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This Climate Email-Hacking Episode is Generating More Heat than Light
Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate scientists and so-called sceptics, with the hacking of email messages between some of the world's leading researchers on global temperature trends. But as usually happens in the blogosphere, this episode is generating more heat than light and is likely to lead to more public confusion over the causes of climate change.
For the past few years, a small group of climate change 'sceptics' have been poring over scientific journal papers that report historical trends in temperatures from around the world, as recorded by directly by thermometers and other instruments, and by 'proxies', such as tree rings. Their primary objective has been to seek out evidence that global warming has been invented by climate researchers who fake their data.
Among their main targets have been papers published by research teams led by Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University and Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia, and particularly those featuring the famous 'hockey stick' graph, showing that average temperature in the northern hemisphere was relatively stable and constant for most of the last couple of millennia, but rose dramatically upwards in the last 100 years. This graph appeared prominently in the landmark Third Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001, which concluded that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations".
The attacks on the hockey stick graph led the United States National Academy of Sciences to carry out an investigation, concluding in 2006 that although there had been no improper conduct by the researchers, they may have expressed higher levels of confidence in their main conclusions than was warranted by the evidence.
The 'sceptics' believe they have been vindicated and have presented the hockey stick graph as proof that global warming is not occurring. In doing so, they have ignored the academy's other conclusion that "surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence".
More importantly, these skeptics have not overturned the well-established basic physics of the greenhouse effect, namely that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and increasing its concentration in the atmosphere causes the earth to warm. They also have not managed to make melting glaciers and rising sea levels, or any other evidence of warming, disappear into thin air. But they have managed to confuse some of the public about the causes of climate change.
Over the past five years, Mann and Jones in particular have been subjected not only to legitimate scrutiny by other researchers, but also to a co-ordinated campaign of personal attacks on their reputation by 'sceptics'. If the hacked e-mails are genuine, they only show that climate researchers are human, and that they speak badly in private about 'sceptics' who accuse them of fraud.
It is inevitable as we approach the crucial meeting in conference in Copenhagen in December that the sceptics would try some stunt to try to undermine a global agreement on climate change. There is no smoking gun, but just a lot of smoke without fire.
41 Comments so far
Show AllThe climate "skeptics" would throw Galileo back in prison and announce the Earth as the center of the Universe, if they could.
Sioux Rose
CYGNUS: Along with their religious fundamentalist cousins, they'd also burn witches and won't be satisfied until the US is a Christian theocracy with their concept of a punitive, father god narrowly defining the mores we all live by. Any who don't toe those narrow mandates would be burned or exiled. And they'd call THAT a "free" society! As if authoritarianism and democracy can co-exist!
Siouxrose November 22nd, 2009 10:35 am: "As if authoritarianism and democracy can co-exist!" THAT'S where you missed it! In a Xrstian White Man's Country - they are the same...and they will kill this country and the entire planet before they let this NOT be a Xrstian White Man's Country. We have only seen the extremes. Remember all of the civilized white folk in '68-'69'-70 that said, "Law & Order" when what they really meant was "Silence the Niggers! Shut those protesters up! Put those uppity bitches back in their place!" - they have never changed and their grandchildren are bred the same...I have never forgotten - they are America. They don't believe in Democracy in any sense of political participation by the general public - HOORRRROOORRRSSS...and the idea of a child growing up to become an autonomous, self-directed human being is enough to give them the screaming hee-bee gee-bees...Absolute, Authoritarian, Male Supremacy, Gender Slavery, Constant War, and feral blood drinking oligarchy to bind the shitcake together...flat earth, fixed creation savage cannibals trapped in their food trance...
Sioux Rose
LL: Although I reserve this prescription only for the most obvious occasions: You really need to get laid, or jump into an ice cold springs!
If Galileo had been successfully silenced and the earth had stayed at the center of the universe - that is, if the so-called "Enlightenment" had been successfully squelched - we wouldn't be worried about anthropogenic climate change now.
