Global Warmists -- Read ( Climategate )

[eunhye]

The real question though, did they cook the books? I believe humans are causing some, less than 1% of global warming/climate change/liberal bologna/mumbo jumbo that everyone's talking about. Peep this though.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...2e126&Issue_id

Monday, November 23, 2009

Senator Inhofe: This is a huge issue and of course we have the Gitmo issue and we have the, of course, cap-and-trade is now taking a new turn. Jed, if I could…

Jed Babbin: Yeah.

Senator Inhofe: Would you let me make one sentence?

Jed Babbin: Please.

Senator Inhofe: This is out of a speech that I made, Melanie, back on the floor of the Senate, and it was repeated, John Gizzi picked it up and put it in Human Events. This was 4 years ago, in talking about the science, cooking the science. I said I would discuss the “systematic and documented abuse of the scientific process by which an international body that claims it provides the most complete and objective science assessment in the world on the subject of climate change, the United Nations IPCC.” Now that was four years ago; so we knew they were cooking the science back then, and you’ve been talking about the, you know, what’s happened recently with the bloggers coming up with what they did, what they…

Jed Babbin: Let me interrupt you there Senator, because I think that’s a really important point. Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven’t followed that story, what Senator Inhofe’s talking about, in Britain, a blogger got into some of the official government records about climate change and how the measurements were being taken to show…

Melanie Morgan: And the politics behind it.

Jed Babbin: And the – well but they were basically saying, “Oh yea, hey, let’s make it look like Jim so-and-so did that, and let’s help him cook the books, and let’s change the data…”

Melanie Morgan: And “let’s beat up those who don’t agree with us.”

Jed Babbin: Yea, but it’s all a huge fraud! I mean, Senator, am I exaggerating?

Senator Inhofe: No you’re not. If you remember, mine was the hoax statement, and that was, what, five years ago I guess.

Jed Babbin: Well, we ought to give you a big pat on the back for being …

Melanie Morgan: Yea, you deserve an an ‘atta boy, and now you are finally being vindicated.

Senator Inhofe: Well, on this thing, it is pretty serious. And since, you know, Barabara Boxer is the Chairman and I’m the Ranking Member on Environment and Public Works, if nothing happens in the next seven days when we go back into session a week from today that would change this situation, I will call for an investigation. ‘Cause this thing is serious, you think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with.

Melanie Morgan: So what will you be calling for an investigation of?

Senator Inhofe: On the IPCC and on the United Nations on the way that they cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.

Jed Babbin: Should somebody stop further spending on this until we get this investigation, Senator?

Senator Inhofe: Well, I don’t know how you do that, though, ‘cause we’re not the ones that are calling the shots. The interesting part of this is it’s happening right before Copenhagen. And, so, the timing couldn’t be better. Whoever is on the ball in Great Britain, their time was good.

Melanie Morgan: Well, Senator, thank you very much for coming back and handling a little bit, a tiny little bit of heat from the kitchen.

Senator Inhofe: Okay.

Jed Babbin: Thanks very much Senator.

Senator Inhofe: Thanks, you bet.

Jed Babbin: Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma on the Environment Committee over there, and one of the real fighters.

Melanie Morgan: He certainly is…

[Tristam]

Read the e-mails, they didn't cook the books, the e-mails if anything are evidence that nothing shady is going on. What you believe doesn't matter. The data matters.

[aalryn]

I wonder what caused this?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091123...climateiceberg

Isn't it obvious?

the falsification, manipulation, and political corruption between Politicians who fund these Scientists, that push their agenda. This is documented, evidenced, and truth. How do you trust the instruments that record the data when the instruments themselves are many times faulty or in such manipulative areas like being placed next to Air Conditioners, and the direct manipulation of the data by the "objective" scientists....

Obviously the scientists put the icebergs too far away from the air conditioners.

[Rhinox]

Quoting inhofe on global warming is like quoting a evangelical on abortion and claiming he is an expert.

[Gwynplaine]

The real question though, did they cook the books?

Thank you for getting back to the actual story at hand instead of talking endlessly about anything and everything else. Here are some articles concerning the emerging news so far.

In light of the hacking, the Competitive Enterprise Institute now intends to sue NASA and its GISS for climate data it has refused to release under the Freedom of Information Act. CBS also reports that Rep. Darrell Issa, member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. James Inhofe are beginning to looking into the issue. The AAAS blog Science Insider also points out the potential legal risks involved if any data requested under Freedom of Information Act were deleted.

The identity of the hacker is still up in the air as well. As much as I disagree with environmentalism I also don't think illegally hacking into government property is right. It will be interesting to see how that turns out. Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit had speculated that if the supposed hacker turned out to be an insider they could be protected under whistle-blower laws. That would make for an interesting twist.

