Wolf Howling: consensus

Showing posts with label consensus. Show all posts

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Climategate Update 13: Hack Job Alert - Washington Post Leads With Climategate & A Complete Defense Of Global Warming

The Washington post leads with an article on Climategate that is nothing short of a one-sided defense of AGW, ignoring the core issues raised by Climategate. The authors, David A. Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin, spend their time assuring the reader that the earth is burning up while only grudgingly acknowledging that the hacked CRU e-mails and data exist. It is a hack job.

WaPo begins by telling us that the last decade has been the warmest decade ever.

I seem to recall having read that Greenland was once actually green and grapes were growing in sufficient quantity in Britain to fuel a substantial wine industry during the Medieval Warming Period. That would make that period the warmest in the past two millennium. (Plus see here) But who can argue with a graph based on peer reviewed, massaged data provided by the AGW scientists?

WaPo repeatedly emphasizes the vast amount of AGW supporting peer reviewed data while belittling those who still contest AGW theory in any form. They then pronounce on Climategate and downplay the major issues raised by the scandal:

Leaked just before international climate talks begin in Copenhagen -- the culmination of years of work by scientists to raise alarms about greenhouse-gas emissions -- the e-mails have cast those scientists in a political light and given new energy to others who think the issue of climate change is all overblown.

The e-mails don't say that: They don't provide proof that human-caused climate change is a lie or a swindle.

But they do raise hard questions. In an effort to control what the public hears, did prominent scientists who link climate change to human behavior try to squelch a back-and-forth that is central to the scientific method? Is the science of global warming messier than they have admitted?

What grossly understates the "hard" questions raised by the CRU e-mails.

- Was data manipulated inappropriately? That answer is clearly yes, a fact which would seem to belie WaPo's resounding pronouncement to the contrary.

- Did the AGW scientists operate in such a manner that the public has been provided with their conclusions, but other scientists were denied the ability to actually check and reproduce their experiments? Absolutely. They wholly corrupted their science, deliberately refusing to release their data, methodology and programs, not to mentioning conspiring to delete data subject to FOIA requests, such that it has been impossible through today to verify their experiments and conclusions. That holds true on this side of the pond also. And indeed, with the loss of the raw data from CRU that they claim to have destroyed in the 1980's, it is not even possible for the AGW scientists themselves to reproduce their work.

- Does the peer review process in the AGW field suffer inherent and systemic weakness that were compounded by the deliberate malfeasance of AGW scientists? Yes., to the point where it is fair to say that the process is irredeemably corrupt and provides no standard for judging the validity of any particular journal article on climate science.

Instead we get this from WaPo:

But recent debate -- some scientists say the Earth hasn't warmed as predicted over the past 10 years -- show that climate science is still science, with researchers drawing different lessons from the same data. The problem is that it plays out before an audience that won't wait for certainty.

Could that paragraph be any more outrageous. To restate the WaPo hacks, by using the word "some," they imply that many, if not a majority of scientists, apparently believe that the Earth has warmed over the past decade - an abject falsehood even contradicted by WaPo's own graph. Two, the WaPo authors decry the fact that the reality of a lack of consensus on AGW has now been made public because the unwashed masses simply have not the patience and intelligence to understand action to combat AGW must happen now regardless. In essence, the authors are arguing that it would have been better if the public continued to wrongly believe in the canard of a consensus. The hubris on display in that paragraph is breathtaking.

Wapo then, amazingly, tells us that this lack of scientific agreement doesn't matter because . . . there is a consensus, even if there are some unimportant distractions surrounding the consensus:

. . . But the climate establishment -- including the U.S. government's top scientists on the subject [That would include Michael Mann, directly implicated in the CRU scandal] -- say that nothing in the e-mails disproves their bedrock ideas. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are still gathering in the atmosphere and trapping more of the sun's heat, and the consequences of that will still be dire in the long run, they say.