"Enlightenment" led to "free inquiry" - inquiry without prudence or respect - which in turn led to the science that led to the technology that led to the greenhouse gas emissions.
The Church foresaw the coming disasters that would be occasioned by hubristic modern science, but could not stop it -too little, too late.
The problem with "progress" is that it isn't.
He WAS successfully silenced, the research simply moved elsewhere.
I was using Galileo as a synechdoche for the whole modern project, but in any event, we all know what he discovered, hence he wasn't effectively silenced.
Point taken.
The problem is "Books" and the loss of scriptorium. If the Pope had only put out a hit on Gutenberg and stolen all of the plans before the printing press could be built, the Bibles would still be chained to the altars and truth would be whatever the fucking priest ju-ju man said it was that day. It's their perfect world and they are working very diligently with the global oligarchy to restore that pre-literate feudalism they knew and loved.
There is a line, something like, "Call me a happy man the day the last oligarch is strangled to death with the intestines of the last priest." For "priest" you may also read: Authoritarian Principal or Neocon or Neolib or Zionist - any who are possessed by the illusion of Absolute Truth - Infinite, Timeless, and without Exception any where among the 400 billion stars in our local neighborhood or any of the 40 billion galaxies in the known universe - and all of that is less than 3% of ALL that must be in order for ALL OF THIS to do what it does...in this context the insistence on Absolute Models can only be taken as arrested infantile development.
Infants are taught Black/White truths because in a lot of cases that's what they can deal with. As a person matures, one sign of that maturity is the ability to respond in a variety of ways, not to say with nuance because they are able to discriminate finer details...more tools in the toolbox besides a hammer, so everything doesn't have to be a nail...yes? Try planing or dove tail joints or, if you're really daring, mitre joints...then you can make boxes for your Books...
Great post luckylefty,
And the greatest toolbox on Earth is the BILL OF RIGHTS of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and always has been (in our lifetimes.) What I can't get you to acknowledge is that the Founding Fathers of the USA led the world out of oppression, monopoly and Royal tyranny.
The USA is good and pure and righteous (for the common citizen) and now for the man or woman of color or of strange religion or of no religion at all.
No country on this planet has ever had such tolerance and justice and freedom and equality. It's never happened before, ever. I will admit, that it applies only to US citizens, and then under the bush killer, not even to them. But the founders DID NOT EXLUDE ANYBODY in their forming of the Declaration of Independence: ALL MEN, and then, in the era of CIVIL RIGHTS all people, including Women and Blacks and Atheists and GAYS and illegal aliens just trying to forge a new life for their families.
Damn you Sir! For painting us all with the same unfair brush.
Damn you sir!
I am an AMERICAN, and I'm proud of it. Just because we find ourselves in the jaws of despotism and banking tyranny, does not mean America is dead. We will rise up. We will rebel. We will protest and boycott and go on NATIONAL STRIKE to bring the Israeli-American International Banking Mafia to JUSTICE.
WE HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT AGAINST THE ENEMIES (ESPECIALLY DOMESTIC FEDERAL GOVERNMENT) ENEMIES AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION AND THE AMENDMENTS OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Just because hostile gangsters hijacked my government, I'm not going to stand here and just be berated by the likes of you.
When you try to portray my country as a country of Slavers and Nobleman, you misrepresent what the AMERICAN REVOLUTION was all about.
I take great offense to the mischaracterizations you are peddling.
There, I feel better.
Sorry, I'm drinking and you really looked like a nail. I loved your post here. It was your attack on the other thread against all my founders that really has me steaming.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Any one who would have a book should be willing to copy one out.
What if he wanted two?
What if he wanted 43?
Viva Gutenberg & keep the Weblights flickering, & may I be saved from all I deserve!
43 books in forty three months. Agree with you re: deserts, though ;-).
