Miguelsan wrote:It´s not a conspiracy but when people are betting their careers on unproven theory X or Y they´ll play with the data to reflect their own conclusions rather than the other way around.
Academia can be a dirtier battlefield than politics sometimes.

M.

General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.

In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I'll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number.

* Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
* Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
* Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!
* Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as "cheering news".
* Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
* Phil Jones says he has use Mann's "Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series"...to hide the decline". Real Climate says "hiding" was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
* Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
* Mann thinks he will contact BBC's Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
* Kevin Trenberth says they can't account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can't.(1255352257)
* Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi's paper is crap.(1257532857)
* Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn't matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
* Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he's "tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap" out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)
* Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to '"contain" the putative Medieval Warm Period'. (1054736277)
* Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
* Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it's insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre's sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many "good" scientists condemn it.(1254756944)
* Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
* Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)
* Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
* Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be "hiding behind them".(1106338806)
* Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to "get rid of the Medieval Warm Period". Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)
* Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)
* Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)
* Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)
* Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the "increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage" he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)
* Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman's admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)
* Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)
* Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)
* Reaction to McIntyre's 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper's editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers - Saiers was subsequently ousted]
* Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
* Jones says he's found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)
* Wigley says Keenan's fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)
* Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)
* Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)
* Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn't be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don't want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)
* Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of "apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data". [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)
* Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)
* Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)
* Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)
* Funkhouser says he's pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn't think it's productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)
* Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
* Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)
* Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)
* Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)
* David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn't be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)
* Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)
* Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr "I'm not entirely there in the head" will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)
* Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306)

Ketara wrote:What I'm interested in, is WHY all these climate change scientists are so obsessed with stopping FoI acts? Surely if everything was fine with their analysis of the situation, they'd be handing out their data as if it was going out of fashion? So why the massive movement between all these people to hide or delete their data? It doesn't add up.

Khornholio wrote:I always thought that the Sun getting hotter was the reason for most of the bizarre weather here on Earth. The ice caps on Mars are gone. There are more storms than ever on Jupiter. The surface of Neptune has got some weird spot action happening. Venus is getting hotter. It's more like solar system warming than global warming. Al Gore? Are you cereal?

Green Blow Fly wrote:Im currently freezing me arse down here in here in Florida.

G

OverbossGhurzubMoga wrote:Idk about global warming. All I know is that it is almost December, and in south Georgia, it's still 60+ degrees. [farenheit, or however you spell it]

Kilkrazy wrote:Radio 4 had a piece on this today.

The Professor of Climatology at East Anglis said there's no reason to think the East Anglia people had hidden or biased the data. There are two other, corresponding datasets available, one from NASA, so it would be impossible to conceal monkey business from independent scrutiny.

He did admit the language used was not to the standard that could be hoped for in public discourse. (To be fair, it wasn't public discourse.)

Lord Lawson brought up the flattening of temperature increase in the past 5-10 years. This was explained essentially by regression to the mean, and did not wipe out the rise over the past 100 and 50 years.

A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "If you looked through any organisation's emails from the last 10 years you'd find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world's leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke."

JEB_Stuart wrote:Well I guess you're right Shuma. When governments across the globe spend literally billions of dollars on global warming research, we can't expect the dissenters to always act like angels. Hacking these e-mails, that should have been in the public's eye already due to the UK's FOIA, was a rather nasty thing eh? I guess when Columbus theorized that the world was not in fact flat, or when Galileo theorized that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and all of the authorities at the time told them they were wrong, and even threatened their lives, they should have bowed to the times conventional wisdom. Academic discourse is about debate, and an open one at that. We simply do not know enough about our own planet and our atmosphere to jump to broad conclusions...

This is in fact an academic discussion, and I have the right to, as well as other skeptics to air our concerns. If the opposition can't handle that, without resorting to personal attacks or getting angry then that is just to bad.

JEB_Stuart wrote:Volcanoes by themselves dwarf the output of the entire human race in terms of carbon gas output.

dogma wrote:Be a smart skeptic: acknowledge that many of the things we put into the atmosphere affect global temperature. Then argue that said affect is minimal.

JEB_Stuart wrote:Hacking these e-mails, that should have been in the public's eye already due to the UK's FOIA, was a rather nasty thing eh?

I guess when Columbus theorized that the world was not in fact flat, or when Galileo theorized that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and all of the authorities at the time told them they were wrong, and even threatened their lives, they should have bowed to the times conventional wisdom.

Academic discourse is about debate, and an open one at that. We simply do not know enough about our own planet and our atmosphere to jump to broad conclusions...

JEB_Stuart wrote:I am amused by the fact that many, many geologists, who know a bit more about the history of Earth's climate and the impact it has on the planet, are man made global warming skeptics. I had one as a professor and he had several lectures devoted to the illogical conclusions and poor modeling done on the part of many climatologists.

Kilkrazy wrote:Why would one group of people holding a belief stop another group of people from analysing data?