Conservatives and climate change

[DC]

"Not true" applied to the accusation of data manipulation, not to the (demonstrated, by the emails) conspiracies to withhold data, bias the peer-review process, evade FOI, and delete emails. These things they discussed and encouraged each other to do. Demonstrably.
I recommend the first quoted material in this Climate Audit post:

when will you backup your claims of similar warming periods?
i guess it is cler meanwhile that you have nothing to back it u and you just made it up.

 

[AlBell]

No, you clearly missed the point. You're not funny. Your "humour" is not at all humorous. If you want humour then karate_kid or whatever his name is leaves you flailing in his dust, that's proper satire. What you're doing is more akin to vaudeville.

Why do you disdain vaudeville?

I don't agree that what mhaze says here fits in that category.

 

[uke2se]

"Not true" applied to the accusation of data manipulation, not to the (demonstrated, by the emails) conspiracies to withhold data, bias the peer-review process, evade FOI, and delete emails. These things they discussed and encouraged each other to do. Demonstrably.

Demonstrably? I just quoted the freaking text showing how you were "demonstrably" wrong.

Now, do you or do you not buy into a global conspiracy to lie about climate change?

ETA: This is what the eight (yes, eight) independent investigations into this case had to say about your wild claims:

The focus on Professor Jones and CRU has been largely misplaced. On the accusations relating to Professor Jones's refusal to share raw data and computer codes, the Committee considers that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community but that those practices need to change.

On the much cited phrases in the leaked e-mails "trick" and "hiding the decline" the Committee considers that they were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead.

Insofar as the Committee was able to consider accusations of dishonesty against CRU, the Committee considers that there is no case to answer.

The Committee found no reason in this inquiry to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, that "global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity". But this was not an inquiry into the science produced by CRU and it will be for the Scientific Appraisal Panel, announced by the University on 22 March, to determine whether the work of CRU has been soundly built.

On the mishandling of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests, the Committee considers that much of the responsibility should lie with the University, not CRU. The leaked e-mails appear to show a culture of non-disclosure at CRU and instances where information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure, particularly to climate change sceptics. The failure of the University to grasp fully the potential damage this could do and did was regrettable. The University needs to re-assess how it can support academics whose expertise in FoI requests is limited.

We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal.
...
A host of important unresolved questions also arises from the application of Freedom of Information legislation in an academic context. We agree with the
CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it.

The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor, Deparment of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University.

More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate 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.

The decision of the Investigatory Committee was unanimous.

Regarding data availability, there is no basis for the allegations that CRU prevented access to raw data. It was impossible for them to have done so.

Regarding data adjustments, there is no basis for the allegation that CRU made adjustments to the data which had any significant effect upon global averages and through this fabricated evidence for recent warming.

We find that CRU was unhelpful in dealing with requests for information to enable detailed replication of the CRUTEM analysis.

Crucially, we find nothing in the behaviour on the part of CRU scientists that is the subject of the allegations dealt with in this Chapter to undermine the validity of their work.

In our review of the CRU emails, we did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data comprising the GHCN-M dataset or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures. In addition, we found no evidence to suggest that NOAA was non-compliant with the IQA or the Shelby Amendment. However, the CRU emails referenced a specific IPCC-related FOIA request received and responded to by NOAA in June 2007 that led to our further examination of how those FOIA requests were handled. We determined that, at the time, NOAA did not conduct a proper search for responsive documents as required under FOIA, and, as a result, did not have a sufficient basis to inform the requesters that it had no responsive documents. Given that federal agencies are legally obligated to publicly disclose records under the terms of FOIA, we recommend that NOAA conduct a proper search for responsive records as required by the FOIA, and reassess its response to the four FOIA requests in question, as appropriate. Additionally, based on the issues we identified in NOAA's handling ofthese particular FOIA requests, NOAA should consider whether these issues warrant an overall assessment ofthe sufficiency of its FOIA process

We fully examined both the University Inquiry and Investigation Reports. Although the Inquiry Report dismissed three of the four allegations, we examined each de novo under the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation. That regulation, consistent with the policy of the Office of Science and
Technology Polici, defines research misconduct as plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification (45 CFR § 689.1 ). Based on our review of both University reports and all material we received and reviewed on the matter, we were satisfied that the University adequately addressed its Allegations 3 and 4 (misusing privileged information and serious deviation from accepted practices) identified in the Inquiry Report. We also determined that these allegations were not issues covered under our Research Misconduct Regulation.