Sioux Rose
In the continuity of the life experience, whatever afterlife awaits us, those who have spent their days finding ways to mask the data that would save others' lives (not to mention sustain the ecosystems said lives depend upon) will pay a very severe price. Many of the spiritual teachers whose works were published before materialism (*a la Ronald Reagan) became the rage in all things inclusive of the publishing industry, espoused the premise that the leader SERVES his people, that each must answer to a higher authority--either serving ego and selfish needs or the greater good. This understanding has largely been lost to an era that celebrates temporal power, instant gratification, ego, and self over society.
The types of minds that work for big polluters inventing ways to muddy the public's understanding of the cause-effect relationship between their product and the evisceration of some fundament of the ecosystem, and those that use their degrees in psychology as cover for sadism as they oversee the very specific species of torture used on those unfortunates kept in secret prisons, are not unlike those intellects that center their niche of awareness upon increasingly cruel and efficient forms of modern weaponry. As Edgar Cayce, noted mystic, made clear in a wide body of spiritual works, each is eventually held to account. His admonishment was, "Choose ye which master ye shall serve." That question, hardly rhetorical, is inviolate and invokes the workings of Higher law.
Huh? Equating global warming doubt with torture and the manufacture of weapons of mass estruction?
Very nasty rhetoric wrapped in a thin veneer of self righteous new age mumbo jumbo.
More heat and smoke but no light from Sioux Rose.
Sioux Rose
DREAM(?) Joe Hill: Just because your mind is too small to wrap around the cohesive zone where seemingly differing subjects overlap hardly means that I lack Light. My point related to how language is co-opted to subsume varied phenomena and distort their intended meanings.
No sane mind is large enough to wrap around your bloated sanctimonious rhetoric.
Yes, different subjects can share common traits, but your demonization of those with whom you disagree contributes nothing to the debate.
Sioux Rose
DJH: I do not "demonize" those with whom I disagree. Just like the right wing pundits you cast upon me YOUR M.O. It is you who has sought to demonize me. If you wish to challenge the merits of an argument that is one thing, seeking to diminish the integrity of my intellect is quite another. There are a few in this forum who I recognize as surpassing me in certain areas of knowledge. I respect them and seek to learn from them. There are only a handful that can debate me in MY area of expertise, and that is quite a different thing from someone with NO knowledge of this arena merely throwing fiery barbs and then seeking to castigate me for on occasion reacting to the burns they've sent my way.
Siouxrose, I for one would NEVER demonize you. But I'll challenge 30 cent metaphysics every day of the weak...."...each is eventually held to account.." Question: By whom? To what effect? According to what body of evidence? We successfully perpetrated deliberate genocide for over 150 years and reaped nothing but profit and wealth from the effort. Two hundred years of forced human slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow and now 45+ years of targeted incarceration (still for profit) of the Black and Brown populations - nothing but profits at every stage. Don't look for Justice here. And if the ever echoing words of Hermes Trismegistus should ever come to mind, "As above, so below," you might take a different slant on all that is around you. Your "Afterlife" may be worse than this world and THAT may be the reason people reincarnate - to escape into the forgetfulness of conscious life - before they return again to the Chaos Hell in Death that spawns all life, such as we are.
Cayce was a nice man and appears to have gotten useful medical information for his customers that they could use in meaningful and effective ways in their lives. I don't really care where he got it or if he was channeling The Great Who-Who in the Sky or the Lesser Who-Who in the Tree. If a person got some good out of his advice then it was worth the price. Metaphysics however has a tendency, like organized religion, to grab for universal quantifiers when specific referential indices are all that the situation calls for.