"Our collective understanding of how the Earth is warming . . . rests on a wealth of scientific information that is very diverse and comes from multiple sources and multiple groups," said Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Regardless of what happened in one place, it doesn't undermine the totality of what we know."

Wapo then sets up the "few" skeptics as merely substandard scientists. Interestingly, they pick Roger Pielke, a renowned scientist whose work was discussed in the CRU e-mails by the conspirators who sought to keep it from the major journals. Instead of quoting from the e-mails, WaPo quotes an another individual who calls Pielke's work unsupported. You can find the links to Pielke's work here, as well as his explanation of the disagreement he has had with the AGW crowd. Given that his work is based on something that should be easily provable or disprovable - i.e., whether temperature stations used to support AGW conclusions are in fact untrustworthy - I find the dismissal of his work out of hand to be extremely questionable. Too bad, is it not, that WaPo did not see fit to give him an opportunity to respond to his accuser.

Wapo spends the remainder of the article telling us why Climategate makes no difference to the validity of AGW.

Top climate scientists say that in recent years most of the new, worthy research has only made the threat of climate change seem bigger and faster.

. . . These are the facts: After an increase in 1998, the world has been historically warm, but its average temperatures have not climbed steadily. Does that mean climate change has stopped?

Many mainstream scientists say no: This is just a tic of nature, as cycles of currents in the Pacific Ocean and a decrease in heat coming off the sun have temporarily dampened warming. Some researchers, though, have said the models -- and, by extension, the human researchers that built them -- could be missing something about how the climate works. That point was made in one stolen e-mail, in which climate researcher Kevin Trenberth wrote it was a "travesty" that models could not explain why the Earth hadn't warmed more.

. . . The diversity of opinion on this topic, however, wasn't evident late last month, when a group of 26 climate researchers issued a report called "The Copenhagen Diagnosis," summarizing scientific advances since the last major U.N. climate report in 2007.

"Has global warming recently slowed down or paused?" the report said. "No."

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Climategate Update 11: Finally an AGW Concensus, "Hockey Stick" Mann Attacks Jones, Gore Goes To Ground

Finally! We now have a real consensus as to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The consensus among Americans is that AGW is not settled science and the AGW crowd has been committing fraud. This from Rasmussen:

Most Americans (52%) believe that there continues to be significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming. . . .

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Americans say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming. Thirty-five percent (35%) say it’s Very Likely. Just 26% say it’s not very or not at all likely that some scientists falsified data.

The real cannibalism begins. Michael Mann, he of "hockey stick" infamy and one of the climate scientists at the very heart of the AGW scandal, threw his colleague Dr. Phil Jones, the former head of East Anglia CRU, under the bus yesterday. Appearing on the BBC (Britain's ideological equivalent of MS-NBC) Mann was questioned about the CRU e-mails on a BBC show:

. . . Speaking to BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight, Prof Mann said: "I can't put myself in the mind of the person who wrote that email and sent it. I in no way endorse what was in that email."

Prof Mann also said he could not "justify" a request from Prof Jones that he should delete some of his own emails to prevent them from being seen by outsiders.

"I can't justify the action, I can only speculate that he was feeling so under attack that he made some poor decisions frankly and I think that's clear."

Prof Mann then argued however that there was "absolutely no evidence" that he too had manipulated data, while he also said "I don't believe that any of my colleagues have done that". . . .

CBS News, is beginning to take rather a jaundiced view of the AGW deniers. By "deniers," I don't mean those who question AGW, but rather those who deny that the CRU e-mails and data don't call into question the validity of AGW. And in particular, the author takes on the Democrats in Congress.

If you're a U.S. politician calling for expensive new laws relating to global warming, you know you're in trouble when Jon Stewart lampoons the scientists whose embarrassing e-mail messages were disclosed in what's being called "ClimateGate." [see Climate Update 9 below]

But Democrats put a brave face on it on Wednesday, with Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey saying that the leaked files and allegations of scientific misconduct should not stand in the way of the U.S. Congress swiftly enacting cap and trade legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. . . .

