[Climate] Cap and Trade

[NervousWreck]

Wouldn't be hard, the man has a 23k electric bill. And the whole calculation of a carbon footprint uses bogus math anyway.

[Tonus]

You can be sure that the mainstream media will do its damnedest to smother this story:

Note: this is just a portion, read the rest at the link. It really deserves to be publicized, because it's a bombshell.

Do hacked e-mails show global-warming fraud?


Controversy has exploded onto the Internet after a major global-warming advocacy center in the UK had its e-mail system hacked and the data published on line. The director of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit confirmed that the e-mails are genuine — and Australian publication Investigate and the Australian Herald-Sun report that those e-mails expose a conspiracy to hide detrimental information from the public that argues against global warming (via Watt’s Up With That):

The internet is on fire this morning with confirmation computers at one of the world’s leading climate research centres were hacked, and the information released on the internet.


A 62 megabyte zip file, containing around 160 megabytes of emails, pdfs and other documents, has been confirmed as genuine by the head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Dr Phil Jones.


In an exclusive interview with Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition, Jones confirms his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to have come from his organisation.


“It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”

One of the most damning e-mails published comes from Dr. Jones himself. In an e-mail from almost exactly ten years ago, Jones appears to discuss a method of overlaying data of temperature declines with repetitive, false data of higher temperatures:

There are also emails discussing the removal of data points from charts that showed, uh... inconvenient truths about the climate.

The second email that they show was sent to, among others, Michael Mann. Mann is the author of the infamous (and now soundly discredited) "hockey stick" graph that the IPCC finally removed from its reports on global warming climate change. In that email, they discuss ways to add noise to temperature data to smooth over declines in temperature. This comes on the heels of the discovery that much of the data that went into such graphs was part of a very narrow selection that skewed the results in favor of the alarmist point of view, which is probably why the authors of those papers fought tooth-and-nail to keep the data hidden.

The global warming hysteria is dying, and I really really hope that this gets publicized, though I fear that it won't. These two incidents are enough to put a stake in the heart of this dangerous movement, but not if the idealogues win the information battle.

Edit to add: there is another link between these guys. Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit had been stonewalled for years, trying to get a hold of the Yamal data that was being kept confidential (in violation of both Science magazine's rules and scientific protocol). Who had the data? CRU, the entity that got hacked. Apparently there is an email where Phil Jones (CRU's director) admits that he'd rather destroy the data than provide it to McIntyre! More and more I hope this becomes the scandal that it deserves to become, because there seems to be clear evidence of fraud.

Edit to add: Keith Briffa, who wrote the paper based on the Yamal data, is (or was) Jones' assistant at CRU.

[Tonus]

This story is exploding over the blogosphere right now. Stories at:

Climate Audit (I'm putting this one at the top, but the site is getting hammered due to interest. It might be better to visit this site at a later date, I'm sure McIntyre will have A LOT to say on this whole matter.)

Watts Up With That - it's worth it to read through the comments here as well as the main post.

Examiner.com

the Herald Sun

Edit to add: According to a comment, it seems that Phil Jones greets the notification of the passing of an AGW skeptic (John Daly) as "good news." (Correction, he considered it "cheering" news.)

Edit to add: From the Herald Sun: "Destroying government data subject to an FOI request is a criminal offence. Is this data being deleted the stuff CA asked from Jones in repeated FOI requests? If true, Jones had better get himself a lawyer very fast, but I doubt very much he would have done anything remotely illegal."

That was after he showed the contents of an email where the recipient is asked to delete a number of emails pertaining to an information request, and asking that the recipient pass the request on to others who were involved. This could be a criminal act.

Edit to add: The Herald Sun article is long (and growing) but it has lots of stuff there that makes the data seem more and more damning to CRU and to some of the highest-profile warming alarmists. If properly cataloged (there are more than 3,500 documents!) and investigated, this should end at least a few careers at the very least. The word 'scandal' may no longer be sufficient to describe this, if this information has not been tampered with (it's authenticity appears to have been validated by Jones himself).

[Tonus]

I've uploaded the file here. Don't abuse the bandwidth, it's for the regulars here to download and read.

[S Carver Orne]

Thanks, Tonus!

[Tonus]

Just some clarification, because the information about the file's contents is being reported incorrectly in some places.

The ZIP archive is 63MB. The uncompressed contents are about 165MB.

I see that it's still being reported that the archive contains "1079 emails and 72 documents." Apparently there are 72 individual folders, not documents. The entire archive contains just over 4,550 individual files. This includes at least 1,073 emails that are saved as text documents with numeric file names. According to one explanation, the file names are an indicator of the email's date, using the UNIX notation that keeps the date as an integer (the number of seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970). Thus, the file name (assuming it is legit) can be used to determine the date of the email.

I've read that some of the emails contain the email header text, and some don't. In any case, the volume of documents can make it daunting to read through, but it also helps to bolster the veracity of the claim that it's authentic-- for one thing, it's a hell of a lot of data to forge. Second, it allows for a lot of scrutiny, and it's almost impossible to imagine that someone cooked up this much data and didn't make mistakes.

Of course, there's the option that most of it is legit and only the most damning portions have been faked, but again the volume of data makes it easier to check those portions to see if they fit in to the overall narrative. It also creates a real problem for those involved, since this information can be subject to a Freedom Of Information request in the UK. Deleting documents that can be procured via FOI is a crime in the UK.