Because I was able to "murder" two aggressive basal cell carcinoma's with a combination of murderous chaos energy (a form a chi) physically directed into the nucleus of each cell (no form holds together in the presence of Chaos energy) combined with visualization of white mucous glop enclosing every cancer cell (cells absorb through their 'skin' - block that they starve) and did them both at the same. Acts done with a sense of excitement, discovery, and play despite the fact of directing all the murderous killing rage of my life into the center of every nucleus. And no, I had no qualms about killing those cells at all - no more than I would have in killing someone attacking my child. None of this or even successes separated in time - make me the 2nd Coming or even the 3rd (though I do my best), in fact it doesn't even make me necessarily a nice person. That said, aggressive basal cells don't go away by themselves, they bloat to the limits of the available food supply - like Oligarchy.
My experience may mean that I stumbled onto something interesting that produced results from a model that runs contrary to ALL the accepted models of New Age huggery buggery and "acceptance", which inevitably get you dead sooner than otherwise.
Long since past the time when humans could rely on "otherworldly" thoughts and fantasies to solve their problems. Not when the real work of discovering what and who and how we truly can be has been abandoned for the infantile search for "Certainty". Any child with basic reading skills can be taught to read 40000 a minute. Whether that's desired is another question - but the capacities are all there. Chi', Ki, Prana et al have been pretty well demonstrated - but that does not support an entire cosmology - it simply identifies another area of human capacity - that we refuse to actively explore...
We are all of us, from the children of Darfur to the children of Hebron and Falluja to the children of Detroit and Bed Sty CAPABLE of immensities beyond our current capacity to imagine - limited only by our ability to gain exposure to the phenomenon and have time to explore. This world is DESIGNED to block, crush, thwart, and mangle all of it. And it so it will die, and with it most mammalian life - savage cannibals caught in the food trance.
Lucky, I love you. You just said what I've always wanted to say to SR. I love her posts but, It's a pain to sift through the mumbo-jumbo and mysticism to get to the jewels of wisdom contained within. We have many abilities that can and should be explored and shared as our birthright. Prana/the Force/Chi etc, is definitely real and provable. However, we don't need to create an entire pseudo-scientific/mystico-religious system around something which may prove to be as natural and normal as mitochondria creating ATP within our cells.
Personally, whether climate change (how fuggin vague can you get) is real or not, the fact is that we are the cat that's defecating on our own sleeping mat. We know that we are harming the environment, no matter if we are part of the cause of 'climate change' or not. We are poisoning our water, air, food, children and ourselves. We are destroying many species a day and have been for millenia. We don't need to debate that we are walking hard on the face of this planet. I think that we need to focus on the stuff we can fix (organic agriculture, non-toxic manufacturing and production, community redesign, local free, democratic and voluntary governing, etc.) instead of worrying about something that all of our vaunted tech cannot and probably should not fix.
If climate change is going to cause more flooding, warmer weather, etc, we're going to have to deal with it. McKibben has been casting his '350' mantra to the winds and guess what...we're over 350 right now. We might be able to change the output of CO2 somewhat and we should do what we can. However, we have many other problems to fix long before we should be stressed out about climate change.
Sioux Rose
BLACK ANARCH: It takes 12 types to make a holistic circle. If you want to focus on the cat defecating on its own sleeping mat (pragmatic orientation) that's fine with me. Some are earth signs and don't feel compelled to look up to see the stars. Excuse me while I kiss them... Hendricks understood, as do all Magi, mystics, shaman, and those born to lift the veil and help humanity to reach beyond its mortal yoke.
Sioux Rose
LUCKY: Who do our acts answer to? I think it speaks of hubris, seeing YOUR personal intellect and capacity for analysis as the be-all, end-all of all that is possible, all that is writ among the galaxies. To citizens living before Edison's time the idea that one could light up the night was preposterous. The guys at the local tavern probably thought the Wright Brothers were nuts. WE do not know all that is to be known, and the belief in KARMA is hardly "new age," pal. It is intrinsic to just about EVERY universal system that seeks to explain the great mysteries of life.
Can you explain to me the mechanics of how it is that my typing on this screen results in info you can read, and info that can be contained on a tiny piece of technology, a chip? I believe, as does author Gregg Braden, that the ENTIRE universe is sentient, owns the capacity to record data, and this gigantic mechanism records deeds in the manner the tree rings record prior weather, as do the ice crystals found in the Arctic circle.
