climategate

In 2009 when the ClimateGate scandal broke, we learned that climate "scientists" manipulated the peer review process to prevent publication of research they didn't like. Today we learn that, after publishing papers the went against the consensus, an entire journal has been closed down! You publish what they don't like, you get punished. Never, ever, anyone, ever again suggest that peer review is any kind of authentication for good science.

The full story is on Jo Nova's site. She writes:

When ethics is kicked out of public life, it returns in the wrong place - denying the ethical wrongness of criminality, denying that there can be expected standards of behaviour, even towards one's opponents, indeed, denying the rights of complete innocents, such as their right to privacy or protection from violence.

Fakegate

Fakegate is the name that has adhered to the latest debacle in the global warming hoax. For the brief background: In 2009 and again in 2011, two series of emails were released from the email archives of the University of East Anglia. It has never been discovered how these were obtained, but they bear all the hallmarks of a whistleblower, since they revealed a long and astonishing history of deceit, possible criminality, and dirty tricks by central figures in the "climate change" aka "global warming" movement. Hence the moniker, "Climategate".

Then, in mid-February, it suddenly appeared as if the tables were turned: an astonishing memo and other documents appearing to come from the Heartland Institute revealed that they were planning a campaign to dissuade teachers "from teaching science" and "keep opposing voices out"! At last, the warmists were vindicated: all the opprobrium they had endured in the wake of Climategates 1 and 2 was about to be repaid upon the skeptics, now exposed as anti-science and anti-free speech, amongst other things.

The only problem: it soon emerged that the memo containing the devastating statements (widely republished by the world's media, whose staff hold journalism degrees and would have been taught to check their sources) turned out to be a fake. The other genuine documents released alongside it were fraudulently obtained from Heartland by the President and co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, Dr Peter Gleick. Numerous commentators have indicated that they believe he is the most likely, or perhaps only, candidate for concocter of the fake document as well. Donna Laframboise writes:

"It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist."

Here in its entirety is Prof. Hal Lewis' public letter of resignation from the American Physical Society, from GWPF:

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence---it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

It particularly irritates me when people make strident claims and then, when the claims are found to be untrue, someone says "Oh well, maybe a few people said that, but not any of us level-headed chaps." In other words, they get the mileage from the absurd claim, but when the claim is caught out, it is downplayed and disowned.

Which brings me to this 2006 article (index.php/ archives/ 2006/ 03/ bush-on-the-debate) from realclimate dot org, the website that proclaims itself "climate science from climate scientists." The site seems to be funded out of the taxes of those of you in America, so it must be reliable (wink wink):

"...warming yes, but is it caused by humans? This position is equally out of step with science, where the debate over this question has also now been settled."

"Nature", which imagines itself to be the international weekly journal of science, published an absurd piece trying to make out that the bullies in the global warming scare movement are in fact a naive group of timid waifs being rolled over by a powerful movement that dominates the media. Try telling that to David Bellamy, one of the best and most popular media biologists, banned from TV for his disbelief in anthropogenic global warming!

There's a really good deconstruction of Nature's cowardly piece over here on Talking About the Weather, but a few additional remarks are in order. To give you the flavour of the thing, here's a sample of the Nature article:

In my last post I took apart the frivolous claim by scientists at the Hadley Centre, the University of Edinburgh, Melbourne University and Victoria University in Canada, that global warming was increasing the salinity of the oceans. They claimed, remember, that they had 'studied' 100 scientific papers:

The panel assessed more than 100 recent peer-reviewed scientific papers and found that the overwhelming majority had detected clear evidence of human influence on the climate.

Apparently they forgot to 'study' this one by NASA's Earth Observatory: 

Researchers Link Ice Age Climate Change Records to Ocean Salinity

October 4, 2006

Sudden decreases in temperature over Greenland and tropical rainfall patterns during the last Ice Age have been linked for the first time to rapid changes in the salinity of the North Atlantic Ocean, according to research published Oct. 5, 2006, in the journal Nature. The results provide further evidence that ocean circulation and chemistry respond to changes in climate.

The Australian gives us this precious piece, reprinted from The Times:

Man-made climate change evidence stronger: study

EVIDENCE that human activity is causing global warming is much stronger than previously stated and is found in all parts of the world, according to a study that attempts to refute claims from sceptics.

I'll get to the bit that shows this "study" for what it really is in just a mo', but in passing, I note that real scientific work doesn't have an agenda, it attempts to find the truth. Yes, scientists do set up "devil's advocate" experiments in which they attempt to disprove theories, but the purpose is to test the strength of the theory: if it passes, it gains credibility. Or, of course, if it fails, it is disconfirmed. But one shouldn't set up 'studies' whose goal and methodology is designed to confirm what you already claim; science is tested by passing hard tests, not by being confirmed in 'studies' designed to be helpful. Moving on...

The "fingerprints" of human influence on the climate can be detected not just in rising temperatures but in the saltiness of the oceans, rising humidity, changes in rainfall and the shrinking of Arctic Sea ice at the rate of 600,000sq km a decade.

Now let's just stop and think for a moment about this, and let's overlook the detail that Arctic sea ice has risen every year since 2007, because I just can't get my eyes off that "saltiness of the oceans" bit. For all intents and purposes the amount of water on Earth is constant. Yes, meteorites may deliver some, and some may be broken up by radiation in the atmosphere, some hydrogen atoms escape the Earth's gravity, and so on. But compared with the total quantity of water, these changes are, on the scale of hundreds or even thousands of years, minuscule. So much for two countries' erstwhile best newspapers.

I attended the Brisbane leg of Lord Monckton's Australian tour last week. The Irish Club was packed. I tried to estimate capacity and got up to around 400, but as the talk started crowds poured in and a standing crowd filled the space between the seats and the back wall. While the crowd swelled, Lord Monckton took the opportunity to introduce himself to attendees.

What's up with Google? The company motto is "Don't be evil". I would have thought that, for an information collecting and analysing company, that would include not putting your own spin on things based on your own political or other opinions. Just give all queries an un-spun answer regardless of whether people query "tiptoe tulips" or "torture babies". And yes, the latter can be asked by good people - for example those trying to document the harm done during partial birth abortions.

But Google has mistaken information collection with advocacy. See the shameless plug for Al Gore at http://www.google.com/landing/cop15. But now I am wondering whether the search results themselves are being distorted. What's going on with ClimateGate? For weeks Google has been persistently refusing to display "ClimateGate" as a suggested search term. (I notice it has turned up this morning, suspiciously late for a word with multiple millions of hits.)

But the number of hits brings us to our second problem: the disappearing Climategate links. When I first became aware of the term, I Googled it. I got around 10 million hits. Over the next few weeks the hits increased to around 40 million. Then last night, down to ten million again?

While the ideologues and ethics-free financiers gather in Copenhagen to set up an unelected socialist world government (suits the former) that runs a scam "market" in an invisible and unaccountable "product" - carbon offsets (certainly suits the latter, who will find lots of opportunities there for mtaking money -ours!), we repeatedly hear the allegation that the "deniers" (meaning the ones who say the climate always changes and always will) are well financed by "Big Coal" whilst the ones who believe in "climate change" (i.e. who assert the climate was magically constant for two thousand years) are strapped for cash and always fighting against overwhelming odds.

Yes, the odds are overwhelming in one sense, because the "deniers" - meaning the realists - have truth on their side, whilst the "good guys" - meaning the ones trying to starve the planet of CO2 plant food and thereby send a billion people into starvation - don't.

But as for money, no, sorry. "Big Coal" finances the alarmists, not the realists. Here is part of a press release from Australian "Big Coal" (The Australian Coal Association):