[Rothbardian]

[eunhye]

Wait a second, I thought I was a eugenics dude.

[Cadsuane]

Who is this vapid vblogger? Are we supposed to care?

[Leif]

and it's really, really shitty. a lot of big companies have mandatory arbitration clauses in their employment contracts. sure, it's "voluntary" in the sense that the new hire signs the contract, but if you don't sign on to arbitration you don't get the job. and depending on your field, it can be extremely difficult to find an employer that does not have an arbitration clause.

and guess what happens when you file a workplace dispute that goes to private arbitration? the vast majority of the time, the arbitrator finds in favor of the employer because they get a ton of business from that company. if they were to decide against the employer in too many cases, the company would simply find another arbitrator with a more favorable tilt.

now, there is a way to eliminate this problem, i.e. labor unions. but i have a sneaking suspicion that you don't much like those.

After you tell a make-believe story of how arbitrators are corrupt, you say the solution is labor unions! Hurray!

I wonder what caused this?

An bunch of ice bergs broke off, wow! It must be man-caused CO2 emissions to blame!

[Correction]

After you tell a make-believe story of how arbitrators are corrupt, you say the solution is labor unions! Hurray!

Make believe, huh.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0716/p13s01-wmgn.htm

The National Arbitration Forum (NAF), one of the nation's largest private arbitration firms, is commonly used by creditors and secondary debt buyers. A Monitor analysis of the last year of available data from NAF found that arbitrators awarded in favor of creditors and debt buyers in more than 96 percent of the cases. () Such results may be similar to outcomes in court. It also found that the 10 most frequently used arbitrators – who decided almost 60 percent of the cases heard – decided in favor of the consumer only 1.6 percent of the time, while arbitrators who decided three or fewer cases decided for the consumer 38 percent of the time.

Hey guys I've never seen the other side of the moon, is it make believe?

[Leif]

Yes, you take real statistics and paint them into complete fiction.

You show a difference between big arbitrators and small arbitrators, which is great, but statistically irrelevant. You don't know the kinds of cases each kind of arbitrator takes. You assume that the ones who side with the consumer 38 percent of the time (the smaller ones) are as experience and as accurate as the others.

You need to argue with what the statistics actually say, not what you think they mean when you unfairly assume about eight different things.


Use some brains. Give us numbers that are actually relevant. You're going to have to do a lot better if you are to convince anybody reasonable.

[Solefald]

Same company as above.


Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson and the National Arbitration Forum—the country’s largest administrator of credit card and consumer collections arbitrations—have reached an agreement that the company would get out of the business of arbitrating credit card and other consumer collection disputes.[...]


Swanson sued the National Arbitration Forum on Tuesday, alleging that the company--which is named as the arbitrator of consumer disputes in tens of millions of credit card agreements--hid from the public its extensive ties to the collection industry. The lawsuit alleged that the Forum told consumers and the public that it is independent and neutral, operates like an impartial court system, and is not affiliated with and does not take sides between the parties. The lawsuit alleged that the Forum worked behind the scenes, however, to convince credit card companies and other creditors to insert arbitration provisions in their customer agreements and then appoint the Forum to decide the disputes. The suit also alleged that the Forum has financial ties to the collection industry. The suit alleged that the company arbitrated 214,000 consumer arbitration claims in 2006, nearly 60 percent of which were filed by laws firms with which the Forum is linked through ties to a New York hedge fund.

http://www.ag.state.mn.us/Consumer/P...ionAgremnt.asp


And of course there is the now-infamous case of Jamie Leigh Jones who was drugged, gang-raped and imprisoned inside a shipping container while she was working as a contractor for KBR in Iraq. Thanks to the mandatory arbitration clause in her employment contract, her case spent 15 months in private arbitration without resolution. Thankfully now, she has gone public with her story and the real courts are going to handle the case.

[Gwynplaine]

Here's something you all might find interesting (or disturbing). Particularly if you're interested in a career in a scientific field. While finding out more about this story I was introduced to the idea of Post-Normal Science (PSN). A number of people involved in the e-mails from CRU are professed PSN advocates, particularly Mike Hulme who has been pushing the idea for years. Hulme is the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change research, Professor of Climate Change at UEA, and was named 10th most cited climate research scientists, between 1999 and 2009.

"Post-Normal" is basically a ham-fisted name for postmodern science. Cutting through all the rhetoric, PSN advocates regarding moral and political values as above the truth and knowledge. How can that possibly be reconciled with science who's whole purpose is to discover truth and knowledge? Here's what Mike Hulme and others have to say about PSN for themselves.

