ClimateGate Continues

Today, let's tee it up with an excerpt from Ann Coulter's latest:

As we now know (and by "we" I mean "everyone with access to the Internet"), the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has just been caught ferociously manipulating the data about the Earth's temperature.

Recently leaked e-mails from the "scientists" at CRU show that, when talking among themselves, they forthrightly admit to using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in the Earth's temperature since 1960 -- as one e-mail says. Still another describes their manipulation of the data thus: "[W]e can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

Am I just crazy from the heat or were they trying to deceive us?

Global warming cheerleaders in the media were quick to defend the scandalous e-mails, explaining that, among scientists, the words "trick," "hide the decline" and "garbage" do not mean "trick," "hide the decline" and "garbage." These words actually mean "onion soup," "sexual submissive" and "Gary, Ind."

(Boy, it must be great to be able to redefine words right in the middle of a debate.)

 

The leaked e-mail exchanges also show the vaunted "scientists" engaging in a possibly criminal effort to delete their own smoking-gun e-mails in response to a Freedom of Information request. Next, the fanatics will be telling us that "among scientists," this behavior does not indicate knowledge of guilt.

If I recall correctly, their next move should be to fire the special prosecutor late Saturday night.

These e-mails aren't a tempest in a teapot. They are evidence of pervasive fraud by a massively influential institution that has dominated news coverage of global warming.

CRU was regularly cited as the leading authority on "global climate analysis" -- including by the very news outlets that are burying the current scandal, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. The CRU alone received more than $23 million in taxpayer funds for its work on global warming.

Having claimed to have collected the most complete data on the Earth's temperature for the last half century, the CRU's summary of that data was used by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its 2007 report demanding that we adopt a few modest lifestyle changes, such as abolishing modern technology, reverting to hunter/gatherer status and taxing ourselves into servitude.

It's enough to make your blood boil, except that they'd try to tax that too.

On a lighter note -- if there can be any levity in the face of such massive scientific fraud -- this video keeps dancing through my head:

And here's another nice little "nutshell" explanation of the whole scandal, from Iowahawk via Ace of Spades:

The initial controversy about this result was raised by MacIntyre and McKittrick (MM) who noted the backcasts of Mann's reconstructed temperatures didn't reproduce the amplitude of the Medieval "warm period" or the subsequent "little ice age" that previous research had estimated. That previous work suggested that the recent uptick in temperatures in no big whoop compare to previous decades in the past 1000 years, but Mann's result showed it off the charts. They published a couple papers suggesting the flat reconstructed historical temperatures were artifacts of Mann's selection of a time frame for extracting principle components (see step 1 above), which artificially suppressed the variation in the temperature backcasts. This is likely what the CRU emails were talking about when they referred to "Michael's Nature trick." This artifact explanation was largely confirmed by George Mason U statistician EJ Wegman (methods editor for JASA), who blistered Mann's model in a 2006 report commissioned by the Congressional Energy & Commerce committee. Amusingly, Wegman showed that replacing Mann's principle components estimates with repeated samples of random white noise continued to produce the same hockey stick shape.

Now here's where the fun begins. MacIntyre and McKittrick wanted to follow up on their research, and asked Mann and Jones for their source data. This is where M&J started stonewalling to the point where M&M made FOIA requests, which were ignored. The emails give some sense of how desperately the CRU group wanted to avoid providing it. Why? Because, I suspect (and seems obvious from the "harry_read_me.txt" programmer's notes), the basic observed temperature variables -- the linchpin of truth in Mann's model -- are hopelessly, utterly corrupted.

Now, if you've been following this, Mann's entire temperature reconstruction method rests on knowing (observing) recent periodic global temperatures, y. Quibbling about principle components aside, that's the dependent variable in the backcasts. But as is now becoming increasingly plain, y was constructed from an undocumented process that took raw ground station data and ran it through a black box that included smoothing, filtering, inference, manipulation, baling wire, glue and the juice of one whole lemon. This is what the CRU people are calling "valued added homogenized data." Or what normal people call "made up horseshit." It's also the temperature data that dozens, if not hundreds of AGW studies are based on.

But a bigger concern than the scandal itself is the likelihood of an attempt to whitewash the issue for reasons that are both political and intellectually dishonest.  From Paul Joseph Watson of Prison Planet via Pundit and Pundette (who are about to join the blogroll here for their excellent work):

Watch out for a biased investigation to amount to nothing more than a slap on the wrists for people like Jones and Mann, while still refusing to acknowledge that “consensus” presumptions about global warming have been challenged as a result of climategate.

Since the investigation into Jones and the CRU will likely be conducted by Lord Rees of the Royal Society, who is a staunch warmist, it will undoubtedly be a complete whitewash. Indeed, a source cited by the Telegraph’s James Delingpole says that the British government and the foreign office has already made it clear to the University of East Anglia and Rees that they will need to “keep a lid on everything lest it destabilises Copenhagen.”