You presume that intelligence is only a product or aptitude of the HUMAN mind. You are also so thoroughly enmeshed in rage for those injustices that I also rail against that your need to be right about all who are wrong blinds you to more universal prospects or possibilities of that which could bring about universal catharsis, a higher collective state of being, lne that is WONDER based.
I do not see aggression as an inevitable component of the human condition. It exists as a latent prospect. However, since most of our recorded history only goes back a few thousand years and war has been championed (along with patriarchal societies, a fact you are very aware of) throughout those times, aggression, competition, and the dog-eat-dog hierarchical designs of societies have taken precedence seeming to preclude all other alternatives. Indigenous living models along with those said to belong to earlier matriarchal eras suggest OTHER.
As you know, I have laid out the case in this forum that the exaltation of the military in US culture, subliminally streaming in through sports, promulgated through false religious teaching that pit sect against sect as if contests of violence prove allegiance to their god, means that for all intensive purposes Mars rules. The identification with this particular selfish, aggressive archetype is what mars our culture and leaves its blood soaked stain across the world.
Jesus had 12 disciples, Abraham founded 12 tribes, and TWELVE is the number of the basic constructs of human personality formation... there are 12 quintessential models of which Mars is only one, albeit the greatest bully of the pack, and the one who has demanded that there be no other gods but himself. The punishment involved very certain death to any who did not oblige and over the centuries, this angry-jealous-martial concept of a deity has taken hold of MANY civilizations.
I'll leave it there with the final comment that the ancient truths which have lasted for thousands of years hardly constitute what you blithely dismiss as "new age." A lot of the so-called new age books push materialism and ego through the prism of pseudo-spiritualist jargon. My studies reach far deeper into time. Astrology is an ancient metaphysical science that seeks impirical proof of its theories, and practitioners of this craft indeed have a data base that holds hundreds of years of anecdotal material. My clients are not fools, sir... they tend to be among the most educated in society. You are free to fight off what masters term enlightenment, but when the Spirit hits me, I will continue to share those insights that have illumined my understanding with receptive members of this forum.
Pieces of 8 back at ya.
The forces of global warming denial have a lot of earning potential to defend (not to mention reparations for deliberate obfuscation & degradation of the environment), so their growing desperation is not too surprising.
While American public opinion waxes and wanes, the number of Americans who acknowledge the reality of global warming has a constant floor that is significant, partially cuts across political boundaries, and most worryingly long-term for the polluters for profit, the young are overwhelmingly Green.
Thus the climate change deniers are fighting a rear-guard action in order to maximize whatever polluting they can get away with before the inevitable occurs.
Its a simple artifact of physics, easily reproducible, that if you heat up a cup of ice water the cup warms with time. Then, its stops warming, and then at some later time, it starts warming again. During the period of no warming, the ice was melting.
Earth is like a cup of ice-water, so why would we expect Earth to warm evenly in response to even heating? Shouldn't there be pauses in the warming trend, and during these pauses large-scale melting observed instead?
Has anyone here at CD heard of this as an explanation of the apparent period of no-warming that's occured in the last 10 years? Are the climate-scientists talking in this direction at all? The last 10 years have also seen a lot of observation of polar ice-shelf melting that has certainly generated bad news. Indeed, I would now put melting (and sea level rise) as a darker consequence of GW than warming.
I'm not a climatologist, but I think in this case the ice cube is called the oceans of Earth, and I believe you are on solid ground. One of the latest issues of Science has an article called something like What Happened to Global Warming, and the opinion is that short periods (10 years or so) of suspended warming are to be expected during a global warming trend. They are not to be considered strong evidence against the process. The article gave an ominous prediction: within the next 5 years, expect the warming to reconvene with a vengeance. The sad circumstance is that this period of "no show" for GW comes at a critically horrible time for climate activists and is certainly a factor driving the foolish email exchanges that were hacked.