In a Guardian article from '07 Hulme writes:

It has been labelled "post-normal" science. Climate change seems to fall in this category. Disputes in post-normal science focus as often on the process of science - who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy - as on the facts of science.

The danger of a "normal" reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow.

That is why [opponents of climate change] exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences. If the battle of science is won, then the war of values will be won.

Did you follow that? To Hulme "normal" science assumes that discovering the facts and truth come first, then values and policy will flow from that. But he treats that as a naive and foolish view. For him certain areas such as climate change require the opposite.

In fact, in order to make progress about how we manage climate change we have to take science off centre stage.

Two years ago, Tony Blair... [asked] for the conference scientists to "identify what level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is self-evidently too much".
This is the wrong question to ask of science. Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking

He ends with:

Climate change is too important to be left to scientists - least of all the normal ones.

(All italics added for emphasis)

That is the gist of it. Little wonder then "scientists" such as these have been manipulating and obfuscating their data for what they see as a higher value.

[Cadsuane]

That is quite disturbing.

[Kuya]

I sort of do get what he is trying to say, although i'm not sure. Many suposedly scientific debates are in reality riddled with ideological baggage, and the climate change one is no exception. Let us first assume that science isn't guided by ideological considerations (or anything outside of truth seeking), and that rather, it is a monolithic force that decides what is truth and what isn't, as it is often seen. You have a political debate, where people dive right into science to find arguments to support their beliefs, and you seemingly find that every side can count on some scientists to back them up on their stance. Then you get the problem where trust in science is diminished, because the science is essentially poisoned by the political debate.

The given problem being that science isn't monolithic, and there aren't at times self evident truths that every scientist agrees with. There is plenty of disagreement and debate, and that is something people in general do not understand; they expect science to drop into a debate and drop some truth and the debate is over. There isn't the meticulous study of a debate to see what is being said or whether it is even a difference of emphasis rather than anything substantial. What you get in the end is this confusing marasse where seemingly there is a scientist on every side saying something, and the problem stems from the fact that people (again in general) do not judge what a scientist says on its merits nor do they meticulously study a scientific debate, but rather, if it comes from the mouth of a scientist, then it is just much more believeable if it came from anyone else.

I'm not sure if i was very coherent, but i think i'm essentially saying that at times adding science to a debate doesn't actually settle a debate at all, in fact, it may actually make it more convoluted, and lead to a situation where people begin to loose trust in the science.

[Tristam]

I sort of do get what he is trying to say, although i'm not sure. Many suposedly scientific debates are in reality riddled with ideological baggage, and the climate change one is no exception. Let us first assume that science isn't guided by ideological considerations (or anything outside of truth seeking), and that rather, it is a monolithic force that decides what is truth and what isn't, as it is often seen. You have a political debate, where people dive right into science to find arguments to support their beliefs, and you seemingly find that every side can count on some scientists to back them up on their stance. Then you get the problem where trust in science is diminished, because the science is essentially poisoned by the political debate.

The given problem being that science isn't monolithic, and there aren't at times self evident truths that every scientist agrees with. There is plenty of disagreement and debate, and that is something people in general do not understand; they expect science to drop into a debate and drop some truth and the debate is over. There isn't the meticulous study of a debate to see what is being said or whether it is even a difference of emphasis rather than anything substantial. What you get in the end is this confusing marasse where seemingly there is a scientist on every side saying something, and the problem stems from the fact that people (again in general) do not judge what a scientist says on its merits nor do they meticulously study a scientific debate, but rather, if it comes from the mouth of a scientist, then it is just much more believeable if it came from anyone else.

I'm not sure if i was very coherent, but i think i'm essentially saying that at times adding science to a debate doesn't actually settle a debate at all, in fact, it may actually make it more convoluted, and lead to a situation where people begin to loose trust in the science.

I think I see what you're saying, but the way I would put it is that the public is a pretty poor judge when it comes to what constitutes good science. When both sides claim to have the "science" on their side and a scientifically illiterate public cannot make a good judgment about where the preponderance of evidence lies the entire message gets diluted to the point of being worthless.

In this "debate" it has been shown over and over again that the "science" on the denialist side is pure garbage. There is no equal debate in terms of facts. The competitive enterprise institute suing under FOIA is nothing new, in fact the climate audit goons have sued under FOIA multiple times already and a judge finally determined that the purpose of the suits was not to actually look at the data but rather to harass the scientists and prevent them from doing the work. So now the professional pests have realigned themselves under the CEI banner and their only purpose, make no mistake, is to cloud the public "debate" by casting unscientific doubt on data.

edit: also, 10 pages and noone has shown how the scientists manipulated or did anything unethical to the data? This is EXACTLY what the problem is.

