Nice article Unity. This release is quite interesting in terms of highlighting the degree of pressure climatologists are placed under by these cranks.

Newtongate!

Yes, good post, thanks for presenting it so clearly.

Doesn’t this episode make the case for open source data in academic studies though? If this is anything, it’s a scandal about a refusal to disclose data. I hope the AGW scientists learn that lesson from this.

This is another PR disaster for the science behind AGW. The scientific community needs to get down into the playpen and talk to the public at their level about this issue; it’s the only way that the plague of public scepticism can be addressed.

I also think that the unit at the UEA needs to do better than its recent press statement. While it’s completely understandable that the academics involved are furious, saying ‘we’re not going to comment because it’s an illegal act, and anyway there’s too much material’ just doesn’t cut it. I hope they’re working on a detailed, public-friendly rebuttal.

Well, there you have it. You can’t have access to the data on which we make our assumptions because, a) you wouldn’t unerstand it and b) you’d use it dishonestly for your own purposes. And there, in a nutshell, is pretty well every excuse for secrecy ever used. I’m surprised at Unity for defending this ‘we know best’ attitude. In almost every other set of circumstances Unity would take the opposite line. Shame.

Mike:

I’m not defending the chicanery around FOIA requests, merely pointing out that there are understandable reasons for the actions of these particular scientists.

It can’t be stressed often enough that science is not a democracy and to a significant extent has to be treated in very different terms to the usual run of things.

As for people not understanding, we live in a country where, even today, less than half of all school leavers possess a halfway decent qualification in any of the sciences, so the question of understanding strikes me as being moot. More than half the population of the UK is fundamentally ill-equipped to make sense of the evidence.

On the dishonesty point, all I can say is read the full article – QED.

‘it is not as if the evidence would, if released, be put to legitimate and honest use.’

This is very arrogant. Liberals like you think you have a monopoly on morlity
The climate scentists at UEA are paid out of our taxes. £13 million in recent years.
If the released evidence is not used honestly then they and you can let us know.

It is the withholding of evidence which is not legitmate and against the whole idea of science.

Free the data.

‘More than half the population of the UK is fundamentally ill-equipped to make sense of the evidence.’

You are correct. That is why the evidence must be released for other trained and sceptical scientists to look at and analyse.

‘More than half the population of the UK is fundamentally ill-equipped to make sense of the evidence.’

You are correct. That is why the evidence must be released for other trained and sceptical scientists to look at and analyse.

This is very arrogant. Liberals like you think you have a monopoly on morlity [morality]

Not at all, and I should add that I’m not speaking here as a liberal but as someone who is, thankfully, scientifically literate.

We are not dealing here with questions of morality but rather of honesty and of the integrity of the scientific research process.

So far as releasing the data is concerned, it should be openly available for use by the scientific community for research purposes, the results of which should be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Beyond that there is little or nothing to be gained from releasing the raw data to a few blogging fucknuts with a political agenda and a will to distort the evidence to suit their ends.

All that does is pollute the debate with gibbering nonsense of a kind that obscures those areas where there is legitimate scope for skepticism, i.e. on whether the kind of policy measure being put in place to tackle AGW are likely to be effective, or even viable, and whether or not there are viable alternatives to found in areas such as geoengineering, that offer less economically proscriptive solutions.

That’s where the real debate lies, not in pretending that global warming doesn;t exist because you don’t like paying taxes.

As for the ‘we payed for it, we own’ argument, what we’re paying for, primarily, is the expertise of these scientists and when we’re spending £13 million a year on them should we not allow them to get on with their jobs rather than have then waste time fielding FOIA requests from fucknuts?

That is why the evidence must be released for other trained and sceptical scientists to look at and analyse.

I agree, as long as those scientists agree to publish their findings in good quality peer reviewed journals.

Sadly, that’s often not the case.

Highly informative piece, thanks Unity.

Pedants’ corner, I know, so apologies in advance for raising it, but:

‘Data’ is the plural of ‘datum’; thus, Osborn was right when he wrote ‘The data are attached to this e-mail’, and you were wrong to ‘sic’ him for doing so.

Love it. So instead of releasing the data along with notes which explain how to correctly use the data to arrive at the correct conclusions (which is how true science works), the scientists took the route of non-disclosure because other people wouldn’t understand the work.

Don’t you see how the scepticism arises from that behaviour? If I came up to you and said “I’ve proved that AGW doesn’t exist, here’s some data I’ve manipulated that shows it” you wouldn’t believe me – you’d want to see the raw data and my methods. If I refused to give you those then you would have to assume that I’m talking out of my arse.

@11 Oops – I keep forgetting that ‘data’ is plural. Corrected.

You say that more than half the population wouldn’t understand the science. By my calculations that still leaves several million who would, including me, my wife, my sons, my brothers-in-law, my son-in-law, my next door neighbour, many bloggers and tweeters I know…well, you get the picture. Do we count?

You claim not to be defending the scientists but ‘merely pointing out that there are understandable reasons for the actions of these particular scientists’. Listen, the reasons for blocking access to information is always perfectly ‘understandable’ to the people doing it. Just ask politicians or drug and tobacco companies.

I don’t care why someone is seeking information under the FOIA. I don’t even mind if they are people you haughtily dismiss as ‘misguided, misinformed and, well, just plain old wackaloons’. Are you to decide if their motives are pure enough. Or maybe a committee of Fabians or left-wing bloggers? Jeez. God help us.

No, science is not a democratic process (neither is politics, actually, but that’s another debate) but it isn’t science that decides on policies which will have a huge impact on society. It is politicians, (most of whom, incidentally, belong in the ‘scientifically ignorant’ group) influenced by scientists and pressure groups justifying their views with scientific data. That is why we all (and not just scientists who want to publish in peer reviewed publications) need free access to ALL that data.

I’m sick of living in a ‘we know best’, ‘do as we say’ society, largely because I’ve been around long enough to see these people get it wrong time and time again. Once more, it’s a case of, let’s not trust the common man; let’s leave it to the ‘experts’. And that, my friend, stinks!

You can see why climate scientists are reluctant to release raw data into the public domain – it’s because they know that climate change deniers will cherry-pick the evidence and highlight only the anomalous data in support of their belief that global warming is a fraud.

I dare say you’re right. It still looks bad.

Surely you mean 61 MB not 61 Mb?

If Einstein had posted the general theory on a blog, rather than a peer-reviewed journal, would it have any less value?

If no, then Unity’s comment at 10 is specious.

Unity,

A reasonable article so far as it goes, but rather limited.

Firstly, I am not looking for evidence that AGW is a fraud. What I have found, however, is collusion by an influential “club” who have conspired to try to ensure that their particular view—that of catastrophic AGW—is the only voice that is heard.