Take a look at Figure 2 of this article:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Why-is-Greenlands-ice-loss-accelerating.html
Basically, before 2000, Greenland wasn't really losing much ice mass. However, SINCE 2000, Greenlands mass has dropped off the deep end. It's really quite a remarkable difference: pre-2000 and post-2000.
So, my original point is: if in the last decade we've seen significant ice-mass loss in places like Greenland, why would we ALSO expect global atmospheric temperatures to ALSO be going up. Personally, just knowing how ice-water heats up, I would NOT expect atmospheric temperatures to increase while large amounts of ice-melting was occuring.
You might be right ubrew12.
It's difficult to establish direct cause and effect. In Aviation and Meterology/Weather forecasting, I know that the oceans act as a heat sink and they "remember" the previous atmospheric temps. Normally the Sun and air mass temps drive extreme weather. But thunderstorms will continue to build even at night if they have hot water (or land) under them causing uplift. I've read some scientist think it takes 30 years for the Global heat sink to change. So we may hitting the 1973 Oil Embargo right now when burning slowed down...... who knows.....
But nobody can argue with glacier mass loss on Greenland. It's happening. Massive crevasses are showing up on top of the ice cap with millions of blue "mullons" lakes cascading through the sheet causing swiss cheese holes. This is not a good thing for an icecube to be doing. If it breaks up and slides into the sea we are now at a 20 foot average higher world-wide sea level.
But on the "Planet of the BushApes" everything's a hoax and since Greenland has a green name they think this is a cycle and won't affect one billion people sitting in the coastal flood zone. But even if the southern tip was green and had some human habitation in the past, that doesn't tell us what the condition of the icecap was back then. I suspect it was solid, unlike today.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Be careful not to play into the hands of the climate skeptics, with their strategy to FUD (fear/uncertainty/doubt) the science. Short-term atmospheric temperature fluctuations mean nothing. The long-term trend is everything. The skeptics are relying on us to forget about the science, and fear their mammon-drenched political prowess. But even if one isn't an expert in data analysis or physics, one can rely on the facts that the scientists are almost exclusively driven by the pursuit of the truth, while the mammon-drenched skeptics are almost exclusively driven by the pursuit of plunder/exploitation. As usual, what matters is the intent of the people behind each movement.
Sioux Rose
RTDRURY: Succinctly stated. Those who bow to the altar of mammon would prefer to sacrifice tomorrow's children then alter their behaviors (or temporal profits) today. It is a sacrifice of mythic proportions only eclipsed by the ignorance of those high-stakes gamblers who would play so fast and loose with others' lives, livelihoods, and ultimate "right to life" potentials.
If you apply heat to a stirred cup of ice water the temperature will NOT rise until ALL the ice is melted.
The Earth is larger and the stirring less efficient.
"Global Warming" is the rise in the average temperature of the Earth's surface.
All the associated effects are known as "Climate change" - the melting of the ice at the poles, ocean levels going up, rainfall patterns changing drastically (droughts, floods), storm intensity changing (e.g. stronger hurricanes).
The mention of both "climate change" and "global warming" seems to confuse the "Sceptics", as though it has to be one or the other.
The above-referenced "climate sceptics" are extremely well organized and have been focused on their mission of public perception management for a very long time.
Their "hacking" activity isn't limited to the e-mail communications of scientists who are working in the climatology field. The "sceptics" also interfere with communications between concerned citizens who are discussing the climate change issue in e-mails, on Internet discussion forums and in dedicated online groups.
As someone who has been subjected over many years to the disruptive activities of these "sceptics" I am now strongly recommending that all parties truly concerned about climate change and related issues GO AROUND these goons and KEEP ON GOING. Do not be intimidated by them and do not allow them to engage you in "debate". Their time is up.
