I'm that's because it's all about the "science"

Interestingly, neither Inhofe's inquiry nor the Competitive Enterprise Institute's FOIA request seem to be interested in how the e-mails were obtained.

- those relating to the content, importance or propriety of workday-hour posts or entries by GISS/NASA employee Gavin A. Schmidt on the weblog or "blog" RealClimate, which is owned by the advocacy Environmental Media Services and was started as an effort to defend the debunked "Hockey Stick" that is so central to the CRU files. RealClimate.org is implicated in the leaked files, expressly offered as a tool to be used "in any way you think would be helpful" to a certain advocacy campaign, including an assertion of Schmidt's active involvement in, e.g., delaying and/or screening out unhelpful input by "skeptics" attempting to comment on claims made on the website.

One post without sarcasm or ridicule

I generally agree with Monbiot. The leaked CRU e-mails suck, but they don't show nearly the kind of conspiracy that free-market think tanks would like us to believe.

Having read through a number of e-mail threads from the hacked CRU database, it strikes me how, in many cases at least, innocent of conspiracy these scientists actually are; and how rigorous their e-mail debates tend to get. Here's an example where they find use of fraudulent data by a prominent climate skeptic. They wonder what to do, discuss it at length, and check and re-check their data before taking any action. No wonder they're not all that happy with journal editors who publish manuscripts by those very same climate skeptics: the risk of having their work associated with journals that publish poor quality work is too great.

The thread discussing this recent 10 year period--in which there was no additional warming following the excessively warm year of 1998, but the globe was still above average--was similar. Reading just one or two of the e-mails doesn't get you to an understanding of what went down. Heck, one or two e-mails between myself and my collaborators would probably leave most anyone rather confused since the context is missing. Yes, the context. This is a cast of characters that each have strongly-held widely-divergent opinions, and reading the entire set of arguments is crucial to understanding how they came to that one fateful e-mail that is quoted in shock-highlights on blogs and in editorials.

But I also understand it's not easy to go through all this information as a journalist--or pundit--and convey what's in them in a fair way. A good friend of mine who spent much of his early career chasing terrorists said to me that "they" have to get it right only once, whereas "we" have to be right all the time. Obviously, climate skeptics are not in any way terrorists but in this world where climate scientists are constantly under attack, they need to get the right message to the public all the time. If the Earth is taking a break from warming, they need to come up with a reason because the skeptics will try to tell the public every year that the Earth is not warming.

Reading CRU e-mails with CEI-colored glasses

From the CLIMATEGATE e-mails:

As I see it, there are two key issues here.

First, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Pat Michaels are arguing that Phil Jones and colleagues at the CRU [Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK ] willfully, intentionally, and suspiciously "destroyed" some of the raw surface temperature data used in the construction of the gridded surface temperature datasets.

Second, the CEI and Pat Michaels contend that the CRU surface temperature datasets provided the sole basis for IPCC "discernible human influence" conclusions.

Both of these arguments are incorrect. First, there was no intentional destruction of the primary source data. I am sure that, over 20 years ago, the CRU could not have foreseen that the raw station data might be the subject of legal proceedings by the CEI and Pat Michaels. Raw data were NOT secretly destroyed to avoid efforts by other scientists to replicate the CRU and Hadley Centre-based estimates of global-scale changes in near-surface temperature. In fact, a key point here is that other groups -- primarily at the NCDC [NOAA National Climatic Data Center] and at GISS [NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies], but also in Russia -- WERE able to replicate the major findings of the CRU and UK Hadley Centre groups. The NCDC and GISS groups performed this replication completely independently. They made different choices in the complex process of choosing input data, adjusting raw station data for known inhomogeneities (such as urbanization effects, changes in instrumentation, site location, and observation time), and gridding procedures. NCDC and GISS-based estimates of global surface temperature changes are in good accord with the HadCRUT data results.

The second argument -- that "discernible human influence" findings are like a house of cards, resting solely on one observational dataset -- is also invalid. The IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) considers MULTIPLE observational estimates of global-scale near-surface temperature changes. It does not rely on HadCRUT data alone - as is immediately obvious from Figure 2.1b of the TAR, which shows CRU, NCDC, and GISS global-mean temperature changes.

As pointed out in numerous scientific assessments (e.g., the IPCC TAR and Fourth Assessment Reports, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Report 1.1 (Temperature trends in the lower atmosphere: steps for understanding and reconciling differences), and the state of knowledge report, Global Climate Change Impacts on the United States, rigorous statistical fingerprint studies have now been performed with a whole range of climate variables -- and not with surface temperature only. Examples include variables like ocean heat content, atmospheric water vapor, surface specific humidity, continental river runoff, sea-level pressure patterns, stratospheric and tropospheric temperature, tropopause height, zonal-mean precipitation over land, and Arctic sea-ice extent. The bottom-line message from this body of work is that natural causes alone CANNOT plausibly explain the climate changes we have actually observed. The climate system is telling us an internally- and physically-consistent story. The integrity and reliability of this story does NOT rest on a single observational dataset, as Michaels and the CEI incorrectly claim.