What the emails also show is other scientists questioning the validity of certain reports and methods—including the tree ring proxies. In fact, one of the correspondants states…

“Dendrochonology is a bankrupt approach. They admit that they cannot distiguish causal elements contributing to tree ring size”

… with these causal elements being…

“the relative contributions of rainfall, nutrients, temperature and access to sunlight”

… this last—which you omitted—being particularly important, Unity: especially when you are measuring trees in a forest.

And whilst we may know—or, rather, hypothesise—that acid rain rendered the trees unreliable after 1960, we have no idea what other factors might affect tree growth a century, two centuries, three centuries or a thousand years ago. Why? Because we weren’t there.

Obviously, this probably wouldn’t be too important were one taking enough samples but, as we know from the Yamal data, the whole of the twentieth century was modelled on a tiny sample of tree-cores (even though many more were collected); in fact, as the same correspondant puts it…

Indeed a single tree can, and apparently has, skewed the entire 20th century temperature reconstruction.

Note that this correspondant does not deny AGW, but he is very much on the side of mitigation, as are many of the others involved in the CCMedia conversations.

But most of this is irrelevant, of course: what people like myself have been looking for is evidence that a small team of people have been controlling the climate science agenda. Why?

Because we knew that many scientists were sceptical—if not of AGW, at least the catastrophic predictions wheeled out by some—but their papers seemed to have trouble being published.

And, to be fair, we have found that evidence.

None of this—and I would like to stress that point—disproves Anthropogenic Global Warming but it does heavily suggest that the argument has been skewed by a small team of people, described by another correspondant thusly:

Thanks for the extensive and detailed e-mail. This is terrible but not surprising. Obviously I do not know what gives with these guys. However, I have my own suspicions and hypothesis.

I dont think they are scientifically inadequate or stupid. I think they are dishonest and members of a club that has much to gain by practicing and perpetuating global warming scare tactics.

That is not to say that global warming is not occurring to some extent since it would be even without CO2 emissions. The CO2 emissions only accelerate the warming and there are other factors controlling climate. As a result, the entire process may be going slower than the powers that be would like. Hence, (I postulate) the global warming contingent has substantial motivation to be dishonest or seriously biased, and to be loyal to their equally dishonest club members.

Among the motivations are increased and continued grant funding, university advancement, job advancement, profits and payoffs from carbon control advocates such as Gore, being in the limelight, and other motivating factors I am too inexperienced to identify.

Alan, this is nothing new. You and I experienced similar behavior from some of our colleagues down the hall, the Bell Labs research people, in the good old days.

What I hope might happen is that the poisonous contribution of these people can be drawn out, and we can actually have a discussion about the science—without the political agenda skewing the response.

Fat chance of that happening, to be honest, but you’ve got to try…

DK

Unity,

A reasonable article so far as it goes, but rather limited.

Firstly, I am not looking for evidence that AGW is a fraud. What I have found, however, is collusion by an influential “club” who have conspired to try to ensure that their particular view—that of catastrophic AGW—is the only voice that is heard.

What the emails also show is other scientists questioning the validity of certain reports and methods—including the tree ring proxies. In fact, one of the correspondants states…

“Dendrochonology is a bankrupt approach. They admit that they cannot distiguish causal elements contributing to tree ring size”

… with these causal elements being…

“the relative contributions of rainfall, nutrients, temperature and access to sunlight”

… this last—which you omitted—being particularly important, Unity: especially when you are measuring trees in a forest.

And whilst we may know—or, rather, hypothesise—that acid rain rendered the trees unreliable after 1960, we have no idea what other factors might affect tree growth a century, two centuries, three centuries or a thousand years ago. Why? Because we weren’t there.

Obviously, this probably wouldn’t be too important were one taking enough samples but, as we know from the Yamal data, the whole of the twentieth century was modelled on a tiny sample of tree-cores (even though many more were collected); in fact, as the same correspondant puts it…

Indeed a single tree can, and apparently has, skewed the entire 20th century temperature reconstruction.

Note that this correspondant does not deny AGW, but he is very much on the side of mitigation, as are many of the others involved in the CCMedia conversations.

But most of this is irrelevant, of course: what people like myself have been looking for is evidence that a small team of people have been controlling the climate science agenda. Why?

Because we knew that many scientists were sceptical—if not of AGW, at least the catastrophic predictions wheeled out by some—but their papers seemed to have trouble being published.

And, to be fair, we have found that evidence.

None of this—and I would like to stress that point—disproves Anthropogenic Global Warming but it does heavily suggest that the argument has been skewed by a small team of people, described by another correspondant thusly:

Thanks for the extensive and detailed e-mail. This is terrible but not surprising. Obviously I do not know what gives with these guys. However, I have my own suspicions and hypothesis.

I dont think they are scientifically inadequate or stupid. I think they are dishonest and members of a club that has much to gain by practicing and perpetuating global warming scare tactics.

That is not to say that global warming is not occurring to some extent since it would be even without CO2 emissions. The CO2 emissions only accelerate the warming and there are other factors controlling climate. As a result, the entire process may be going slower than the powers that be would like. Hence, (I postulate) the global warming contingent has substantial motivation to be dishonest or seriously biased, and to be loyal to their equally dishonest club members.

Among the motivations are increased and continued grant funding, university advancement, job advancement, profits and payoffs from carbon control advocates such as Gore, being in the limelight, and other motivating factors I am too inexperienced to identify.

Alan, this is nothing new. You and I experienced similar behavior from some of our colleagues down the hall, the Bell Labs research people, in the good old days.

What I hope might happen is that the poisonous contribution of these people can be drawn out, and we can actually have a discussion about the science—without the political agenda skewing the response.

Fat chance of that happening, to be honest, but you’ve got to try…

DK

Aargh, sorry for the double posting: could mods remove one please?

DK

P.S. Just as a note of interest, I know what Bishop Hill does for a living and he is far from being an ignorant layman who doesn’t understand science. Just thought I’d point that out.

DK

I agree, as long as those scientists agree to publish their findings in good quality peer reviewed journals.

Sadly, that’s often not the case.

*sigh*

That’s the main revelation about these emails, Unity: that The Club were using blackmail and other pressures to prevent such studies being published. Further, when peer-reviewing papers that did not agree with their point of view, The Club colluded to discredit them.

DK

P.P.S. That video is hilariously bad—ad hominems (what the hell has tobacco got to do with AGW?), confusion of weather with climate and sweeping generalisations (“the consequences are dire”—historical evidence would suggest not).

I’ll admit, the temperature stations graph is good though: I shall have to go and check that out. It was, however, the only good thing in it.

