, 8:25 pmAnonsters says:
I don’t care about the moral propriety or impropriety of hacking e-mails. Wikileaks happened to be one of my favorite websites. I’m all for transparency. The problem is that a set of hacked e-mail does not constitute very credible evidence. We pretty much know that the e-mails that are public equal only a portion of the e-mails these people sent back and forth to one another. So either the hacker randomly grabbed e-mails and those are just the ones the hacker grabbed, or someone only chose to post a certain portion of them. Either way, it’s not a complete picture of e-mail traffic. My point is just that they do not make up a very reliable body of evidence on which to say, definitively, oh yes, they violated law or not, at least not without further investigation.
I really didn’t think my point was that elusive.
January 30, 2010, 8:28 pmkdackson says:
Anonster:
Keep digging. I’m sure you’ll find the truth.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7004936.ece
January 30, 2010, 8:33 pmAnonsters says:
I swear to God, I hope you’re not a lawyer, because if this reflects how carefully you read documents, I fear for your clients.
That suggests that they are basing their judgment only by looking at the e-mails. I have said over and over again that that represents an extremely limited, not particularly reliable body of evidence on which to base a conclusion. If ICO is certain of it, I’d like to see them set out the legal arguments, with accompanying evidence. Notice that they haven’t done anything of the sort.
But, ok, I’m done now. It’s clear you have no interest in listening to anything I’ve said.
Note, though, that when the larger investigation is complete, if at that time it turns out that the scientists in question did, on consideration of a more complete body of evidence, act inconsistently with UK-FOIA, or whatever, I’ll be more than happy to criticize them for doing so. We’re just not there yet, and it turns out that I’m not so blinded by my belief in the correctness/incorrectness, deviance/honesty of one side or the other that I can’t see that. Unlike some.
January 30, 2010, 8:40 pmArtifex says:
… and I love how the activists bent on crushing this myth seem to have selective amnesia and forget the rest of the story. It seems that those non-disclosure forms that were signed indicating that they couldn’t produce the data under FOI themselves couldn’t be produced by CRU either. The dog must have eaten those non-disclosure forms as well. Let’s also remember that CRU also did distribute the data in question to some external researchers and when called on it, they claimed that they could only give the data to “academics”. Once again, no non-disclosure agreements with this caveat could be produced. Not only that, they fought to keep from producing station lists as to what was actually used so that the skeptic community could potentially work around the non-disclosure. Want to explain to me how that particular one fell under the non-disclosure ?
My understanding of CRU’s argument was “We have signed non-disclosures with someone, we can’t tell you whom. Because of this we can’t give you any data”. It seems your two choices for describing the situation are either dishonest or monumentally incompetent (though a guess a combination of the two would work as well). Looks like the authorities are making the argument: “Yes it was dishonest, but it is too late for you to do anything about it”
… of course to an activist there is nothing wrong here because CRU was promoting the cause, so anything goes.
January 30, 2010, 9:07 pmOren says:
:-)
Yup, here’s a link. It turns out to be incredibly small, even relative to hundreds or thousands of years.
Again, that depends on the time-scale over which it’s diffusing. Given the estimate for the diffusion of CO2 shown above, it’s a negligible contribution.
Not enough, it would seem, to question the major thrust of their results (as opposed to the last significant figure).
They look the same from all the way up here. :-P
Of course it works for my car, my point was that perhaps the CO2 concentration in ice “follows” Fick’s Law with a constant of 10^-18 cm / s^2. In that case, it would be well enough to say “Fick’s Law doesn’t apply” or, if you want to be pedantic “Fick’s Law doesn’t apply on the timescale we are looking at”.
That is, the original question was “why doesn’t the CO2 concentration everywhere in the ice equilibrate to the average”. The answer is that some systems that relax to equilibrium quite slowly and some are so slow as to be basically be stuck forever in the state in which they were first quenched. This is true of ordinary window glass, granular systems and, in some cases, gas dissolved in a solid.
