Hacked Emails Show Climate Science Ridden with Rancor

[Kulindahr]

They're not hiding the data. You can go access the data yourself (They said 95% was available easily, you might have to look elsewhere for the rest). Their job is to give you processed data, not raw data. Anyone can go collect and/or access raw data. It's the job of scientists to process and interpret the data into something people can USE.

Are you saying you want to process and interpret the data all on your own?

That brings to mind a project of one university, I think in California, where they handed out free weather stations to thousands of people across a huge region. The catch was that the weather station had to be connected to your computer, and your computer had to be accessible to having the information from the station downloaded daily -- meaning you weren't allowed to turn your computer off.

The idea came from a UC project studying earthquakes, where thousands of seismometers were distributed to be hooked to computers. The data thus obtained gave the geologists a fantastically detailed map of earthquake activity and a resulting geological map of astounding detail and accuracy. So some bright climate scientist decided that if the rock hounds could do it, so could they.

Gore at one point wanted federal funding to spread such a net across the US and even the continent. It's a grand idea, but I don't think it went anywhere. (It doesn't matter where you stand on the climate issue; more data is always something scientists love.)

 

[Kulindahr]

Ambrocious, I used to believe pretty much as you do. I went into those classes at OSU where we got to play with the raw data hoping to expose the flaws. But while there are isolated incidences where short-term fluctuations seem to go against it, the only reasonable conclusion from the raw data is that mankind is driving global warming.

I'm not going to go so far as to say that man is causing global warming, so I don't like the term "anthropogenic". The evidence (as I learned in astronomy class) that solar output has been rising, and thus insolation is higher, is irrefutable. Even so, from measurements of the effect on Mars and Venus (and guesstimates from Jupiter), the calculated result for Earth is only a small fraction of a degree Fahrenheit; it is also not proceeding rapidly. In the normal course of things, the planet, by processes I described in an earlier post, would handle the difference as a matter of course.

But mankind's contribution is kind of like the words we used to sing to a popular song:

We didn't start the fire,
but we're throwing on fuel, piling it higher.

It's possible to argue that we're in a normal warming cycle and humans are exacerbating it. But remember that there are a good number of climate4 scientists who say that if it weren't for us, Earth would be dropping into an ice age.

To use an analogy, it's like we're in an airplane. Our instruments tell us we're descending, and we know there's a nasty swamp below. We've been messing with the plane, but we can't figure out how much of that is driving us down and how much may be due to other things. We know there's a downdraft, but we can't measure it accurately. We know a lot of things, but we don't know enough to assess levels of responsibility.

Now, in that scenario, would you argue against fixing the things that we know that we, the passengers, have done?

 

[Kulindahr]

They could easily use NaN instead of zero, and just have the algorithm spit out NaNs every time it uses one in a calculation.

True, but when you have politicians who control your funding demanding numbers....

The fault here is not that of the scientists, but of the politicians who want easy, simple answers they can reduce to sound bites.

 

[Corny]

Kulindahr - i take my hat off to your patience ..

 

[Kulindahr]

Kulindahr - i take my hat off to your patience ..

I think it comes from an aspect of my personality/whatever that a number of advisors and teachers observed about me: I'm a born teacher; whatever I do, I end up teaching.

I just could never handle a class bigger than about eight....

 

[mike_n_herrin]

I'm saying that they hid the decline of temperature from 1961 onwards and replaced it with data to their choosing. Even still, the temperature rises AND THEN the CO2 rises, not the other way around as the eco prophet Al Gore states.

No one has "hid" declines in temperature. Oh look there were declines after 1940 and 1960, but wow look where we are now. And that's just from a simple graph from wikipedia!

 

[Kulindahr]

Mike, that's an excellent graph. If you look at it, you can see a regular rhythm I noticed in the data when I was at OSU: it appears as a big rise, big drop, small rise, small drop, pattern.

And if you take that and level it across the time line, you get the "outside the pattern" heat. That's when you have to start asking where it came from.

 

[Corny]

more interesting material ..

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg[/ame]

 

[Kulindahr]

^ The little clip there of Alex Jones is sufficient to take away any trustworthiness he might have had. He looks like a complete idiot.

 

[Kulindahr]

Now that I've listened to the whole thing, parts of it more than once, I have to say that's very well done.

One thing I've learned over the years from being a Rush fan to wishing he'd dry up and blow away is that when he talks about science, he's almost invariably wrong. So just knowing that he's in the same space as Beck and Jones on this is enough to tell me the whole thing is a joke.

In fact, I think that the only conspiracy involved in any of this is a conspiracy of stupidity, a conspiracy of people who really would rather not take responsibility for the way our forefathers and we have abused the earth. In fact they sound just like what's described in the Bible, when the world was facing a catastrophe: they claimed things had always been the way they were, and they weren't going to change just because someone said there was going to be a disaster.