DK

@Devil

Firstly, I am not looking for evidence that AGW is a fraud. What I have found, however, is collusion by an influential “club” who have conspired to try to ensure that their particular view—that of catastrophic AGW—is the only voice that is heard.

That would be a tiny little secretive club consisting only of every climatology department in every university on the planet, thousands of scientists in associated disciplines (geology, oceanography, zoology etc) who are reporting the effects of climate change on their subject area, pretty much every government on the planet except the Czech Republic, the Meteorological Office, NASA, the US Geological Survey, the British Antarctic Survey etc, etc….

These sorts of debates do leave me with odd mental images of what it would be like if the climate change skeptics had ever been on board the Titanic. DK would be standing knee-deep in water calmly explaining that more evidence is needed that so-called “iceberg-made sinking” is not a fraud by the crew. Brendan O’Neill would be on the boat deck hectoring passengers on how the guys in the boiler room screaming about a hole in the ship are simply left-wing enemies of progress who don’t want ordinary people to sail to New York, Glenn Beck would be in the ballroom suggesting that the Captain is a communist, and while it is clear that water is rising, there is no evidence that there is cause for alarm or that it’s anything to do with icebergs…and so on.

I repeat my comments from the earlier thread.

I don’t think the leaked emails show a smoking gun (that anthropogenic global warming is a fiction) but what they demonstrate is that scientists are all too human in trying to bend evidence to suit their theory. They have been happy to try to shut down the debate by concealing evidence from colleagues they fear would interpret it differently and have indulged in crude smear tactics on opponents.

In short, they have not behaved like scientists seeking an objective truth- more like politicians trying to win an election.

I don’t know how much of this stuff you have read, Unity, but it is pretty appalling. I dipped in at random and found the suggestion that a couple of opponents who were astronomers by profession could be smeared by referring to them as astrologers. If anyone objected they’d blame a typo.

That is indicative of the level at which these eminent men of science appear to have been working. If he has any sense of decency, Jones will resign forthwith.

DK:

I know what Bishop Hill does for a living and he is far from being an ignorant layman who doesn’t understand science. Just thought I’d point that out.

All the more reason to be disturbed at a failure to recognise the significance of the reference to a non-temperature signature.

That video is hilariously bad

That’s Americans for you but you’ve got the key point – Watts’ weather station survey is an epic fail from start to finish.

Not only do the uncompromised sites show the same temperature gradients but he utterly fails to address or even acknowledge the existence of the four NOAA papers which deal with the adjustment methodologies used to deal with anomalies in individual station data arising from confounding factors.

To knock the US surface station record, you have to knock over those papers as well.

Science progresses by falsification. Niels Bohr noted that many beautiful theories are destroyed by an ugly fact.

If the people at the Climate Research Unit ( CRU) of EAU were really interested in the truth they would welcome their work being tested by others and therefore further validated. What have they got to hide.They are interested in supporting politically attractive policies and more funding.

The great irony of this post is that Unity has gained his blogging reputation by publishing long, detailed pieces full of facts, information and other data, often of a kind that the targets of his articles would, no doubt, rather not have attention drawn to. Shouldn’t he leave this to the specialists and experts to publish in peer-reviewed periodicals?

I thought not. Blogging is, after all, one of the manifestations of the, ahem, ‘information age’, is it not?

26

That is, at best, a *hypothesis* and a pretty weak one at that, yet you present it as fact. Interesting that your hypothesising of a non-temp signal suddenly appearing in 1960 confirms the data has been altered. Sorry, adjusted.

Now all we need to know is the raw data on the one hand and the exact alterations that were made to said data on the other.

In the Internet age, the old adage of ‘trust us, we’re experts’ just doesn’t wash.

There’s something that confuses me about a number of threads in this post.

There is precisely no-where on this planet that predicting significant climate change is “politically attractive” to actual elected representatives at the national level (that’s why you’ll notice the Greens don’t have any, although they’re making ground at local levels).

Any politician who hears about climate change is hearing about tax rises, population restrictions, food shortages and, ultimately, lost elections. Look at Al Gore’s record; if predicting catastrophic climate change was politically attractive he’d have won a minimum of 3 terms in the White House.

Think about it; if you’re over 40, which most voters and all top-rank politicians are, then people who’re talking about climate change will sound remarkably as if they’re blaming you, and your generation, for fucking up their planet. Of course, they’re not; they’re blaming Lord Peel and Andrew Jackson’s generation for fucking up their planet. They’re only blaming the Baby Boomers for ignoring the problem for so long.

The men working on the hideous task of presenting unpalatable truths to the post Cold-War world have developed a siege mentality; the number of political, financial and academic pressure groups and interests who would rather see no-one mention climate change, ever, at all, is immense and they’ve been hammering away at anyone telling the truth for thirty years.

So the story here is that having been political targets and funding albatrosses for thirty years, these guys acted like people under siege; looking for ways to turn the propaganda tricks of the plutocracy against its servants. Unfortunately, they also fucked it up which is typically what happens when honest men stoop to the tactics of the conservative right.

Mike Power @28:

The great irony of this post is that Unity has gained his blogging reputation by publishing long, detailed pieces full of facts, information and other data, often of a kind that the targets of his articles would, no doubt, rather not have attention drawn to. Shouldn’t he leave this to the specialists and experts to publish in peer-reviewed periodicals?

Well, typically, when Unity writes one of his it’s because a scientist has published a debunking in a peer-reviewed journal, frequently more than once, and has then been sued for ‘libel’ by the charlatans he exposed.

I’ve only been reading Unity’s work for a year but the salient investigations, such as Purnell’s travesty of a “lie-detector system” or his more recent work viz. the Simon Singh case, have typically referenced multiple peer-reviewed sources. Personally, being a) an historian and b) way beyond access to University libraries, I’m grateful to him for not only aggregating the peer-reviewed data and references for me but also explaining them in lay terminology so I can understand them.

Point is, the scientists in question here have been publishing properly peer-reviewed science in the field for decades. There are lots and lots of studies already out there. Giving me raw statistical data on this scale would be pointless; not only would I not understand it or the techniques for analysing it, my computer hard drive is quite possibly too small for a data dump on this scale.

Well, of course Unity doesn’t restrict himself to peer-reviewed data. But are you suggesting that he should? You are missing the point. Would Unity be OK about having data, ANY data, witheld from him on the basis that he might not understand it or might use it against the provider? I think not.

As for your abilities to analyze data or store it on your computer – so what? You don’t need/want it? Fine, don’t have it. But does that somehow justify not releasing data on request to anyone else? Who decides? You? Unity?