January 30, 2010, 9:13 pmkdackson says:
Anonsters:
IANAL. I have made that clear in THIS thread. So if you want to kvetch about reading comprehension, so be it.
I posted the link to highlight the following:
Now a “breach” could mean a) the emails were “hacked” (quite unlikely, given the format they were put into), b) an internal leak, or c) an error.
The fact remains that these were legally requested and illegally withheld. Whether they were released on purpose or by accident is moot. They should have been released.
I sincerely wonder to what lenghts you warmists will go to protect your lies and fabrications.
It ain’t science; it’s political crap.
January 30, 2010, 9:17 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
The problem is the FoIA allows anyone to demand all your data. Industry-paid climate-change deniers set up web sites just in order to make nuisance demands. Often in a sequence of small demands for particular bits of data, so someone has to waste time putting it together for them.
Contemptuously refusing to honor such requests may be illegal but it is totally ethical, and appropriate.
January 30, 2010, 9:37 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
We need to pass the No-Wasting-Scientists’-Time Amendment to the Freedom of Info Act.
January 30, 2010, 9:48 pmricky says:
Thank God there are people who stand up to the fascist FoIA requirements and Industry by keeping their data secret. The deniers have no right to any data. Real science is conducted in secret, with the data hidden from outsiders and disposed of before anyone can challenge your conclusions. These Corporate Fascist deniers are trying to corrupt the scientific progress by making the data public.
January 30, 2010, 9:59 pmkdackson says:
So, now I’m hearing that ethics trumps law. I hope you are not an officer of the court.
And, I would remind you that it was the liberals who wanted the FOIA transparancy. Kinda sucks when the shoe is on the other foot, doesn’t it?
Never pass a law that your worst enemy could administer.
January 30, 2010, 10:00 pmElliot says:
1) How much is “some warming?”
January 30, 2010, 10:52 pm2) What policy responses are justified?
3) How do you balance the extent of policy response with “some warming?”
4) If you don’t know #1, how do you know what policy response is justified?
OperationCounterstrike says:
Ricky and Kdackson, your jokes are funny but the thinking behind them is naive. The fact is it’s like being a lung-cancer specialist in the 1960s, you face all the opposition that industry money can buy (tobacco industry then, oil now) and they abuse every law and every requirement.
So do say, Ricky and Kdackson, what portion of his/her working day should a scientist be required to spend responding to nuisance requests from people who are paid by oil companies to clog the science works?
What if you had to spend half your working day answering hired-nuisance requests for your accounting sheets or whatever you do, I’d love to see what you would say and do.
January 30, 2010, 11:37 pmvic says:
<
this lung cancer business is a old tired and discredited analogy
i will say however that there is a relative paucity of solid data for any significant deleterious effect of secondhand smoke, most of the citations are from opinion piece to opinion piece to opinion piece, not unlike the himalyan glacier and now the alpine glacier sagas
excuse the off topic bit
January 31, 2010, 12:15 amOperationCounterstrike says:
Vic, are you saying the tobacco industry DIDN’T fund a whole crowd of fakers in the 1960 to deny the cancer thing? Or are you saying the energy companies aren’t doing the same thing now?
Wrong, and wrong!
January 31, 2010, 12:45 amOperationCounterstrike says:
By the way I agree with you about secondhand smoke.
Not about CO2, though. The abundant water vapor in the atmosphere traps all the outward-bound radiation except for a few narrow frequency bands and CO2 has an absorbance peak right smack in the middle of the most important band. We can argue about details like glaciers and so on but no one denies the fundamentals, not any more.
And we haven’t even started to talk about acidifying the oceans.
January 31, 2010, 12:49 amvic says:
The energy companies and big corporations have been for quite some time setting themselves up to profit from cap and trade.
But I have no knowledge of who the energy companies are funding and really dont care. This is pretty much a straw-man.
However I do not think they are funding Steve Macintire or the skeptics who are pretty much a grass roots bunch if anything. They just seem to be asking the right questions. And ultimately that is what science is about. If you do not ask the right questions you cannot get the answers.