When the crash comes, there's only going to be so many resources for dealing with everything. My vote at this point is that all those who are crying that nothing is actually happening get put on the bottom of the list for everything.

And as someone who's planted enough trees and restored enough habitat in his life to have a negative carbon footprint, I'll volunteer to make them slave for their rations.

 

[JB3]

No one has "hid" declines in temperature. Oh look there were declines after 1940 and 1960, but wow look where we are now. And that's just from a simple graph from wikipedia!

That graph is meaningless without the accompanying explanation that part of the reason (albeit, it is not known how big of a part) we're seeing temperature rises is that data collection measures have drastically improved. The data from 1900 isn't exactly going to be rock-solid like most of the data from the year 2000.

 

[Kulindahr]

That graph is meaningless without the accompanying explanation that part of the reason (albeit, it is not known how big of a part) we're seeing temperature rises is that data collection measures have drastically improved. The data from 1900 isn't exactly going to be rock-solid like most of the data from the year 2000.

Statistically, that's nonsense: the error is as likely to be too low as too high; we may actually be seeing a sharper rise than we realize.

 

[JB3]

Statistically, that's nonsense: the error is as likely to be too low as too high; we may actually be seeing a sharper rise than we realize.

Bullshit. Even the scientists in question identify it as one of the biggest issues, since the data is incomplete.

 

[Kulindahr]

Bullshit. Even the scientists in question identify it as one of the biggest issues, since the data is incomplete.

If the data is incomplete, then statistically the error is as likely to be too low as too high; we may actually be seeing a sharper rise than we realize. To say that it errs one way but not the other would require having some data to base that on.

 

[Ambrocious]

^ The little clip there of Alex Jones is sufficient to take away any trustworthiness he might have had. He looks like a complete idiot.

And so based on Alex Jones being emotional about what he was presenting and all shook up, you officially say that all credibility is destroyed for him? Perhaps something a bit bland will fit you:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcH-3d-BZn4]Clear Eyes![/ame]

 

[Kulindahr]

And so based on Alex Jones being emotional about what he was presenting and all shook up, you officially say that all credibility is destroyed for him?

Emotional has nothing to do with it.

Being ignorant and uninformed is what destroyed his credibility. He showed that he doesn't understand how science is done, and that he's willing to jump on a bandwagon without doing the background research to make a rational decision.

Did you watch the whole vid Corny posted? That was what research and science look like, and rational thinking. The guy actually went out to find what scientists mean by terms like "trick", and worked at discovering what the emails really said. Jones showed that he's at core a clueless fundamentalist who doesn't bother to discover whether he even reads the language in question; he just barges ahead with his theme and snatches at anything that looks to him like it fits.

 

[Corny]

I just want to throw in that science is kinda like the opposite of emotional

 

[White Eagle]

Emotional has nothing to do with it.

Being ignorant and uninformed is what destroyed his credibility. He showed that he doesn't understand how science is done, and that he's willing to jump on a bandwagon without doing the background research to make a rational decision.

Did you watch the whole vid Corny posted? That was what research and science look like, and rational thinking. The guy actually went out to find what scientists mean by terms like "trick", and worked at discovering what the emails really said. Jones showed that he's at core a clueless fundamentalist who doesn't bother to discover whether he even reads the language in question; he just barges ahead with his theme and snatches at anything that looks to him like it fits.

Thanks for all your posts in this thread. Like all other issues you have been involved in here, I have understood more about them from your "teaching" gene.

 

[moniker]

I found this interesting letter to the Economist:

Now that we know from leaked e-mails that some of the raw data behind the most widely used graph of global temperatures have been lost or discarded; now that we know that the peer-review process in climate science has been hopelessly incestuous; now that we know that some skeptics’ concerns about corrections for urban heat islands were privately shared by those who dismissed them in public; now that we know that proxy graphs were truncated specifically to “hide the decline” and avoid giving fodder to the skeptics – you are free to start covering the science of climate change again...It is not settled.

 

[Kulindahr]

I found this interesting letter to the Economist:

Now that we know from leaked e-mails that some of the raw data behind the most widely used graph of global temperatures have been lost or discarded; now that we know that the peer-review process in climate science has been hopelessly incestuous; now that we know that some skeptics’ concerns about corrections for urban heat islands were privately shared by those who dismissed them in public; now that we know that proxy graphs were truncated specifically to “hide the decline” and avoid giving fodder to the skeptics – you are free to start covering the science of climate change again...It is not settled.

You should show that as a quote.

I'm not certain that we do in fact "know" some of the things that paragraph alleges.

The only things not settled about the science of climate change are details, not the basic conclusion.