Are the families of patients who die in hospital to be denied access to case notes and lab reports because they are deemed to be unqualified or ignorant? The whole attitude is utter nonsense as a moment’s thought would confirm. Apply this attitude to any area outside climate change and it will be shown up for the untenable absurdity it is.

PS: The last point is simply risible. “We are not going to release important information to you not just because we think you are too thick to understand it or that you are a crazy, misguided loon, but also because there is just SO MUCH of it!”

ROFLMFAO

There is precisely no-where on this planet that predicting significant climate change is “politically attractive” to actual elected representatives at the national level (that’s why you’ll notice the Greens don’t have any, although they’re making ground at local levels).

Politicians thrive on the need to be seen to do something. It’s no coincidence that government power increases most readily in times of crisis (forget all the Naoimi Klein you’ve read, and take a look at some actual scholarly work like Robert Higgs’ Crisis and Leviathan), and no politician is going to say “everything’s ticking along quite nicely without us – we here in the government have very little to do, as it happens.” This is one reason for why we get all the talk of ‘broken Britain’ from the right, and environmentalism from the left – politicians love to have something to fix.

Mike:

A point I was about to get around to making, before being distracted by the need to respond to DK’s points and update the article with a link to a peer reviewed paper of particular relevance, was that its not at all clear as to the exact publication status of the data being requested under FOIA here.

If the raw data relates to published research then of course it should be released. That is merely part of the normal scientific review process and essential is research is to be fully evaluated and replicated to verify the findings.

If, however, it relates to research that has yet to be published then scientists are under no more obligation to release it into the public domain than KFC is to release the recipe for its blend of herbs and spices.

It seems to me that the key lessons from these emails are:

1) that climate scientists are working under tremendous pressures due to the polarised and heavily politicised nature of the AGW debate to the detriment of the scientific work, and,

2) that FOIA sits rather uneasily with the public funding of scientific research when used to conduct fishing expeditions, unless there is a very good reason to do so.

I make no apologies for going after unpublished data on the lie detector thing, for example, because there were, and are, very good grounds for thinking that the system in question is a crock and that the methodology of the DWP would be sub-standard and prone to giving false outcomes, due to the information that was already in the public domain from the first round of trials.

Its not at all clear that this is case when it comes to the FOIA requests for data to the CRU, which look to be more of the fishing expedition variety.

@29

1. Try reading the paper I’ve linked to in the update, which gives the current state of play on the divergence problem.

2. I’d have thought that the words non-temperature signature would be enough to suggest that there’s rather more to the question of apparent cooling in a temperature graph, like something to do with factors other than temperature.

In the Internet age, the old adage of ‘trust us, we’re experts’ just doesn’t wash.

No, what we’ve got instead is a culture of ‘I can post stuff on teh Interwebs therefore I’m an expert in everything, even stuff I know jack-shit about’.

As a final point for the moment, its also worth noting that some of these emails are anything up to ten years old.

So, its entirely possible that some, if not all, of the data which appears to have been hidden from FOIA requests at the time may well have since been published, or at the very least made available to the scientific community, which is what actually matters here.

If any of that data does remain hidden, particular after publication of papers based on it, then the criticism directed towards the CRU is not at all unreasonable and questions do need to be asked about the conduct of some of the scientists.

If, however, its now all out in the open then this is all much ado about nothing very important.

Unity

As I understand it the data referred to was gathered by, among others, the Met Office.

The reason the CRU give for not having shared it is that they do not have permission from the producers of the data to do so (and there are allegations of procrastination in obtaining such permission).

How is this reasonable- that only one set of scientists are given the data collated by an organisation funded by the taxpayer?

In the emails they talk of the possibility of destroying the data if the FOIA compels them to share it. Again, why would they want to do this?

The only logical conclusion is that either the data does not entirely support the AGW theory or that the methods thay have used to interpret it do not stand up to scrutiny.

No other conclusion makes sense.

“In the Internet age, the old adage of ‘trust us, we’re experts’ just doesn’t wash.”

It washes just fine, since the alternative is that lots of non-experts look at data they have no qualification (or even full reference) for interpreting and come up with irrelevant outcomes, potentially dangerously so.

Groups like scientists, and certain other professional groups, have some of the most robust methods for ensuring what they say is collectively deemed to be a reality, and a truth. To not trust them in an Internet age simply because you as, quite frankly, an idiot by comparison can look at the same data and not understand it to the degree your own bias is confirmed, is not any proof that these people aren’t telling the truth.

Unity,

“No, what we’ve got instead is a culture of ‘I can post stuff on teh Interwebs therefore I’m an expert in everything, even stuff I know jack-shit about’.”

Like Augusto Odone? The man whose son had Adrenoleucodystrophy, who was told by doctors that he wouldn’t understand the medicine? Who then learnt about medicine and worked out a cure for it?

Personally, I was let down by 3 doctors, an ENT specialist and a dentist over chronic pain in my head. The people who helped me get better were a massage therapist with no official qualifications, some internet discussion boards, and finally a dentist.

Maybe we should have kept people like John Harrison out of the prize for accurately calculating logitude. After all, he was merely a self-educated clockmaker, unlike the men with credentials at the Royal Society who thought that the stars were the solution. It would be fair to say that there was scientific consensus that using the stars was the better solution.

I’m not saying that people with credentials generally don’t know what they’re doing, but that we shouldn’t shut science out from people.

After all, just because some people think that 9/11 was caused by lizard people in league with the jews doesn’t mean that we shut down journalism from all but people with an official press card (many of whom are outclassing those with one).

Franz Kafka’s answer to peer review:

“We will take your criticisms into account when they are published in a reputable journal. However, any journal that publishes your criticisms is no longer reputable.”

Like Augusto Odone? The man whose son had Adrenoleucodystrophy, who was told by doctors that he wouldn’t understand the medicine? Who then learnt about medicine and worked out a cure for it?

And who was immortalised in the film ‘Lorenzo’s Oil’ which is where you appear to have got your information, otherwise you might just have got around to giving a bit of credit to Dr Hugo Moser, the research scientist and Director of the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Neurogenetics Research Center.

You might also have pointed out that controlled studies of ‘Lorenzo’s Oil’ show that its not an effective treatment for symptomatic ALD, although it may delay the onset of symptoms if taken before they set in.

Of course, that would mean getting information from a scientific journal rather than a Hollywood movie.