We next considered the University's second Allegation, related to the emails. We reviewed the emails and concluded that nothing contained in them evidenced research misconduct within the definition in the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation. The University had been provided an extensive volume of emails from the Subject and determined that emails had not been deleted. We found no basis to conclude that the emails were evidence of research misconduct orthat they pointed to such evidence.
We concluded that the University adequately addressed its second Allegation.

The research in question was originally completed over 10 years ago. Although the Subject's data is still available and still the focus of significant critical examination, no direct evidence has been presented that indicates the Subject fabricated the raw data he used for his research or falsified his results. Much of the current debate focuses on the viability of the statistical procedures he eniployed, the statistics used to confirm the accuracy of the results, and the degree to which one specific set of data impacts the statistical results. These concerns are all appropriate for scientific debate and to assist the research community in directing future research efforts to improve understanding in this field of research. Such scientific debate is ongoing but does not, in itself, constitute evidence of research misconduct. Lacking any direct evidence of research misconduct, as defined under the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation, we are closing this investigation with no further action.

Left out EPA as that has already been covered.

Also note that Penn State conducted two investigations. I quoted one of them.

Final note: Where the reviewers called for changes in FOI handling an more effort on the part of the accused scientists to find and release requested data, these issues have all been remedied and all available data has been released. The denialists have thus far done exactly nothing with the data they were so rabid about.

 

[DC]

"Not true" applied to the accusation of data manipulation, not to the (demonstrated, by the emails) conspiracies to withhold data, bias the peer-review process, evade FOI, and delete emails. These things they discussed and encouraged each other to do. Demonstrably.
I recommend the first quoted material in this Climate Audit post:

the part you quoted contains alot of speculation and accusation without a shred of evidence, but they seem to make it look like reals science, so i guess people that called ClimateAudit a pseudoscience blog were right afterall.
thanks for proving their point.

 

[mhaze]

Why do you disdain vaudeville?

I don't agree that what mhaze says here fits in that category.

Because, who would DARE joke around or poke satirically at the high priests in a church?

Wait...

 

[DC]

Because, who would DARE joke around or poke satirically at the high priests in a church?

Wait...

the church of ClimateAudit?

 

[mhaze]

the church of ClimateAudit?

Well, no. You see, we can find many, many opinions of people noting the parallel between AGW fanatics and religion. Just as easy to find countless examples of people making fun of these ecofreaks.

I'm just with this consensus. I'm not saying that if the resident suspect ecofreaks and AGW religionists didn't disavow ASPECTS OF BEHAVIOR that are exactly those which create this parallel, that I or others wouldn't consider them more seriously.

I certainly would.

But first you'd have to disavow a number of hallowed tenents of belief. I suspect the only parallel in old fashioned religion and it's antithesis would be doing the dirty deed on the church alter.

But I'd love to see some of you guys come clean. It's not necessary to abandon your faith and trust in science to do it. You just have to look at where you've carried your beliefs and faith far beyond what science indicates.

 

[DC]

Well, no. You see, we can find many, many opinions of people noting the parallel between AGW fanatics and religion. Just as easy to find countless examples of people making fun of these ecofreaks.

I'm just with this consensus. I'm not saying that if the resident suspect ecofreaks and AGW religionists didn't disavow ASPECTS OF BEHAVIOR that are exactly those which create this parallel, that I or others wouldn't consider them more seriously.

I certainly would.

But first you'd have to disavow a number of hallowed tenents of belief. I suspect the only parallel in old fashioned religion and it's antithesis would be doing the dirty deed on the church alter.

But I'd love to see some of you guys come clean. It's not necessary to abandon your faith and trust in science to do it. You just have to look at where you've carried your beliefs and faith far beyond what science indicates.

im pretty sure the highpriests of science denial love your posts. you sure will get a special cloud in the denialheaven

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

the part you quoted contains alot of speculation and accusation without a shred of evidence, but they seem to make it look like reals science, so i guess people that called ClimateAudit a pseudoscience blog were right after all. thanks for proving their point.