I honestly do not know AGW- yes or no. But I do know that a good number of the assertions, data and behaviour does not pass the smell test.
January 31, 2010, 1:28 ambottom line: expert panels and consensus mean didly. You have to look at the actual data and methodology. And that is what people like Steve Macintyre are attempting to do.
OperationCounterstrike says:
I agree that consensus is not the last word, however it’s not “diddly” either. The system is pretty good at correcting itself and positions don’t become consensus positions without reason.
January 31, 2010, 1:57 amskeeter69 says:
So it was the “system” that corrected the Himalayan glacier LIE. I guess all the pressure from the evil deniers had nothing to do with it.
January 31, 2010, 2:37 amskeeter69 says:
A denier is someone who won’t admit that the climate has changed in the 1,000 years prior to mid 20th century. That’a why you have to get rid of the MWP and LIA in order to have that nice flat steady state climate.
January 31, 2010, 2:50 amGetting a lot of traction from that evil coporation thing?
Bruce Hayden says:
Sorry, but your established science is not. At least to the point of causing AGW. Back to the issue of feedback, assumed by those models to be significantly higher than it actually appears to be, in the most recent studies (see above).
January 31, 2010, 3:34 amBruce Hayden says:
Which is why your “consensus” is looking less and less tenable as time goes on.
My view is that this (arguably false) consensus was (intentionally, according to the emails) keeping opposing views from being investigated and discussed. For one thing, the money was in proving AGW, not in disproving it. If the central players on one side are able to make sure that their papers get published, but can keep opposing papers from being published, it is a lot easier to assert that there is a consensus. But it turns out that at least some, and maybe a lot, of that AGW consensus was an artificial construct.
The other thing that one has to keep in mind is that there have always been a lot of papers being published that didn’t support AGW. They just weren’t being published by “climate” scientists, however they defined that term. For example, outside those journals controlled by the cabal of scientists caught out in this scandal, the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA) are, if anything, even better accepted than in the past. There is just too much evidence out there that the climate was warmer in the MWP, and colder in the LIA. Far, far more than published to the contrary by this small group of climate scientists.
So, you have to ask yourself, if eliminating the MWP and LIA from the climatic record is necessary for the climatic models to work and give the predicted results, and if most other branches of science, and quasi-science (archeology, etc.) show these periods, then isn’t it a more reasonable assumption that these climatic models are wrong, than that the other scientists are wrong?
January 31, 2010, 3:48 amJohn Skookum says:
The skeptics do not bear the burden of proof. Those who would use the AGW boogeyman to confiscate trillions of dollars from the people, empower armies of officious busybodies to rule the peoples’ lives with new rules and regulations, and deliberately reduce the people to a 1930 standard of living bear 100% of that very large burden.
They have failed utterly to do so, and it now looks like they never will. It is a fraud, and constitutes the largest and most evil conspiracy in human history. If they continue to press the issue, we should skip the tar and feathers and get right to the horsewhips and nooses. There are approximately ten thousand people worldwide who deserve the harshest punishment for attempting thievery and tyranny on such a grand scale.
January 31, 2010, 4:52 amJohn Skookum says:
I like how the apologists for liars, thieves and tyrants pretend that it’s all about the e-mails, when the computer programs that were also leaked are far more damning.
Of course, most of them are liberal-arts majors who couldn’t differentiate a second order polynomial to save their lives. Exhibit A: Failed lawyer and failed theologian Al Gore.
January 31, 2010, 4:58 amJohn Skookum says:
Tough shit. That’s the price they pay for taking the Queen’s shilling.
January 31, 2010, 5:11 amJohn Skookum says:
All the money in climate research is on the side of the alarmists and has been for years. Some 80 billion dollars of taxpayers’ money has come from governments and NGOs since 1990, while all the energy industry contributions put together come to less than 2 billion. Follow the money.
January 31, 2010, 5:14 amAnonsters says:
I note, for the record, my previous point about correlations and political leanings….
January 31, 2010, 7:05 amkdackson says:
Anonsters:
Which is still a non-sequitor and has absolutely nothing to do with science.