40. Any more anecdotal examples that are meant to debunk centuries of other progress?

Nice work, Unity.
Further useful links to the situation can be found here:
http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2009/11/you-dont-need-to-know-what-the-science-means-to-establish-what-the-words-means-to-scientists.html
& here:
http://rupertsread.blogspot.com/2009/11/scandal-over-hacked-climate-science.html
John Q. Publican (30) is basically right that people don’t exactly welcome the news that global over-heat is underway. When one is psychologically honest with oneself, it is patently obvious why there is so much climate-denial still out there: it is because a helluva lot of people cannot bear the thought that they may actually have to change their lives. No imposition on their consumerised ‘freedom’ is worth trading for helping to save human civilisation from self-destruction.
Are they really going to go on with these stupid ‘doubts’ until the sea washes at their front door? Are they really such selfish morons that they are going to help sign the death warrants of their own children and grandchildren? At present, the answers seem, depressingly, to be: Yes.

How is this reasonable- that only one set of scientists are given the data collated by an organisation funded by the taxpayer?

It’s Met Office data and, therefore, subject to Crown Copyright. Beyond that you’d have to ask the Met Office and CRU.

The only logical conclusion is that either the data does not entirely support the AGW theory or that the methods they have used to interpret it do not stand up to scrutiny.

No other conclusion makes sense.

Really – So what if I scientist makes a really important discovery, an absolute slam-dunk of a career maker?

Should they be compelled to release their data before publication and risk someone else spotting what they’ve spotted and claiming the credit?

It might help to understand the situation if you realise that the McIntyre referred in the emails is Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, who has degree in mathematics and in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and therefore not a member of the mainstream climate science community to whom raw data of this kind would ordinarily be released.

This all ties in to what’s called the ‘hockey stick controversy’ for which there’s a good summary on Wikipedia, which links to most of the relevant papers…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy

“Mr. Odone made an independent intellectual computation – namely that the use of erucic acid, which is C22:1 (C22 monounsaturated), would increase the effectiveness – and Lorenzo’s oil was developed.”

“The study demonstrated a significant association between the development of MRI abnormalities and a plasma hexacosanoic acid increase. The researchers concluded that Lorenzo’s oil therapy should be given to asymptomatic boys with X-linked adrenoleukodystophy who have normal brain MRI results to delay the onset of disease”

So, a layman was involved in the science, which is effective. Should he have been denied it and left to your credentialism?

Should they be compelled to release their data before publication and risk someone else spotting what they’ve spotted and claiming the credit?

But it wasn’t their data- they got it from the Met Office.

It might help to understand the situation if you realise that the McIntyre referred in the emails is Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, who has degree in mathematics and in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and therefore not a member of the mainstream climate science community to whom raw data of this kind would ordinarily be released.

Not an astrologer then……….

climate scientists are working under tremendous pressures due to the polarised and heavily politicised nature of the AGW debate to the detriment of the scientific work

You’re almost there, Unity. Why not just go the extra yard and admit what has been discovered.

They’re crap scientists.

In reply to John Publican

AGW is attractive to politicians because they love to scare us. It is a reason for taxation and for limiting consumption. But no can say the policy was wrong for many years, until 2050 or later when the politician is retired or dead

The data supporting a theory should be released for other scientists to either falsify or verify. That is how science works.

Oh yes.

And wasn’t it Mcintyre who showed that Briffa had been highly selective (literally) in choosing the trees he wanted to include in his findings?

No wonder they didn’t want him to get more data.

Pagar how can you say they are crap scientists? You might say that they are hiding information for some reason- and Unity is entirely right, hiding information from your competitors is something that is as old as science itself- see one Isaac Newton for an example- but you can’t say on that basis that they are crap scientists, or maybe you think Newton was a crap scientist- he hid calculus for tens of years from everyone else.

If you are going to criticise them as scientists criticise the papers that they have produced, the things that they have actually done and the papers actually written? I second Unity some of the things written on the internet about climate science and about so much else that passes for debate on the UK moronosphere- sorry UK blogosphere- has the nature of I feel strongly about this and have read twenty pages on it so must be right- most of these scientists actually know what they are talking about. If you want to criticise them get into the detail and actually criticise their papers (a practice which is available to anyone with the time and expertise)- otherwise why don’t you listen to people who know more than you about a subject?

You never know you might just learn something….

Shorter flat earth trolls…….

Nothing must interfere with the market. Even if it threatens the human race.

What Sally said.

I would not be able to do so, but how could anyone criticise their findings if they are denied access to the data on which the findings are based? How can their methodology be investigated?

And the problem is that they have been discovered, by their own words, to have conspired to manipulate the data to fit the AGW theory. As a non-expert, even I am able to deduce that is not how science is supposed to work.

FWIW my hunch would be that AGW is probably happening. But it is these peoples job to prove it- without “hiding” any evidence that is contrary.

And wasn’t it Mcintyre who showed that Briffa had been highly selective (literally) in choosing the trees he wanted to include in his findings?

Mcintyre claimed that, without any evidence. He then backtracked and admitted that it may not have been Briffa who selected the data but the Russians who initially collected it. The Russians then confirmed this and also confirmed that using the full dataset gave broadly the same result. Mcintyres own calculations, including his somewhat arbitrary addition of data from a completely different dataset have also been shown to be suspect.

As I understand it the data referred to was gathered by, among others, the Met Office.

The reason the CRU give for not having shared it is that they do not have permission from the producers of the data to do so (and there are allegations of procrastination in obtaining such permission).

How is this reasonable- that only one set of scientists are given the data collated by an organisation funded by the taxpayer?

Your understanding is quite correct – they did not own much of the data and neither they or the Met Office had the right to distribute it to third parties. It is reasonable because of the value of the research done by CRU – the alternatove is not to have the data at all and not to carry out this valuable research.

50. Friend

You say ‘criticise the papers’. That is the scandal. It is not possible to criticise, that is falsify or verify without access to the data used. Also CRU was trying to silence journals that did criticise.

I agree Newton was wrong to hide his theory. He thought it was his own private gift from God. However he was not hiding data.
Darwin hid his theory until he had enough data to support it, and needed it as the church was still strong then.

The data supporting a theory should be released for other scientists to either falsify or verify. That is how science works.

The theory of AGW isn’t based on this particular piece of research. There is a very wide body of work, much of it based on data which is publicly available. And the basic physics behind the theory of course.

I’m not sure what people think that CRU were trying to hide by not releasing their raw data. It was well known that the data showed a reduction in warming in recent years – they published a paper about it in Nature FFS. This research, and the Mcintyre/Briffa spat mentioned above is relevant to the question of whether tree-rings are a suitable proxy for measuring past changes in temperature but they have zero relevance to the question of whether AGW is genuine.

55. Adam Adams

The leaked CRU e-mails suggest that Briffa paid the Russians, who collected the Yamal tree proxy data. This was tens of thousands of dollars into a private bank account. He also invited them for holidays in UK.