Meanwhile, you almost have to feel sorry for global warming true believers who are having difficulty processing the possibility that their entire worldview has been based on lies (or, as the CRU likes to call them, "tricks").  P.J. Gladnick at Newsbusters writes (Huffington Post Suffers ClimateGate Panic Attack):

Your humble correspondent has been checking the Huffington Post Green section every day since the ClimateGate scandal exploded. After all, that Green section is pretty much predicated on the theory that the earth is warming dangerously and that Man is the cause of it. At first, the Green section had a few relatively minor stories attempting to dispute the revelations of the ClimateGate scandal. However, today the Huffington Post went into a complete panic mode on this topic. Bigtime.

The Green section now features a huge story at the top of the page by Katherine Goldstein which features a slideshow supposedly exposing "The 7 Biggest Lies About the Supposed 'Global Warming Hoax'." However, even many of their own readers aren't buying the lame excuses presented as you will see here.

. . . . 

Check out our slideshow and pick what you think the most dangerous lie that is being spread by skeptics about the emails. 

Oh goody! A multi-media slideshow! Let us now look at each of the seven "refutations" about the ClimateGate revelations and how many of the Huffington Post's own readers aren't buying the lame excuses presented:

CLAIM: Scientists have manipulated data.

Skeptics have been pointing to an email from scientist Phil Jones where he said he used a "trick" with his data. As climate expert Bob Wardwrites, "Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something -- a short cut can be a trick." RealClimate also explained that "the 'trick' is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term 'trick' to refer to ... 'a good way to deal with a problem', rather than something that is 'secret', and so there is nothing problematic in this at all."

"Hide the decline." And now for the HuffPo reader reaction:

I'm sorry but if I were sitting on a jury and the Prosecutor told us 'since we have the police report and our investigation report we destroyed the evidence because it was no longer needed, I'd look out the window to see what color the sky was!

It's all unraveling and the left still tries to defend this scam of the century. Sorry folks, using terms like "swiftboating" won't work this time.

Katherine, you and your fellow travelers on are the wrong side of history...­again. The email exposure came from a whistle blower. Lot of money to be made on this false science and you know it. Not to mention futhering the goals of your NWO buds. Sunlight is a trmendous disinfectant. I think I'll just enjoy the warmth for a while.

Fact: The University of East Anglia has admitted that they destroyed their raw data, and all that is available for their peers to fact check is the manipulated data they used to construct their report.

Fact: The programmers working on both the raw and manipulated data noted that the raw data itself was rubbish. In fact, programmers notes indicate that they could just make it up.

Fact: Several professional "scientists" did allegedly conspire to keep reports out of the peer review process and prevent them from being published, according to the emails - and to their peers.

Aiiieeee!!! Stop with the inconvenient facts!

Check out the rest of the slideshow -- and reaction from readers at HuffPo.

Comments

[BobC]

The Leftist/Warmist blogs are all a-twitter with comments playing down the Climategate leak. I've noticed that they seem to be using a similar playbook:

1) They don't actually quote the really "inconvenient" emails, but just claim that the whole thing is irrelevant to climate science. ("Ignore the man behind the curtain!")

2) They totally ignore the leaked source code. While emails give you a snapshot into someone's thinking at a particular time, computer code actually DOES stuff. What this code does is fudge (and actually fake) data -- that can't be "spun".

3) They largely refuse to publish responses pointing out the above points.

The alarmists can't afford a real audit of "climate science". The "scientists" at the CRU obviously were aware of this as evidenced by their emails and destruction of the raw data.

[halfacarafe]

I alway read Ann Coulter's column Wednesday on HumanEvents.com. By 6:00 pm last night the comment section had already taken over by trolls. It was the most vile language and insults that I have ever read on any post of hers. It's almost like you are stealing their religion or as a believer, proved Jesus was a myth. In their case it is a religion. Just getting this into the MSM will be a battle, but ultimetly it will be the death of the same MSM who have refused to report on CRU leaks, Acorn, IGA Walprin's illegal firing due to the coverup of Americorp funds to pay off sexually harassed workers, Kenneth Gadney's SEIU beating, etc, etc.

[Peggy McGilligan]

In 1971, I first encountered the GLOBAL WARMING CULT. Terry McAuliffe was pushing the fledgling ideology out of Alexandria, Virginia. Although persuasive, the argument didn't ring true. I knew that NASA, the military, and other government agencies did extensive climate research. If the polar ice caps were indeed melting enough to cause global flooding by 1976, I would have expected that news to come from those sources. The alarm of course never sounded; global flooding never took place.

I never missed being booted from the cult (I was hardly ever in), and never expected to run into Terry or his people again, especially decades later in sunny California. Yet there they were on the Central Coast, singing the same old tune with some major new variations. It seems they had applied the Global Warming hysteria to higher education. Like Global Warming itself, education now became a massive fraud scheme designed to enrich the Global Warming Cult. By 1995, there was more to manmade Global Warming than some mere water spotting. Much more: http://theseedsof9-11.com