January 31, 2010, 7:33 amkdackson says:
OperationCounterstrike (the Astroturfer):
A very simple solution to the nonexistent problem of wasting scientist’s precious time.
Simply publish the raw, unadulterated data set on a website for all the world to see.
That is how science
iswas done back in the day.We taxpayers paid these clowns to collect the data; the clowns have no right to hide behind an NDA to supress the release of taxpayer property.
January 31, 2010, 7:38 amShelbyC says:
So far, the only fakers we’ve seen are on the pro-AGW side. It sounds like your argument is that the lung cancer deniers in the 1960 were wrong, therefore the AGW deniers nowadays are wrong. Now I’m no expert in logic, but I’m pretty sure that’s a non-sequitur.
January 31, 2010, 10:22 amShelbyC says:
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the deniers are also full of sh*t. Where does that leave us?
January 31, 2010, 10:24 amlucia says:
JHA–
Christopher Booker reports the ICO may have misinterpreted the start date for the statute of limiations. If he is correct, the statute of limitations has not lapsed.
Booker’s article is here.
If any readers here are familiar with UK FOI statutes or know where we can read more about the legal issues, I’d love them to drop by my blog and comment. My brief post on the issue is here.
January 31, 2010, 11:46 amOperationCounterstrike says:
Shelby, it’s not a question of “right” or “wrong”. It’s a question of good faith. These deniers are HIRED BY INDUSTRY, not to seek truth, but to DENY, regardless of truth. For MONEY.
It was true in the 1960s about tobacco and cancer, and it’s true now about CO2 and warming.
January 31, 2010, 12:08 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
Sure, there are some good-faith warming skeptical researchers. The problem is to distinguish them from the hired time-wasters.
January 31, 2010, 12:11 pmkdackson says:
Hey OperationAstroturf:
Prove they work for the evil “industries” you claim they work for.
You know, as opposed to the industry of AGW fearmongering.
January 31, 2010, 12:16 pmShelbyC says:
I don’t know if the deniers are acting in good faith or not. But I sure haven’t seen much good faith on the pro-AGW side. And even if the deniers are acting in bad faith, that doesn’t indicate anything about climate change, correct?
January 31, 2010, 12:42 pmA. Criminal says:
That makes no sense. If “anyone” can demand data, why bother to “set up websites” rather than get a secretary or some other grunt to make the requests?
You keep claiming that releasing data is time consuming – how much time did “the hacker” take to release the data? I bet it took a few hours at most.
Quite the opposite. Withholding data is the antithesis of science, totally unethical and inappropriate; even more so if the data is literally the property of taxpayers, whether Brit or U.S. (And, IIRC, the ever-generous U.S. was partially funding East Anglia).
That’s obviously false: if it were true it’d be impossible to take satellite photos of the earth from outside the atmosphere except in those “few narrow frequency bands.”
“Science without skepticism is nothing more than superstition.” — Kevin
January 31, 2010, 1:29 pmLegal Eagle says:
Who has the burden of proof in this dispute? The supporters of AGW, of course. They want to adopt all sorts of earth changing legislation based on their views. Yet, what do I read in support of AGW? A consensus of opinion argument, which is hearsay based as well as legally irrelevant. Truth is not dependent upon any consensus of opinion. I also read a lot of name-calling. As lawyers and judges often state, “When the law is in your favor, you argue the law. When the facts are in your favor, you argue the facts. When neither the law nor the facts are in your favor, you call your opposition names!”
The majority of the name calling is by the proponents of AGW. Name calling proves nothing. I also read a lot of statements, “I believe . . .” So what. That proves nothing again.
Let’s talk about the proofs for AGW. Land based temperature records which go back at most 150 years. How accurate were the old thermometers? And, where were the locations? What about the sites for temperature measurements today with growing urbanization? How legitimate are the “adjustments” to actual measured temperatures? Why have the number of weather stations been substantially reduced? What are the rules of statistics for cherry picking your data? We must be careful to avoid lies, damn lies – and (corrupted) statistics.
