Published by AJStrata
Strata-sphere.com
December 3, 2009
A blog at CBS News, a news organization hardly unfriendly to liberal causes and climate alarmists, produced a very harsh report on climategate today:
Ripples created by the disclosure of global warming files now being called “ClimateGate” continue to spread, with congressional attention growing and the head of a prominent climate change group stepping aside.
…The reverberations have extended beyond the campus of the University of East Anglia and the CRU. E-mail messages from Michael Mann, a professor in the meteorology department at Penn State University who has argued that mankind is threatening “entire ecosystems with extinction in the decades ahead if we continue to burn fossil fuels at current rates,” appeared in the leaked files. Now Penn State has opened an investigation into Mann’s work, and the U.K.’s weather agency has been forced on the defensive as well.
Some mainstream academics working in the area have distanced themselves from Mann, Jones, and other researchers whose correspondence has drawn allegations of impropriety. Aynsley Kellow, a professor at the University of Tasmania who was an expert reviewer for a U.N. global warming report, told ABC Radio there was evidence of a “willingness to manipulate raw data to suit predetermined results, you’ve got a resistance to any notion of transparency, an active resistance to freedom of information requests or quite reasonable requests from scientists to have a look at data so that it can be verified.”
Hans von Storch, director of the Director of Institute for Coastal Research who was assailed by Mann in one e-mail message, calls the CRU axis a “cartel” and suggests that Jones and others avoid reviewing papers. A colleague, Eduardo Zorita, went further and said Mann and his allies “should be barred” from future United Nations proceedings and warned that “the scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas.”
…Another article at Reason touches on what could be the most damning email, which highlights easily demonstrable data manipulation by Jones and some US cohorts. The topic of fraud was how to hide the infamous 1930-40 warm period, which equals todays warm period:
Consider researcher Tom Wigley’s email describing his adjustments to mid-20th century global temperature data in order to lower an inconvenient warming “blip.” According to the global warming hypothesis, late 20th century man-made warming was supposed to be faster than earlier natural warming. But the data show rapid “natural” warming in the 1930s. Adjusting the 1940 temperature blip downward makes a better-looking trend line in support of the notion of rapidly accelerating man-made warming. Collecting and evaluating temperature data requires the exercise of scientific judgment, but Wigley’s emails suggest a convenient correction of 0.15 degree Celsius that fits the man-made global warming hypothesis. The adjustment may be reasonable—changes in instrumentation might need to be accounted for—but all raw data and the methodologies used to adjust them should be publicly available so others can check them to make sure.
From the email itself we discover the details on the conspiracy to fudge the data to fit the alarmists hypothesis:
Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs [AJSTrata: Sea Surface Temperarutes] to partly explain the 1940s warming blip.
If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know).
So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip.
…It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”.
This ‘blip’ is easily seen in many of the CRU data runs from 2005 and 2008 which were made public by what some assume is a CRU insider with a conscience. These graphs show the raw ‘land’ blips, prior to data fudging…
The article continues here and contains several more links and graphs.