Paid them for what exactly? Providing data for his research? Were they expected to provide it for nothing?

Independent scientists are supposed to be independent. They are paid by the institution they work for and publish their own papers in peer reviewed journals which are then referred to by other researchers.

Briffa’s work was peer reviewed. I’m not sure what point you are making – is it that the Russians’ data was tainted or Briffa’s use of it?

If, however, it relates to research that has yet to be published then scientists are under no more obligation to release it into the public domain than KFC is to release the recipe for its blend of herbs and spices.

Unity, are you seriously suggesting that research data from scientific institutes and organisations (most of which are funded by the taxpayer in one way or other) which is then used to influence politicians to take policy measures with wide ranging effects on society is comparable in ANY way with the commercial information relating to the recipe of a fried chicken coating? If you really do believe that then I think it’s time I ducked out of this ‘debate’ before it gets even more risible. Goodnight. And remember, try to drive 5 miles less next week and help save the world. Yeah, right!

Unity is right.

These brave scientists are on a quest to save us from ourselves.

How ridiculous to suggest that such a small thing as obeying the law should stand in their way.

I took a brief moment to wonder why exactly the world’s climate scientists would all agree to take part in a conspiracy of truly epic proportions to assist tree-hugging lefties raise taxes.

And I concluded the very idea is still barking mad.

Me, #57

There is a very wide body of work, much of it based on data which is publicly available.

For example, a considerable amount of data can be obtained from, er, the CRU website.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/

Damn those close tags!!

Excellent article Unity. In my time as a research scientist (semiconductor physics) I would have recoiled from any request to publish raw data. Part of the reason is that there was so much of it, I tested the materials by varying all the variables that I thought would affect the material and consequently there were a lot of data, most of which were of little interest. In addition, much of the raw data were affected by systemic effects, and these extra effects had to be removed before the actual trends were apparent.

are you seriously suggesting that research data from scientific institutes and organisations…

No, I’m using an analogy to make a point about the difference between data relating to published and unpublished research.

the concept of peer review is interesting. Does it not tend to mean that ground-breaking ideas, or ideas that do not concur with the orthodoxy, get rejected – eg how would the modern process of peer review deal wiuth Wegener’s theory of continental drift?

an interesting sentence in the abstract of the D’Arrigo paper cited earlier…

Although limited
evidence suggests that the divergence may be anthropogenic in nature and restricted to the recent decades of the 20th century, more
research is needed to confirm these observations.

Does it not tend to mean that ground-breaking ideas, or ideas that do not concur with the orthodoxy, get rejected – eg how would the modern process of peer review deal with Wegener’s theory of continental drift?

To answer your second question first, it would cope very well with continental drift theory because it is very well supported by evidence. In fact we can go further and, based on the evidence, we can say that continental drift is a fact.

As for your first question, peer review does not mitigate against ground-breaking ideas.

You have to understand that its a two stage process.

The first stage occurs before publication, during which papers are submitted for review by other scientists who check for obvious problems with the research, i.e. seriously flawed methodology, failure to address confounding factors, spurious claims, especially those which lack plausible scientific foundations, and a failure to provide sufficient information to allow for independent replication, etc.

Even if a paper has flaws, that doesn’t mean it will be rejected, as long as the author has, or is willing to acknowledge its limitations – the purpose of pre-publication review is to ensure that the paper is fit for publication.

Stage 2 happens after publication, at which point the research is opened up to criticism by other scientists, especially by those attempting to replicate and verify the paper’s findings and/or build on them. Stage 2 is by far the more important in the long run as its only if other scientists can independently replicate your findings that your work will be fully accepted.

To have an unorthodox piece of work blocked at stage 1 takes a fair bit of doing – you really have to screw up the write-up or be off with the fairies to get a paper rejected by every academic publisher at the review stage.What can happen is that unorthodox ideas can be ignored and attract little interest from other scientist but what tend to happen more often that not is the opposite – if something comes in from left-field that changes currently accepted ideas it will tend to draw a lot of scrutiny from other scientists who try to test the idea to destruction.

Ideas that survive that tend to have proved their worth – at least until something better comes along, and may well become the new ‘orthodoxy’.

Although limited evidence suggests that the divergence may be anthropogenic in nature and restricted to the recent decades of the 20th century, more
research is needed to confirm these observations.

Not an uncommon statement to find in papers dealing with a relatively new area of science.

The issue here is that researching the divergence problem and its causes is relatively straightforward in terms of it being a recent phenomenon – there’s plenty of usable data to work with stretching back to the 60′s and 70′s it just needs to be properly pieced together.

Before that, things become rather more difficult because the amount of relevant and, especially, reliable data decreases sharply as you move backwards in time, much as is the case with other key areas in climate modelling. Extrapolating backwards into periods where little or no concrete evidence was recorded is difficult, complex and fraught with problems.

Unity: “As I write this, a coalition of the misguided, misinformed and, well, just plain old wackaloons, are heatedly pouring over the contents of the CRU’s mail server for any traces of ’something dodgy’ in a vain attempt to debunk anthropogenic global warming theory once and for all. It’s like watching a road traffic accident unfold in front of you in slow motion.”

Not all those pouring over it are “wackaloons”. To lump everyone together makes you look like some carpet munching apostle of the AGW Religion, as does your use of the term “denier”. Some people have just not swallowed it hook line and sinker. A denier that does not make.

If there is a slo mo RTA in progress here, it is likely to be watching Scientists, their reputations and theories disintegrate.

Nigel Lawson is right when he says in today’s Times:

Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6927598.ece

NB it is not just data related to unpublished research which has been withheld, as you well know

While someone has written a very balanced response on Climate Audit

http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/curry-on-the-credibility-of-climate-research/#more-26

“But the broader issue is the need to increase the public credibility of climate science. This requires publicly available data and metadata, a rigorous peer review process, and responding to arguments raised by skeptics. The integrity of individual scientists that are in positions of responsibility (e.g. administrators at major research institutions, editorial boards, major committees, and assessments) is particularly important for the public credibility of climate science. The need for public credibility and transparency has dramatically increased in recent years as the policy relevance of climate research has increased. The climate research enterprise has not yet adapted to this need, and our institutions need to strategize to respond to this need.”

This seems to me to be the correct response.

Not all those pouring over it are “wackaloons”.

You do realise that when someone says “A coalition of W, X, Y and Z…” they don’t mean everyone is part of group Z, right? So in the very paragraph you quoted it is quite plain that Unity is not “lumping everyone together”.

And it is “poring”, not “pouring”.

I’d like to know if everyone shouting “release the data, it’s our data, we paid for it” would be so keen if the data pertained to, say, a new type of aircraft wing. Or some new-and-efficient nuclear fuel reprocessing cycle.