Why don't you follow the link and read? Unless you contend that those supposed moons around Jupiter are artifacts of the instrument?

...This committee, composed of Edward J. Wegman (George Mason University), David W. Scott (Rice University), and Yasmin H. Said (The Johns Hopkins University), has reviewed the work of both articles, as well as a network of journal articles that are related either by authors or subject matter, and has come to several conclusions and recommendations. This Ad Hoc Committee has worked pro bono, has received no compensation, and has no financial interest in the outcome of the report.

Wegman
Scott
Said

Figure 4.4: One of the most compelling illustrations that McIntyre and McKitrick have produced is created by feeding red noise [AR(1) with parameter = 0.2] into the MBH algorithm. The AR(1) process is a stationary process meaning that it should not exhibit any long-term trend. The MBH98 algorithm found ‘hockey stick’ trend in each of the independent replications.
Discussion: Because the red noise time series have a correlation of 0.2, some of these time series will turn upwards [or downwards] during the ‘calibration’ period6 and the MBH98 methodology will selectively emphasize these upturning [or downturning] time series.

Moar?

Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis. As mentioned earlier in our background section, tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable.

Moar?

Conclusion 3. As statisticians, we were struck by the isolation of communities such as the paleoclimate community that rely heavily on statistical methods, yet do not seem to be interacting with the mainstream statistical community. The public policy implications of this debate are financially staggering and yet apparently no independent statistical expertise was sought or used.

Telescopes? We doan need no stinking telescopes.

 

[DC]

Why don't you follow the link and read? Unless you contend that those supposed moons around Jupiter are artifacts of the instrument?

Wegman
Scott
Said
Moar?Moar? Telescopes? We doan need no stinking telescopes.

i might read once you have supported your earlier claim or retract the claim.

where is your similar warming period pls?

 

[uke2se]

Why don't you follow the link and read? Unless you contend that those supposed moons around Jupiter are artifacts of the instrument?

Wegman
Scott
Said
Moar?Moar? Telescopes? We doan need no stinking telescopes.

Wait, this is an "independent investigation" that publishes its findings on ClimateAudit?



Wait... this is the Wegman report...

Are you serious? Have you been living under a rock for several years?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey...nergy_and_Commerce_Report_.28Wegman_Report.29

 

[DC]

Malcolm Kirkpatrick's silence regarding his similar warming period is very telling.

cought lying, trust gone....

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

i might read once you have supported your earlier claim or retract the claim.1 where is your similar warming period pls?2

1. Which claim? Please quote (not paraphrase) and link.
2. There are a lot of paleo temperature reconstructions in at this link. I was not alive 5000 years ago and cannot personally vouch for any of this. I just have to take people's word for it. It was kinda warm in downtown Honolulu yesterday, though.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Wait, this is an "independent investigation" that publishes its findings on ClimateAudit?

No. It's an investigation quoted by Climate Audit. If that invalidates the quoted material, then remember: Climate Audit quotes Mann, Briffa, Hughes. So I guess you concede, then, that Mann is full of BS, right?

 

[DC]

1. Which claim? Please quote (not paraphrase) and link.
2. There are a lot of paleo temperature reconstructions in at this link. I was not alive 5000 years ago and cannot personally vouch for any of this. I just have to take people's word for it. It was kinda warm in downtown Honolulu yesterday, though.

can't be bothered to go back and search for it, i ask like 2 days already, and you kept ignoring it or dodge it.
you know very well what i talk about.

2. yes Honolulu had a warming trend yesterday morning.....

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

can't be bothered to go back and search for it

Then, neither can I. If the question is so important to you, find the original statement to which you take exception. Or accept "2 1/2" as the answer. What was the question?

 

[Grizzly Bear]

when will you backup your claims of similar warming periods?
i guess it is cler meanwhile that you have nothing to back it u and you just made it up.