Besides that, the original documents are probably the only way for those involved to prove their innocence (or to validate the authenticity of the documents). So they could be in a real bind if anyone attempts to make the original data disappear. Not only would they be risking criminal prosecution, but if the corroborating data disappears, it just adds to the impression that they were disposing of it to hide their complicity.

I think it's critical for these emails and files to be put through the wringer and for their authenticity to be verified. This could end a few careers (deservedly so) and destroy some reputations (ditto) and possibly end the whole global warming debate.

[Grunthos]

Yup yup, I just took some of the same info over to UGOP... If this pans out, it'll be nice to have been proved right over these last several years.

Not that anyone who was wrong about it will ever admit it.

It just cropped up on the New York Times. Dismissively.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/sc...e.html?_r=2&hp

Officials at the University of East Anglia confirmed in a statement on Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and that the police had been brought in to investigate the breach. They added, however, that they could not confirm that all the material circulating on the Internet was authentic.

But several scientists and others contacted by the Times confirmed that they were the authors or recipients of specific e-mails included in the file.

The revelations are bound to inflame the public debate as hundreds of negotiators prepare to hammer out an international climate accord at meetings in Copenhagen next month, and at least one scientist speculated that the timing was not coincidental.

Ya think?

[KB.]

That is the thing. I've pretty much given up on putting forth a good argument about anything to most people unless they already agree with me or they are intelligent enough to be able to see two sides to a situation. Global warming? What ever. The earth has been going through climate change cycles for eons.

[Tonus]

Originally Posted by Grunthos

It just cropped up on the New York Times. Dismissively.

Yeah, the whitewash has already begun. The UK Guardian ran a similar piece, but they included quotes from two or three scientists who insist that the science is settled and that this is all a tempest in a teapot. I think you're going to see a whole new round of "denialism" but it won't be from the AGW skeptics, heh.

[Tonus]

PS- regarding the part about "Mike's Nature [magazine article] trick" being used to "hide the decline"-- both Jones and the guys at RealClimate have offered an explanation about it, but McIntyre clarifies the issue as well as pointing out the motivation behind it.

Link is here. This is a mirror at WUWT because Climate Audit is still being swamped by excess traffic, and at this point I'm wondering if the site isn't being hit by a DDOS attack (which is pointless, considering that other sites are carrying the story).

In short, the 'trick' is to work in additional data to mask a downturn in temperatures at the end of the graph (the 'decline'). The hockey stick graph wouldn't seem so alarming if there was a noticeable dip at the end that indicated that temperatures were back in decline. However, if the line angled upwards at the end, it would imply continued warming at an accelerated pace and generate much more concern.

I expect that there will be a lot of obfuscation and misinformation and outright lying that will go on now, because if this is shown conclusively to be a fraud, then a lot of people who are used to being very prominent and very important are going to go right down the drain, along with their cause. That may not be necessary, though. Copenhagen was already on its way to accomplishing zilch, and Cap and Trade in the US looks dead. If this story gets any traction at all, it can still cripple the GW alarmist movement sufficiently to make it harmless from a legislative and economic perspective.

Edit to add: I think I understand it better now. The temperature data derived from tree rings (dendrology is the term, I believe) shows a warming cycle until the 1960s, when it shows a decline. This diverges from the readings from 'instruments' (thermometers and temperature stations) for the time period. So they used the instrument data in place of the tree data. They do not seem to know why the tree data diverges, and apparently didn't come to the conclusion that this might put the entire record into doubt-- they simply took the data from the tree rings that provided the results that they wanted, discarded the part that showed results they didn't want, and replaced the latter data with numbers that allowed the graph to proceed as they wished.

I've seen the text of another letter that... let me see if I can find it... yeah, here it is as part of a person's comment:

The emails are now searchable online here:

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/search.php

I typed in “skeptics” and the first email I read was allegedly from renowned climatologist Tom Wigley written in 1997 castigating his fellow scientists for misrepresenting the science to influence Kyoto. Here is the link:

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=40

And here are a few paragraphs from the email:

“I was very disturbed by your recent letter, and your attempt to get others to endorse it. Not only do I disagree with the content of this letter, but I also believe that you have severely distorted the IPCC “view” when you say that “the latest IPCC assessment makes a convincing economic case for immediate control of emissions.” In contrast to the one-sided opinion expressed in your letter, IPCC WGIII SAR and TP3 review the literature and the issues in a balanced way presenting arguments in support of both “immediate control” and the spectrum of more cost-effective options. It is not IPCC’s role to make “convincing cases” for any particular policy option; nor does it. However, most IPCC readers would draw the conclusion that the balance of economic evidence favors the emissions trajectories given in the WRE paper. This is contrary to your statement.

This is a complex issue, and your misrepresentation of it does you a dis-service. To someone like me, who knows the science, it is apparent that you are presenting a personal view, not an informed, balanced scientific assessment. What is unfortunate is that this will not be apparent to the vast majority of scientists you have contacted. In issues like this, scientists have an added responsibility to keep their personal views separate from the science, and to make it clear to others when they diverge from the objectivity they (hopefully) adhere to in their scientific research. I think you have failed to do this.

When scientists color the science with their own PERSONAL views or make categorical statements without presenting the evidence for such statements, they have a clear responsibility to state that that is what they are doing. You have failed to do so. Indeed, what you are doing is, in my view, a form of dishonesty more subtle but no less egregious than the statements made by the greenhouse skeptics, Michaels, Singer et al. I find this extremely disturbing.”