Why no, they’d be calling this hack ‘espionage’.

76

I was just going to link that myself. Transparency, as usual, is the answer and Dr Curry is right.

@77 frolix22

I was being brief, as Unity is suggesting that C = [W, X, Y, Z] where W, X, Y and Z are all pejorative and ignoring/denying the fact that A, B and C are also looking at the data. Unity is, in other words, lumping all those looking at the data as “wrong” and to say, in a way, “Move along, nothing to see here…”. Had it been prefixed with “amongst those looking at the data are…” then that would be entirely a different matter. It wasn’t.

p.s. maybe it should have put “(sic)” next to “pouring”, ok? Pedantic enough now?

Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

(a) – There is no evidence of this.
(b) – Some raw data ha not been released due to proprietary issues. Other raw data is publicly available.
(c) – Possibly
(d) – They were concerned at the quality of the papers that one particular publication was accepting and that the editor was accepting material for reasons other than the quality of the scientific content. This, if true, is a valid concern as it undermines the peer-review process. Given that one paticular paper was so badly flawed that six members of the editorial board resigned in protest at the decision to publish it it would seem their concerns were reasonable.

What I don’t understand is this:

In one scenario, the data is released and the ‘skeptics’ (lumping together those who have genuine questions about the reliability of the data and those who are intent on finding fault even where none exists) will do their best to question it. Some of the questions raised will be mad, some will be bad, but it’s hard to believe that any of them will be dangerous. And some of the ‘genuine’ skeptics may succeed in finding real flaws in how the data was gathered or processed, the result of which will be better science. If the facts point to catastrophic AGW, anything that moves us closer to the ‘true’ facts has to be a good thing.

In the second scenario, the data is withheld. The genuine questioners can’t ask their questions and may well be frustrated (and problems with the data may go undiscovered). The anti-AGW ideologues, on the other hand, do not have their case harmed at all. They gain as much – in face, probably more – credibility from the withholding of the data than they would do from the ability to scrutinise it. The only people benefiting from the withholding of this data, so far as I can see, is the conspiracy theory crowd who can now claim (with a rare, for them, legitimacy) that they’re not being allowed to see something important.

This causes a problem for people like me. I’m a natural skeptic about pretty much everything, and when looking at something I don’t understand (like climate models) I can only employ some basic heuristics. One is to trust the prevailing expert consensus; another is to trust those who seem most open and confident about their position. Regrettably, this situation puts those two at odds. I can see why CRU might not like the attentions of McIntyre and co., but they seem to have lost sight of the larger audience. The rest of us out here aren’t exactly pre-disposed to like McIntyre or his arguments, but as long as he can credibly claim to have been denied the opportunity to scrutinise the data, he gains credibility in the eyes of those who evaluate the situation on the basis of the behaviour of the two sides.

As far as I’m aware, climate science is a difficult business. It falls into the category of ‘complex systems’ which, like economics or some forms of medial science, is still quite poorly understood. Even the best scientists, the leading lights in their field, are going to be wrong about a lot of things. That doesn’t mean that their general prognosis is wrong (Newton was ‘wrong’ but his predictions were accurate enough), but it does mean that on many small points of detail their conclusions will probably not hold forever. In 30 years out climate models will be dramatically more sophisticated than they are now. The process by which we get from here to there will be one that involves the work of many scientists being overthrown by others. This belief gives me a strong bias against those who want to keep things secret or to protect certain positions against criticism. I’m sorry, because I am sure that much of the criticism will be unreasonable, wrong and silly, but I’m afraid that that’s life. I’d rather allow a hundred crackpots to look at the data if it means that one insightful person can take that same data and prove something useful with it.

@80

So I take it that when you responded to ‘As I write this, a coalition of the misguided, misinformed and, well, just plain old wackaloons, are heatedly pouring (sic) over the contents of the CRU’s mail server’, with ‘Not all those pouring (sic) over it are “wackaloons”, you meant to say that not all of those doing the poring were a member of at least one of the three groups mentioned by Unity.

However, taking into account that Unity’s sentence also related to the specific motivations of people doing said poring, namely looking “for any traces of ’something dodgy’ in a vain attempt to debunk anthropogenic global warming theory once and for all”, I would say that Unity was broadly correct. People poring over the contents for that reason really are either “misguided”, “misinformed” or “wackaloons”. Actually, considering the amount of effort which no doubt has to be put into sifting through all the contents I would say that quite a lot of people doing the poring do fall into the third category.

@70. diogenes1960

the concept of peer review is interesting. Does it not tend to mean that ground-breaking ideas, or ideas that do not concur with the orthodoxy, get rejected

Not at all. In fact one Nobel Prize in the area where I worked (semiconductor physics) was awarded to someone who did not have a clue about the results he had generated. The individual (a rather arrogant German, who I had the displeasure of working for, for a while) was measuring a new material and generated some strange results. He wrote it up as a letter (ie a short, inconclusive paper) to a peer-reviewed journal. The reviewer, who was a competitor in the field, immediately recognised the results because it was exactly what he had predicted and was looking for. The reviewer, unfortunately, did not have samples as high quality as the German’s and so had been unable to see the effect. To his utmost credit, the reviewer returned the paper to the German with references to some theory papers on the phenomenon. The German re-wrote the paper (but did not include the reviewer who had pushed him in the right direction) and a few years later the German got the Nobel prize for the work in that paper. The reviewer didn’t get the Nobel prize, of course, but he did do the right thing.

One thing that I find with non-scientists is that they just don’t understand how scientists think. Non-scientists tend to think in terms of polemic competition – they think scientists are fighting each other. That is far from the truth. Scientists put their effort into scientific discovery. There is some competition about who will publish first, but by and large the process is positive, not negative. People who produce contrary theories still get published, but if the evidence cannot be found to reinforce their theory, their theory will still remain in the literature, but it won’t be treated as mainstream. I remember once making a minor experimental discovery in my work, and the theorists I worked with did not know how to explain it, but after a search in the literature a member of the team found an obscure paper from 20 years before in a German journal that predicted this effect quite accurately. This was the first time in 20 years that someone was able to provide results that proved that theory.

The article at Climate Audit is well reasoned, however I’d steer clear of citing Nigel Lawson as an authority here – what he actually understands, when it comes to science, would fit on the back of a postage with plenty of space for one his daughter’s recipes.

Roger:

I’m afraid much of the current traffic on the CRU emails is very much of the wackaloon variety, hence the abject failure to understand the implications of Tim Osborn’s email.