Tree rings to prove historical temperature records? Trees grow well if they have sufficient moisture and temps above freezing. A tree can’t tell the difference between 80 and 82 degrees. If you disagree, explain your theory, and conduct an experiment to prove it. And, no cheating by artificially adding CO2 to the growing environment.
Ice core data? How accurate are the measurements of CO2, and how do you prove age of the samples? Is the age 1,000 years, or 1,000,000 years? Your conclusions are only as good as the underlying assumptions.
CO2 greenhouse gas. A correlation does not prove cause and effect.
So what causes warming and cooling cycles? And, is it caused by man? So, why did palm trees grow at one time in the antarctic as well as the arctic? That was obviously one hell of a global warming period. And, what caused the glaciers to cover half of northern America, Europe and Asia? Man certainly could not have been responsible for those cycles.
And, what caused the climate of Greenland to become so warm a thousand years ago that farming was allowed? Too many cows that were farting? And, what about the year of no summer in the American colonies?
And, is it reasonable to believe a scientist who threw away his raw data to avoid FOI requests? (Or, at least claim to have thrown it away.)
As for me, I will choose global warming any day over another ice age.
January 31, 2010, 2:36 pmgeokstr says:
Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts are two of the prime irritants in the AGW oyster. Can you give me cites as to the gobs of money they’ve gotten from Exxon?
And people like Hansen and Jones and Mann are being showered with tens of millions by GOVERNMENT, and have now been shown to be master MANIPULATORS, regardless of truth. For MONEY.
Or maybe it’s more like Alar, or DDT, or saccharine, or any of the many, many, many other apocalyptic frauds already perpetrated by scientists – for MONEY and FAME.
I’m a big proponent of real science, but I have seen little to make me trust this crowd.
January 31, 2010, 5:32 pmBruce Hayden says:
I think that it was in thread yesterday that someone asked why there were so many denialists at volokh.com.
My first answer is that there have always been a lot of people not convinced, but who were brow beaten into silence through the consensus of the experts argument. And ClimateGate ripped the cover off that argument. What we needed was somewhere where we wouldn’t get laughed at for questioning the AGW received wisdom.
But that wasn’t a satisfactory answer to me. Accurate, but incomplete.
The other part of it, I think, is that libertarians tend to distrust authority more than most. And the consensus of the experts argument is an appeal to authority, the authority being the experts and all their peer reviewed articles.
Compounding this was that almost all of those we deal with who argued to that authority obviously knew far less than we did about the subject. They had picked up their AGW science over at Kos, and were parroting it back here, or just plain appealing to that consensus of sainted experts again.
This sort of article works well on the left, where it appears well accepted that some are smarter than others, and thus capable of ruling over them. I think that we see that a lot with the election of President Obama, whose primary claim to fame was two Ivy League diplomas. And, I think that a lot of those who voted for him are amendable to arguments to authority, and esp. intellectual authority.
But I think that a lot of libertarians are just the opposite – suspicious of arguments through appeals to authority, and esp. if they include intellectual authority.
I know that that was one of my big problems with AGW – constantly running into the argument that there was a consensus of opinion on the subject by experts in the field, and that I was too stupid to understand the science. And making sure that I wouldn’t accept it out of stubbornness, most often this all was pointed out to me by programmed trolls who turn out to have a superficial understanding of the subject, at best. I at least have enough graduate level physics and software engineering classes under my belt to understand how complex the subject is, and enough years writing (good) code to understand that the CRU code we’ve seen is not something that I would trust multi-trillion dollar expenditures on.
I think that for a lot of libertarians, if they were willing to accept the consensus of the experts argument for AGW, they would also be the type who would accept that it is possible for the experts in politics and government to make better decisions than the rest of us could over our lives – but then, they wouldn’t be libertarians.
January 31, 2010, 7:49 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
LegalEagle, you wrote: “[What proves that]CO2 [is a] greenhouse gas[?] A correlation does not prove cause and effect.”
What proves that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is its infra-red absorption spectrum.
Next question?