[Kaeko]

It is hard to be completely unbiased and open-minded when you and your lab's livelihood is based on funding from someone that wants a certain answer. It's also especially hard to go against a majority when that majority can and is willing to ruin you for attempting to contrast their conclusions. An example of this in the "hacked emails" was when he wants journals that include articles supporting natural climate change devalued and boycotted. Scientists, even those acting in good faith, can easily be biased simply because the "wrong answer" could hurt their career.

Funding is the key to this. You cannot research without funding, and oftentimes, you cannot amass the necessary funding to continue without a little politics. Politics adds bias. These personal motivations are generally policed by the community of peers, who each with their own biases, offset each other. However, if you introduce pressure outside this community of "experts" like in climate change, it can potentially tip the balance.

I'm not really for or against human caused climate change. We may very well be causing it, but did the other side really have an equal chance of convincing everyone given the politics undermining the issue?

**

Also random aside about funding. One of my biotech professors in nanotech said that his mentor's lab was having huge issues with funding decades ago. It was basically early nanotech research, but was called "microtechnology". Then his mentor had the genius idea of just changing the word micro to nano (even though they worked with micro scale - in fact, even today "nanotech" is really only micro scale) because it was sexier and different. Resubmitted all his funding requests and papers with micro changed to nano, got huge funding. Others followed, and now we commonly use the word nanotech for stuff that's actually still on the micro scale. It's all about the money, and the people with it want sexy, cutting edge research.

[Tristam]

Read those e-mails a little more carefully, the reason why they wanted to boycott a journal is because those journals were publishing bullshit. Yeah, they were pissed, but despite speaking strongly in private, their plan was to publish data that directly contradicted the results published in the other journals and showed *why* they got it wrong. (You can read this in the e-mails). This pisses off a field because now instead of doing something new you have to keep going back to the same old question that's already been treated very well. This is why cherrypicking hacked e-mail exchanges isn't really conducive to a good dialogue about climate change. But again, that's not the point of publishing these e-mails, the point is simply to cast public doubt.

http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2009...cs-in-science/

When Merck was exposed for publishing data in bogus journals which only served as echo chambers for their results, the community collectively bitchslapped Merck and those journals and the publishers got in big trouble. Yet everyone is giving the climate change denialists the benefit of the doubt?

Funding is very much not the key to this. Denialists are hugely privately funded and have failed to provide good evidence of anything. You get public funding by doing something new, and AGW is old at this point. Yes you need to sell your work to funding agencies, so grantsmanship is always an issue, but central to that idea is showing that what you are doing is new and interesting despite whatever the study section feels is important. Yeah, buzzwords are used, and the NIH in particular has an agenda that they use to prioritize funding (this is what the public wants btw). But usually a granting agency can see through the bullshit. If I was on a study section and someone tried to pull a simple word-switcheroo on resubmission I'd be insulted.

Impact studies are where the field is at. There is plenty of data in reputable journals concerning impact studies and you can directly compare the data with the predictions made by the IPCC, Mann et al., and so forth. Denialists have thus far not made any predictions that can be supported by data. In some cases the impacts of AGW have not kept pace with predictions by IPCC, Mann et al., etc. But the data is out there, "hidden" in plain sight. The overall conclusions are not changed.

edit: reading more of the e-mails is actually very very instructive in finding out exactly why they don't like particular papers or a journal. They actually discuss why they are so baffled that certain papers got through review and were published. In some cases the aforementioned papers simply refuse to address problems with data and interpretation. In other instances algebraic errors that completely removed warming trends went unnoticed at any stage of the review process. I'm even more convinced that the scientists "outed" by these e-mails behaved completely ethically.

edit#2: The e-mails from the end of october through early december of 2008 document pretty well the harassing FOIA requests by McIntyre (for data that is already available publicly) and how the scientists ethically attempt to respond to such requests. Correctly, they point out that no matter what they do to "clear the air" they are always made to look in public like they are hiding data, even though it's publicly available data!

[Kaeko]

I concede that when in doubt due to spin, I would default to what the peer reviewed journals on the topic in question say. So if it is true that someone tried to publish easily provable bullshit then I agree that "hacked email" was taken out of context. The wording does leave a bad taste in your mouth though.

[Beckwin]

food for thought: libertarians/free-marketeers have been staunchly against AGW from the start because AGW goes completely against their ideology... combating AGW does not have a free-market solution; it would require government regulation and collective efforts. So while they're calling it a massive conspiracy that grabs for freedom and a conviction of academia (conveniently, capitalism also thrives when academia is weaker and knowledge is not free-flowing), in reality they must oppose it simply because it threatens their ideology, regardless of the actual science behind it all.