The alternative is that in the case of the climate gate scandal, "climate change" is being exploited by politicians to enact some completely inept policy changes. The science shows the earth is "warming" however the same people arguing that this is a human induced phenomenon are working with only a few decades worth of objective satellite observations. Overall patterns of climate change can be much longer than a few decades, and at the very least anyone arguing that humans are the definitive cause to todays' climate patterns need to take that into account.

 

[DC]

The alternative is that in the case of the climate gate scandal, "climate change" is being exploited by politicians to enact some completely inept policy changes. The science shows the earth is "warming" however the same people arguing that this is a human induced phenomenon are working with only a few decades worth of objective satellite observations. Overall patterns of climate change can be much longer than a few decades, and at the very least anyone arguing that humans are the definitive cause to todays' climate patterns need to take that into account.

actually they are working with alot more than just a few decades of satellite observations.

and sure there will be Politicsters that will and most propably have already exploited AGW. but that doesn't change the science that showed that it is indeed AGW and not just GW.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Conclusion 3. As statisticians, we were struck by the isolation of communities such as the paleoclimate community that rely heavily on statistical methods, yet do not seem to be interacting with the mainstream statistical community.

Although that conclusion was countered by proof of interactions and consultations with the mainstream statistical community, I don't think it's terribly controversial to suggest that climate science, like many other areas of science, would benefit from greater involvement by professional statisticians.

However...

Wait... this is the Wegman report...

Are you serious? Have you been living under a rock for several years?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey...nergy_and_Commerce_Report_.28Wegman_Report.29

Wegman and Said evidently committed plagiarism in a subsequent paper. As reported by an editorial in Nature 473, pages 419–420, 26 May 2011:

Earlier this month, a statistics journal decided to pull a little-cited 2008 paper on the social networks of author–co-author relationships after it emerged that sections were plagiarized from textbooks and Wikipedia....

Two of the paper's authors, Yasmin Said and Edward Wegman, both of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, are also authors of an infamous 2006 report to Congress, co-written with statistician David Scott of Rice University in Houston, Texas....

This [report] was cut down to an academic paper and published two years later in the journal Computational Statistics & Data Analysis. It is this paper that the journal has decided to retract. So it seems likely that the plagiarism in the 2008 paper is also present in the 2006 Congress report....

The editorial goes on to note that Wegman and Said are still being investigated by George Mason University.

The journal's investigation is complete, and resulted in retraction of the paper.

At this point, it would be remarkably foolish for anyone to question Mann's integrity by citing Wegman and Said.

So I wasn't the least bit surprised when Malcolm Kirkpatrick did it.

 

[lomiller]

I recommend the first quoted material in this Climate Audit post:

FYI the blog you are quoting is regurgitating already debunked claims. Specifically referencing the Wegman report, which was a positional political document commissioned by Republican Joe Barton (the same Joe Barton who apologised to BP “on behalf of the US” for the negative reaction to the Deepwater Horizon spill)

The official bi-partisan report to congress was Congress was conducted by the National Research Council and found Mann’s results to be largely accurate. It did say he overstate certainty in some cases (his error bars were too small) but otherwise upheld the results. These error bars have been reduced in subsequent papers so

Wegamn himself faces significant charges of academic misconduct related to his position on climate

The newspaper quotes CSDA editor Stanley Azen (who is denying responsibility for what appeared to be a rushed, one-man review of the Wegman/Said paper), saying the journal’s legal team has decided to pull the study because of the evidence of plagiarism from Wikipedia and textbooks.

The Wegman work is part of a flurry of “analysis” (at least one expert derides this particular paper as “an opinion piece”), that Wegman and Said conducted on behalf of U.S. Congressman Joe Barton (R-Texas), who was using the material to attack the climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann.

The guy has been caught plagiarising Wikipedia!

Even setting aside academic misconduct the Wegman report has multiple serious flaws. Mann’s original paper was a first of its kind analysis and as a result contained some errors but these were minor in that they did not impact the final results. McIntyre’s response however contained serious errors that completely invalidated it’s results. This was already documented at the time of his partisan report, nonetheless Wegman refused to evaluate whether Mann’s results were correct and refused to comment on the documented errors in McIntyre’s response. For the purposes of evaluating climate change therefore Wegman’s partisan report was useless.