January 31, 2010, 8:44 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
“Infra-red absorption spectrum” means which frequencies (colors) of infra-red light the CO2 absorbs, and which frequencies it does not absorb.
January 31, 2010, 8:46 pmLegal Eagle says:
You misquoted me. Re-read what I wrote.
The fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas does not prove that man is causing global warming. CO2 is a tiny fraction of greenhouse gases. Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, and a much larger percentage. CO2 was much higher historically before man was even on this planet. The last 150 years proves nothing, and is only a blip on the map of history. Weather is constantly changing: from cooling to warming. The planet has suffered one or more ice ages, and farming in Greenland and palm trees in the arctic and antarctic. If you “adjust” the raw temperature data, you can prove any theory you propose including the “hockey stick” graph. Garbage in, garbage out as computer programmers say about corrupted data. Look at the Fortran computer coding and the remarks of the programmers that the data they were inputting was a real mess. The coding is also bad. The reason why there aren’t many comments on the internet about the bad coding is that Fortran is a 1950′s computer language that is no longer in general use. During the Y2K bullcrap, enough Fortran programmers could not be found in the U.S. to rewrite old programs, so they were imported from India. No one writes in Fortran anymore.
Sorry, but you haven’t proven your case.
January 31, 2010, 9:38 pmOperationCounterstrike says:
Legal Eagle, sorry for misreading you before. But now you wrote: “CO2 was much higher historically before man was even on this planet. ”
So what? That fact doesn’t in any way invalidate the prediction that increasing CO2 levels NOW will cause disasters. Nor does it invalidate the claim that CO2 levels are increasing now because of what we’re doing.
But let’s assume you’re right, that the scientists have overreached (as scientists do, that’s why we have other scientists to correct them), and the “hockey stick” is totally wrong. In fact let’s assume we cannot measure atmospheric CO2 accurately at all. Unless you can show that the gigatons of CO2 we’re putting into the air are NOT doing any harm and will not do harm, the case that they MAY do harm, based on infra-red absorption spectum ALONE, is strong enough to merit action. Because the theory is so straightforward (if you block the frequency-window of water-vapor transparency, then the heat can’t get out, and if the heat can’t get out, it’ll stay in), and the predicted disasters are so large.
February 1, 2010, 1:11 amOperationCounterstrike says:
It’s not as if the CO2 measurements, and for that matter the glaciers, were the only indications. There’s the melting ice caps. And our evidence for that is unedited satellite photos. Hard to imagine how you’d set about faking those.
February 1, 2010, 1:20 amTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » ClimateGate Scientists’ Conduct: Unethical and Illegal -- Topsy.com says:
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February 1, 2010, 11:13 amzuch says:
If that’s your explanation, feel free to provide evidence for such. Note that there’s thousands of journals, and hundreds in any field plus those of a general nature such as Science and Nature.
But I’d note my comment stands as per claims on anti-AGW websites.
Cheers,
February 1, 2010, 1:26 pmzuch says:
An unstated assumption there, perchance?
Cheers,
February 1, 2010, 1:32 pmzuch says:
How so? Be specific now.
Cheers,
February 1, 2010, 1:35 pmzuch says:
BOP assignments are a convention, and not an indication of the truth of the matters asserted. There are cases where BOP is reversed from the usual for pragmatic (or other) reasons.
And the truth of the matter asserted is not affected by the [alleged] costs of the various policy choices recommended by the facts (not to mention you provide no evidence here for the alleged costs either). Asserting the truth on that basis is like saying “it’s true because I want it to be true.”
Your assertions of “fraud” and “[most evil] conspiracy” are likewise unsupported. The truth of a matter asserted is not in proportion to the amount of inflammatory and hyperbolic rhetoric used to assert it.
Cheers,
February 1, 2010, 1:43 pmAmerican-Manifesto.com » Ridicule-Worthy says:
[...] scandal, a now steady stream of revelations of errors in the IPCC plus potential ethical and legal problems among climate priests), the geniuses in the Obama (mis)administration are proposing to create a [...]
February 9, 2010, 11:24 am