The anti-AGW crowd are barking at the wrong end of the ‘hockey stick’ and complaining, absurdly, about scientists substituting data for the recent post-1960 period derived from dendroclimatological modelling with REAL data from actual weather stations.

If there are problems with the dendro-models, which is possible if not likely due to it being a very new branch of science, they lie in the data that pre-dates 1960.

Beyond that point, as Osborn freely admits in the email, the dendro-data is useless because its confounded by factors unrelated to temperature.

Understand that, and that the current obsession with the Osborn email stems from the mistaken belief that the post-1960 data shows a real cooling trend, which it doesn’t, and you understand why I described this as an RTA in slow-motion.

By obsessing over that issue, many of those commenting on that email are proving only that they haven’t got the foggiest idea what they’re gibbering on about.

@72. Unity

I have to add another stage, Stage 0. The editor of the journal has to select reviewer(s) who are knowledgeable about the subject. This is not a trivial process, and clearly if the work is contentious the editor must choose reviewers that can give an unbiased yet critical review. The reputation of the journal rests on its ability to find suitable reviewers. If a journal only chooses reviewers with a particular opinion (diogenes1960′s query) then its reputation will be that it is biased.

I have had many discussions about the peer review process with the advocates of “Intelligent Design” who contend that the peer review has an inbuilt bias against their belief^H^H^H^H^H^H theory. It is interesting that climate change deniers present the same arguments against the peer review process as the ID proponents.

A recent survey shows many of the populace are not convinced by AGW, I have a degree in mathematics and physics (more than 50 yrs old now), so I think I can understand the evidence, but I am not 100% convinced. There needs to be a honest selling job by scientists and politicians if people are to be convinced, and people are not stupid nor do they like to be taken for granted. This is especially true if major changes in lifestyle are to be expected of them. Just to take one example: recent remarks by Professor Stern about animal produced greenhouse gases and the desirability of a more vegetarian diet, produced universal derision amongst my friends and acquaintances.
A selling job should give convincing answers to the following:
(1) What is the staistical evidence for climate change and how robust is it? No talk about computer models please.
(2) What evidence is there for the relative contributions, to climate change, of greenhouse gases, solar activity, volcano activity, and other sources of warming eg. changes in oceanic temperature and activity?
(3) What evidence is there for an anthropogenic cause for the greenhouse gases proportion of CC? I think the actual theory is quite easy to understand; a problem arises because of the relative smallness of greenhouse gases in the total volume of the atmosphere – yet these are correlated with largish temperature changes.
(4) What are honest assessments of the likely outcomes of CC (the hazards), and what are the best estimates of the probabilities of these outcomes (the risks)?
(5) For each of the hazards, will they be beneficial, neutral, inconvenient, or dangerous?
(6) For each hazard is it best to ignore it, try to mitigate its effect, or try to prevent it?
(7) What are the cost profiles of doing, and not doing, each of the policies in (6)?

@75. cjcjc

Nigel Lawson is right when he says in today’s Times:

No he is very wrong.

(a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

(a) No they haven’t. Raw data usually has systematic errors, these have to be removed. If Lawson says that this is manipulating data then he just does not under stand the scientific process.
(b) Of course outsiders are refused access to raw data. Raw data really is of no interest to anyone else: usually there are large amounts and only the people who gather the data know how the measurements were taken and hence what must be done to remove systematic errors. Documenting all of this is precisely what they do when they publish their npapers.
(c) What the fuck has FoI got to do with science? Science is open anyway: scientists’ raison’d'etre is to publish their work. FoI requests just get in the way of them doing science.

Idiot troll “Nigel Lawson is right when he says in today’s Times:”

If the flat earth trolls are having to use Nigel Lawson as their great guide they really are fucked.

Lawson has no credibility on anything except wiping his own arse. And I would not put it past him to mess that up.

Yosemite Sam #86 – your questions have all been answered many times over the years in various ways and locations. Nevertheless I shall look at ones which I can recall the answers to quickly.
To begin with –
point 2 – volcanic contributions of greenhouse gases are hundreds or thousands of times less than human:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/co2-and-the-volcanoes/
http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/climate_effects.html
and thus of no account, no matter what PLimer and his ilk tell you. (You’ll note they give no figures and no references)

On solar activity and its relations (negligible for the warming of the last 30 years or so):

http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm

Your point one makes no sense to me, because what else is stats except a method of modelling using numerical data? What statistics would you want anyway?

The point about total volume of CO2 in the atmosphere is a classic lie. Would you feel happy in a room wiht 1ppm of Cl2? Yet people complain that an extra 100ppm of CO2 is nothing. It is all explained in the latest IPCC report which can be found here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assessment_report_wg1_report_the_physical_science_basis.htm

The anthropogenic cause is knowne because of isotope ratios of C12 and C13 and C14. Moreover there are also feedback mechanism which increase the warming beyond that expected simply due to Co2.

Your points 5 and 6 are what we would like the govnerment, scientists and others to be getting on with, but people who think AGW isn’t real keep getting in the way and preventing action.
AS for point 7, I believe the Stern report looked at that, and the short answer is do something or we’re all fucked.

Hey, I wonder if NIgel LAwson likes being sued for libel?

Oh the CRU and/or Jones won’t sue.
There’s a little process involved called “discovery” which means that everything will have to be released.
I don’t think they’ll want that.

Or perhaps they might sue the person who wrote this:

“There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.”

No, not Lawson….George Monbiot!!

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/11/23/the-knights-carbonic/

Oh dear, I do seem to have exasperated guthrie at #90. However, I will not engage in further discussion – as one who has a genuine desire to try find his way through this shouting match between zealots and deniers, I am sad that it does not seem possible to find that way. I will not add to the hullabaloo. I’m sorry if I spoilt your bedtime guthrie.

What the? I post a reasonable resume of some fo the resonable information available on the web and Yosemite Sam runs away from it claiming he has exasperated me? Thats not a very sensible response. Why not just read the information I gave you and come back in a few months and we’ll see if it makes any more sense to you then? Thats my challenge to you – if you are a genuine sceptic interested in the science, you’ll be able to work your way down the questions you have, looking at both denialist websites and real stuff like the IPCC and Real climate, and work out which is correct. (hint – its not hte denialists) But this takes time and effort, so see you in a few months?

As for Monbiot, I expect him to apologies some other time for it, because oddly enough he gets things wrong like all the other journo’s do.

This is the weirdest of the Jones quotes.

“If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.”

There’s clearly something wrong there, aside from the possibly illegal acts.

“There’s clearly something wrong there”

Ego, innit?

Hardly unusual, as you must know from hanging around here.

http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepagenews/CRUupdate

See also http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/rupert-read/real-scandal-in-hacked-climate-change-e-mails-controversy