I have known Phil for most of my scientific career. He is the antithesis of the secretive, "data destroying" character the CEI and Michaels are trying to portray to the outside world. Phil and Tom Wigley have devoted significant portions of their scientific careers to the construction of the land surface temperature component of the HadCRUT dataset. They have conducted this research in a very open and transparent manner -- examining sensitivities to different gridding algorithms, different ways of adjusting for urbanization effects, use of various subsets of data, different ways of dealing with changes in spatial coverage over time, etc. They have thoroughly and comprehensively documented all of their dataset construction choices. They have done a tremendous service to the scientific community -- and to the planet -- by making gridded surface temperature datasets available for scientific research. They deserve medals -- not the kind of deliberately misleading treatment they are receiving from Pat Michaels and the CEI.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking

So I was talking with a treehugger hippie friend of mine over beers during the football game yesterday. I do have friends like that, though I know they are clueless. But I usually can convince them to see the light and change their minds. This is how our conversation went.

Treehugger hippie: What if Newton's personal communications had been stolen and held up to the same scrutiny as the Hadley CRU climate scientists? Would we then not have learned gravity theory and possibly missed out on the Enlightenment entirely?

So I sez: Look, the worst that would have happened in that case would have been that we didn't know why the apple hit us upside our heads. With climate change legislation, we're facing trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in costs, millions of jobs lost, and people shooting themselves in the head. That's why we need to have absolute certainty about the climate models. No questions should remain, all bloggers must be entirely satisfied that catastrophic warming will lead to impending doom.

Treehugger hippie: So the economic models used to forecast economic doom and gloom...aren't they also subject to interpretation and to bias? Are we sure that they 100% correct?

Me: Of course they are. Plus, there's consensus amongst economists. Not a single one of them disagrees. I'm sure that if you were to hack their e-mails, they'd be all like:

--Are you absolutely certain we should publish this study at this time, or should we run another analysis before frightening the public? You do know how important our work is. Has the model been tested under all sorts of different consumption patterns?
--Why yes. This model will stand up to anyone's scrutiny. I have already sent the code to skeptical, AGW-leaning economists for pre-publication review and critique.

Treehugger hippie: Well OK, but just to be safe, couldn't we simply begin by reducing our own per capita emissions down to maybe the level of the Europeans. They seem to be living a fine life.

Me: The Yurpins? The reason their carbon emissions are lower than ours is because they are ruled by reptilian overlords of mankind who force them into a sad life of socialism.

Treehugger hippie: Reptilian overlords?

Me: Yeah, I was told to slip that in somewhere. But you know what I mean. Modern environmentalism can be traced directly back to Hitler, Stalin, Goebbels and Carlos the Jackal. They all wanted to reduce carbon emissions, and look what happened to them! Besides, if you want to see more babes in bikinis, then you should be all for global warming!

Treehugger hippie: I don't care about babes in bikinis.

Me: Oh, yeah.

Treehugger hippie: So if the economic models used to forecast the effects of global warming legislation are always correct, and the climate models are often incorrect, how come when we allowed a large increase in carbon emissions these past 10 years we didn't see the economy boom? Did the models predict the housing bubble? Did anyone listen to those who came up with forecasts predicting the housing bubble?

Me: Of course there were people predicting that, but those were also the same people who said we should be listening to the AGW modelers, and since we know those models are crap, we also knew that the predictions of a housing bubble must be wrong. Something about sustainability and other such crap.

Treehugger hippie: Oh, OK.

Me: Glad I could set you straight on all this malarkey.

Like Paul Joseph, without the smile.

The Wall Street Journal provides further background on Climategate:

The tension between those two camps is apparent in the emails. More recent messages showed climate scientists were increasingly concerned about blog postings and articles on leading skeptical Web sites. Much of the internal discussion over scientific papers centered on how to pre-empt attacks from prominent skeptics, for example.

The horrifying revelations about scientific abuses over the last few days have brought us numerous challenges, but also given us an opportunity to reflect on our mission and refocus our goals. Some of our inspiration might come from fellow bloggers. For instance, Mark Steyn at National Review's Corner blogs:

"Climate change" and "health care" are different ends of the same stick: They're both all-purpose pretexts for regulating every aspect of your life.

Yikes! Blogger William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection alerts us to the danger of scientists:

The e-mails also demonstrate what we all have known to be true -- that left-wing academics hate people who disagree with them, and are willing to engage in de facto boycotts and intimidation in order to silence opposing opinions. [...]

Let's get it right, or our children will be swimming -- not in water -- but in economic ruin resulting from failed policies based on politicized science propagated by people with hidden agendas who stand to make fortunes off of our misery.

Finally, Wonker, aka TerryP at HazZzMat relates this to all of academia:

A certain amount of this ongoing snit is but one example of the casual, reprehensible kind of skulduggery that's an everyday fact of life in academia where tenured-for-life professors go through adulthood acting like spoiled brat

We're at war with a propaganda machine conspiring to take over the world. Luckily, there are tools to fight for our freedom. For instance, the cover of this new book from Australia puts exactly what we're up against into an easily comprehensible cartoon:

The captain must not leave his sinking ship.

