Climategategate

A big setback for the Michael Mann smear campaign.

Here‘s the science relevance context, the subject area Mann has worked on, temps in the 1000 year timescale. While some others work on instrumental records, say last 100 or 200 years, some work on ice age stuff that takes 100,000 years etc etc. Some of the 1000 year reconstruction papers were by him, and hence the lines in that IPCC graph labelled MBH1999 and MJ2003 and I don’t know if he’s the M in some other too.

But he hasn’t also worked, at least to my knowledge on other stuff like radiative forcing. Notice how nicely the report is laid online, for everyone to read, hint hint…

Read Full Post »

The Latest Fake Outrage Campaign

Hack and get some climate researchers’ emails. Then point to some pretty reasonable stuff as evidence of a conspiracy if taken out of context.

It seems there are a few cases certain people latch onto.

There was a certain lousy paper pushed for publication in the journal called Climate Research. It was crap – the claims in the paper conclusions could not be justified by the data or methods presented in it. It was also written by known fossil industry funded frauds. It went through anyway because of a bad reviewer and editor, and actually was pushed as support for policy. Like pushing creation science somewhere in a weak journal so you can cite it as “peer reviewed”. Many other editors for the journal quit as a result. Read the story here, where “Clare Goodess explains the circumstances behind the resignation of half of the editorial board of the journal Climate Research”.

I do hope for more openness on the data and algorithms front. Of course if you’re a climate researcher and get your data only with personal agreements (from the data collecting scientists and institutions who might work under lots of constraints – these might not be the same people who make models or the temperature reconstructions from the data).

I don’t know about the FOIA (government information) requests… It seems bad that things have been withheld. On the other hand if you get so much FOIA requests just for posturing’s sake from certain people that you’re swamped by them, that’s unreasonable as well.

Then there’s the alleged “trick” to hide some cooling. AFAIK, this is just a known proxy issue where they are in error at some point and thus when you make some plots you don’t use that period but “hide” it.

Quite weird arguments.  The FOI one is the most serious looking to me, and others seem just fake.

Read Full Post »