Some of the emails do raise legitimate questions about whether the certainty with which climate change researchers announce their predictions is justified by the scientific data, and others raise a few concerns about the intellectual integrity of some of those researchers. These issues shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Of course, the "other side" is often driven to discredit climate change research for purely selfish reasons (i.e., corporate greed), but that fact alone doesn't justify blind acceptance of the claims of climate change researchers.
Personally, I suspect that climate change researches often overestimate the accuracy of their models and predictions, but on the other hand, I believe that the dangers they warn about may be real, and should be investigated and addressed.
Here are a few points of interest from the emails.
The email from Ronald M. Lanner at http://www.anelegantchaos.org/emails.php?eid=282&filename=1037241376.txt and the one from Donald Keiller at http://www.anelegantchaos.org/emails.php?page=43&pp=25 raise some questions about the methodology used by dendrochronlogists (tree ring counters).
And the email from Fred Pearce at
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/emails.php?page=1&pp=25 seems to give cause for doubt regarding climate models, while also calling into question the scientific integrity of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change). For example, the author quotes another researcher, Barnett as saying, "'the current models cannot be used in rigorous tests for anthropogenic signals in the real world'. If they are they 'might lead us to believe that an anthropogenic signal had been found when, in fact, that may not be the case.'" Mr. Pearce goes on, "Barnett knows how easily this can happen. He was a lead author for a critical chapter in the last IPCC scientific assessment ... 'We wrote a long list of caveats in that chapter,' says Barnett. 'We got a lot of static from within IPCC, from people who wanted to water down and delete some of those caveats. We had to work very hard to keep them all in.'"
You know, you can use the information gathered by torturing people also. Just, don't ask me to walk downwind of you afterward.
It honestly says so much more about you, that you would read someone else's private emails, than it does about them. Go ahead and tell me what you found out. I promise to give it all the consideration such information-gathering techniques are due.
They're hardly private now; they're all over the web.
Your reference to torture in this context is ridiculous.
I notice that you didn't bother to address the issue of the reliability of predictions of global climate change.
Exactly brew,
Despicable NeoCons raiding private mail......
But the fact that climate scientists are being challenged fiercely by peers validates the scientific process. Few government decisions (like Bagdad WMD's) have ever been receptive and considerate of serious challenge to the data like this. If history is any guide, climate scientists grossly UNDERSTATED the dangers of coal plant and tailpipe emissions considering the fact that most of the glaciers and sea ice in the world are disappearing.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Given the dearth of denier looney-toons on this thread, compared to the science blog sites that are currently in "open mic" mode, one can only conclude:
ExxonMobil must have a pavement schedule that varies by website, with CD waaaaay down on the list.
A limerick comes to mind as I read these 'denial of the deniers' posts:
If your thesis is utterly vacuous
Use first-order predicate calculus.
With sufficient formality
The sheerist banality
Will be hailed by the critics: "Miraculous!"
If your thesis is quite indefensible
Reach for semantics intensional.
Your committee will stammer
Over Montague grammer
Not admitting it's incomprehensible.
You've been exposed .... again.
Hey longshot,
Forget temperature trickery. Focus on all the fake icebergs climate scientists are making in their freezers at night and gluing together in New Zealand and Austraila to make it look like the ice caps are breaking up.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091123/ts_afp/australianzealandantarcticaclimateiceberg
Over 100 icebergs drifting to N.Zealand: official
Mon Nov 23, 2:09 am ET
SYDNEY (AFP) – More than 100, and possibly hundreds, of Antarctic icebergs are floating towards New Zealand in a rare event which has prompted a shipping warning, officials said on Monday.
An Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist said the ice chunks, spotted by satellite photography, had passed the Auckland Islands and were heading towards the main South Island, about 450 kilometres (280 miles) northeast.
Scientist Neal Young said more than 100 icebergs -- some measuring more than 200 metres (650 feet) across -- were seen in just one cluster, indicating there could be hundreds more.