Climategate reveals additional e-mails

You think the revelations of climate fraud are bad? Wait till you see what we've uncovered in their spam filter:

Subject: East Anglican models with mad data skillz

You can't account for her lack of warming? Are you having trouble hiding your decline? Your observing system is not inadequate. Trick her into manipulating your hockey stick tonight!

Order your hemispheric reconstruction kit today and so you won't have to contain your MWP any longer.

Emphasis added. This is the biggest science spam in history.

Friday's science.e-news commentary

By now many of us will have heard the shocking revelation that an anonymous hacker has posted damning evidence showing climate sciencofascists used real data in their models, debated over whether to ask the US Congress to take climate science seriously, questioned their theories during unseasonably cold nights and disagreed over the review process and editorial decisions of certain journals. I know. I can't believe this either. Scientists should never debate things or question the validity of the assertions of those who question them. Just ask the Camel Doctor. But this conspiracy reaches much farther than even the most astute bloggers could imagine. Today it is with great shame that I must admit that I, too, was involved in the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind. As my former incarnation "Sir Oolius" I was tasked with the dreadful responsibility of having to lie to my readers. One of the e-mails in the hacked documents clearly shows this:

From: George Soros
To: Al Gore ,fat@xxxxx.xxx, t.boone.pickens@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Socialist plan to take over the World
Date: Mon., 16 Nov 2009 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: w.buffett@xxx.xx.xx

Dear Al and T.,

After all this time and money spent, we can finally say that our view is aired consistently by the MSM. We now own The Washington Post editorial board (except for Will, who still insists on publishing the truth about AGW), and at the New York Times we just added Friedman to our payroll; but Rich and Kristof have been doing fairly well for us there. In short, climatofascism can now enter its next stage. With the help of the liberal noise machine at MSNBC and the blogs, we can now delude the rest of the American public into taking "action." Romm, Revkin, Dave Roberts, Zimmer are all fighting hard to keep the message fresh. We're a little concerned with Oolius at the moment. He might be going rogue in which case we'll have to terminate his contract. Otherwise we're in good shape. Once this catches on, we'll be making trillions of dollars in so-called "alternative" energy. I know you are, T-Bone, but Al, are you fully invested in this yet? I know you've been busy with your book cover, but it's really time *now* to leverage the equity in your mansion. [...]

Folks. There you have it. This is all one big conspiracy in which scientists make things up and wealthy capitalists enrich themselves on heaps of government money while oil and coal companies struggle to survive on a 3% profit margin. And that is why I have decided to join the truth of the truest truths to shed light on these malicious tactics. I hope you will understand.

I gotta start 'splainin myself sometime

You might have wondered what's happened to good ole' Sir Oolius these past few months. Well, I have to admit that after much navel-gazing, the contrarian in me won out and I feel compelled to join forces with the side of the truest truth of truer truths. Over the past 9 months, I have come to realize that I strongly believe that the free market is under attack by a vicious and heartless socialist conspiracy and that global warming is the issue with which they plan to force us into slavery. And death. Lots of death. I fear the death that is to be bestowed upon our freedom-loving nation. To all my previous readers: I WILL NOT apologize! You must join me and the mission of this mighty blog in resisting this effort on the part of our enemies by every means possible! Rise up and fight!

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, how better to get things going again here than with climate denier [dammit, things like this still slip out from time to time] policy experts quotes! Atrios pointed us to this particularly insightful quote over at Red State yesterday:

I was so delighted when she [Sarah Palin] catagorically rejected the global warming nonesense in an interview with Rush today. This is something that she was unable to do during the campaign because of McCain’s climate facisim views. This issue is one of the most important for me. Global warming facisim is the buggest threat to our liberty, prosperity, free markets, and way of life. Sarah is so far the only possible 2012 contender that holds this view. Don’t let Pawlenty’s 180 degree turnabout fool you.

Oooooh....Buggerin' Buggers!

Erick nailed it: McCain is a climate fascist. And if McClimatefascist had been elected, our right hand would already be raised high, chanting in unison: "Sieg Gaia!" Chris Horner gives some background:

[...] if warmist-friendly John McCain had been elected last November, we already would have adopted cap-and-trade, and would be facing a "successful" Copenhagen collapse.

And that's because Republican Presidents never change their position on the environment once their butts are firmly planted on the Oval Office chair, safe from the liberal MSM attacking them at every turn on the campaign trail. Moreover, McCain could have easily convinced congressional Republicans to build a filibuster-proof majority with DemocRats for cap-and-death-panel-tax legislation. We'd already be on our way to converting highways into bike lanes, downtown Detroit to a pedestrian zone, and shuttling urban hellhole criminals into the suburbs on SUPERTRAINS to implement the ACORN agenda of coercing your youngest daughter into crack-whoring. All because of climate alarmism.

But things are looking up for our side. We have "bagfulls of cash". And, this is The Year of the Skeptic, we are also currently planning on re-winning the Nobel Prize next year, but without the fat guy. And so I have great hopes for our common future together, and the 2010 elections. May God bless all of you.

hello?

Someday soon I hope to find the time to blog again.