Markey, the head of a House global warming committee, said during a hearing that his Republican colleagues "sit over here using a couple of e-mails to (tell us) how to deal with a catastrophic threat to our planet." And: "There is no alternative theory that the minority is proposing, other than that we know has been funded by the oil, by the coal industries that want to continue business as usual."

That's a bit of an overstatement. The leak includes over 1,000 e-mail messages, and another 2,500 or so computer files, many of which are still being analyzed. And the burden of proof should properly be on anyone -- even a House committee chairman -- proposing new taxes and extensive regulations, especially when climate science is anything but settled. . . .

Read the entire post here. Now if we can just get these stories on the front burner of our MSM . . .
The Goreacle had scheduled a meet and greet on Dec. 16 in Copenhagen to promote has new book, Our Choices. He has now pulled out of the event for unspecified reasons.

Lastly, the best tongue-in-cheek opinion piece on the Climategate scandal comes from the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby in his article "Climategate, Dissent On Ice"

Richard Nixon said he wasn’t a crook. O.J. Simpson said he didn’t kill his wife. The scientists who run the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia say they are “committed to scientific integrity . . .and . . . respectful and informed debate’’ with climate-change skeptics.

But as Nixon and Simpson eventually discovered, truth has a way of undoing even the most determined stonewall. Now it is the turn of the CRU’s climate scientists - especially its director, Phil Jones - to learn that lesson.

The CRU, a highly influential source of data on global warming, is home to some of the foremost proponents of the scientific “consensus’’ that climate change is a looming man-made disaster to be reversed at all costs. It is also at the center of “Climategate,’’ the international furor triggered when thousands of e-mails and documents were hacked from CRU computers and released over the Internet last month.

Assuming the e-mails are genuine, they are nothing short of scandalous. They reveal celebrated climate scientists apparently conspiring to corrupt the peer-review process, to suppress or finesse temperature data at odds with global-warming alarmism, to silence or discredit climate experts who criticize their work, and to hide or eliminate the raw data on which their own much-trumpeted claims have been based. , , ,

There is much more. Read the entire article.

Prior Posts:

Climategate and Surrealism
More Climategate Fallout
Climategate Update 3
Climategate Update 4: CRU Records Worthless
Climategate Update 5: IPCC's Chairman Mao
Climategate Update 6: Climategate In Video
UNEP, Green Religion & Global Governance
Climate Update 7: IPCC's Chairman Mao Plays The Obama Card, Peer Review Analyzed, Scientific Method Explained For Paul Krugman
Climategate Update 8: The NYT Reports
Climategate Update 9: CRU Head Phil Jones Steps Down During Investigation, An MIT Prof Explains The Holes In AGW Theory, And Climate Fraud Is Everywhere
Climategate Update 10: Climategate Reverberates From The UK To Down Under

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Interesting News From Around the Web

I agree with Tom Friedman this morning: "It’s clear that the surge by U.S. troops has really dampened violence in Iraq. So don’t we now need a surge in diplomacy to finish the job?" And I would take it a step further. We need a real bi-partisan effort now to capitalize on Iraq's pax Americana, both diplomatically and with aid. But see here - tough to do when the majority party wants nothing more than to surrender.

Herd Journalism - all the major news papers reporting on the positive developments in Iraq. "Taken together, these stories amount to a consensus that the surge of additional American troops and the counterinsurgency strategy adopted by General David Petraeus has worked - and worked brilliantly." Somebody tell Reid . . . anybody following the global warming arguments know that once a consensus has been achieved, the question has been answered beyond rebuttal.

What utter idiot signed off on this. "The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments."

Sometimes its just impossible to catch a break. "Top United Nations’ scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they wildly overstated the size and the spread of the AIDS epidemic, but that all the millions of people who don’t actually have AIDS will soon drown in the rising tide caused by man-made global climate change."

The cave where Romulus and Remus suckled at the tits of a she-wolf has been found.

The problems of policing, crime and punishment in a war zone.

Soros goes Horowitz hunting.