He said they were the remains of a massive ice floe which split from the Antarctic as sea and air temperatures rise due to global warming.
"All of these have come from a larger one that was probably 30 square kilometres (11.6 square miles) in size when it left Antarctica," Young told AFP.
"It's done a long circuit around Antarctica and now the bigger parts of it are breaking up and producing smaller ones."
He said large numbers of icebergs had not floated this close to New Zealand since 2006, when a number came within 25 kilometres of the coastline -- the first such sighting since 1931.
"They're following the same tracks now up towards New Zealand. Whether they make it up to the South Island or not is difficult to tell," Young said.
New Zealand has already issued coastal navigation warnings for the area in the Southern Ocean where the icebergs have been seen.
"It's really just a general warning for shipping in that area to be on the alert for icebergs," said Maritime New Zealand spokesman Ross Henderson.
The icebergs are smaller remnants of the giant chunks seen off Australia's Macquarie Island this month, including one estimated at two kilometres (1.2 miles) and another twice the size of Beijing's "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium.
Young earlier told AFP he expected to see more icebergs in the area if the Earth's temperature continues to increase.
"If the current trends in global warming were to continue I would anticipate seeing more icebergs and the large ice shelves breaking up," he said.
Those sneaky, sneaky tree-huggers! Next they'll be leaving on their faucets to try to make it LOOK LIKE the ocean is rising.... but thank goodness you can come up with another neocon poem to ward them off with..... You're soooo very witty it's freaky.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Sadly, US citizens think that "scientific truth" is not worked out in prestigious referred journals but rather by watching "fair and balanced" presentations on TV--this is true even among the so called educated including many journalists. This leaves the political class with a hill too steep climb with regards to climate change where believing the deniers--who would seem to have equal scientific heft--is a no brainer vs having to make a sacrifice in hard times for an "unproven" theory.
Nice poetry but,
Oil station temp readings are just a red herring (Oil companies own many of the stations). Islanders have been evacuated off three sets of islands now because breakers are now rolling through their bedrooms in the Marshals, the Maldives and other islands. They lived there for 500 years without this happening. Obviously, you don't need a "thesis" to understand that storm tidal surge is greater than it's ever been in recorded history. Burma and Bangladesh are now periodically destroyed by storm surge. Manila was destroyed last month. Millions are still homeless. Glacier mass readings from NASA show them losing mass world-wide and the speed increasing in the Greenland giants that are galloping towards the ocean relative to their speeds just a few years ago.
Surface station readings don't tell the whole story, but since the 1800's they've clearly increased (NeoCons just cherry-pick the 1998 spike and compare it to today claiming it's a "cooling trend". NeoCon Flat Earth science is about as safe as putting their derivative certificates in your safety-deposit box and thinking you've got a sound investment.....
The truth is the legend of the "Northwest Passage" that many explorers including Captain Cook were looking for is now wide open for supertankers. It's been closed to anything but icebreakers for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Crewmembers report they saw virtually NO ice the whole way from the East coast through the middle of Canada to Alaska.
I wish I were wrong. I love twin-engine diesel boats that get half a mile to the gallon and old airplanes that burn 100 gallons a day, but I can no longer look at myself in the mirror when I behave that way for my own jollies. But we have to go further. We've got to ban the private automobile, or deal with the horror of a new wave of diseases from one billion floating bodies and sick migratory flood refugees.
Crying "hoax! hoax!" means you don't have an honest background in basic science principles. Use google earth. Look at these places like Antarctica and Greenland. You might find that they are crumbling away before your very eyes. The only "hoax" is the "we're in a cooling trend now" fallacy. I mean, I may have lost ten pounds the last ten years and I may think I'm in a weight-losing trend. But it means nothing if I'm still tipping the scale at 435 lbs! PPM of CO2 is way over 350ppm now. The temp is so high in Alaska, whole towns have sunk and had to be abandoned. But the Cooling Trend Weenies don't want you to know about that.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson