Climate Change a Hoax?

Off Topic Politics and World Issues
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Hackers broke into the servers at a prominent British climate research center and leaked years worth of e-mail messages onto the Web, including one with a mysterious reference to a plan to “hide the decline” in data about temperatures.

The Internet is abuzz about the leaked data from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (commonly called Hadley CRU), which has acknowledged the leak of 61MB of confidential data.

Climate change skeptics describe the leaked data as a “smoking gun,” evidence of collusion among climatologists and manipulation of data to support the widely held view that climate change is caused by the actions of mankind. The files were reportedly released on a Russian file-serve by an anonymous poster calling himself “FOIA.”

In an exclusive interview in Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition, Phil Jones, the head of the Hadley CRU, confirmed that the leaked data is real.

“It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago,” he told the magazine, noting that the center has yet to contact the police about the data breach.

TGIF Edition asked Jones about the controversial “hide the decline” comment from an e-mail he wrote in 1999. He told the magazine that there was no intention to mislead, but he had “no idea” what he meant by those words.

“That was an e-mail from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?” he said.

The Telegraph has posted some of the more scathing excerpts from these emails, which the newspaper suggests points to manipulation of evidence and private doubts about the reality of global warming, though the much of the scientific language in the e-mails is esoteric and hard to interpret.

Others suggest the comments are simply “scientists talking about science.” In an interview with Wired, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, points out that “if you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists.”

Still, one notable e-mail from the hacked files clearly describes how to squeeze dissenting scientists from the peer review process:

“I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial boardâ?¦What do others think?”

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interesting

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There was also a news story a week or two ago about a U.S. group or organization that had been collecting temperature data at taxpayer expense for many years that just went and erased many years of it.

There has also long been the issue that reported average temperature values from surface stations are NOT based on the same set of stations from year to year, but the set of stations has become more and more urban over time, which of course invalidates any such averages. Additionally, stations have been found in places such as rooftops right next to exhaust ducts.

Satellite measurements are so far as I know honest and undisputed, and show cooling over the last decade.

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Eventually people are going to notice that the sea didn’t rise and the world didn’t end.

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Well of course not. Obama promised specifically that now is the time the oceans will stop rising, and he has delivered.

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[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Well of course not. Obama promised specifically that now is the time the oceans will stop rising, and he has delivered.[/quote]

Haha. Priceless. Of course, every study and report you mention above is squashed by the media. Even Fox is in the can for climate change. Unfortunately, the straw man they’ve set up (the science is “settled”) is so pervasive, that you can’t even get past that to have a real debate on the real science. And a hint for our “settled science” friends: A computer model is NOT science. Computer models have INHERENT bias from their programmers. Also, a model to try and simulate somthing as complex as global weather (which we don’t even come close to really understanding) is by its very nature full of assumptions and fudge factors. And as you mentioned Bill, the data is nowhere near comprehensive or of high realiability. Add to that the natural bias of “researchers” whose budgets and paychecks depend on the concept of climate change, and you get total garbage.

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Fox seems to be getting out of the Climate Change bandwagon. Hence why this story is on there front page.

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British intellectuals tend to organize into cliques or fraternities. In those fraternities it is considered the highest social insult to question somebody else’s position, especially if that other person is an elder member of the group. They’re all intellectuals, after all, and British, so how could they be wrong? Then the focus switches to defending the position no matter what.

That’s how we got our current economic policies, from idiotic, British, aristocratic snobs who thought themselves to good to be wrong. (Damn Keynes!) I’ll bet the scientists are similar.

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He is super serial

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How can climate change be a hoax? It obviously occurs naturally. But also, are the properties, the effects, of greenhouse gasses even under dispute? They either act as a greenhouse gas, or not? Should be falsifiable, no?

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Obviously when I say Climate Change is a Hoax I am talking about man made Climate Change.

The fact is since 1998 the earth has been getting colder. And now people are exposing that the “Scientists” knew this yet continued to spew there bullshit.

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[quote]HG Thrower wrote:
Computer models have INHERENT bias from their programmers.[/quote]

Also known as GIGO, “Garbage In Garbage Out”

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[quote]John S. wrote:
Obviously when I say Climate Change is a Hoax I am talking about man made Climate Change.

The fact is since 1998 the earth has been getting colder. And now people are exposing that the “Scientists” knew this yet continued to spew there bullshit.[/quote]

I’d have to find it, but an article I read recently tells of data being shared with a few prominent Statisticians. They’re conclusion was that what describe, cooling/stagnation, is simply a short trend in an overall long term warming.

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[quote]Sloth wrote:
John S. wrote:
Obviously when I say Climate Change is a Hoax I am talking about man made Climate Change.

The fact is since 1998 the earth has been getting colder. And now people are exposing that the “Scientists” knew this yet continued to spew there bullshit.

I’d have to find it, but an article I read recently tells of data being shared with a few prominent Statisticians. They’re conclusion was that what describe, cooling/stagnation, is simply a short trend in an overall long term warming.[/quote]

I am sure they are going to come out with some more “facts” to try and back up there farce. 11 years is a little bit more then a stagnation period. Especially given the fact that they have been talking up a 100 year model.

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[quote]Sloth wrote:
How can climate change be a hoax? It obviously occurs naturally. But also, are the properties, the effects, of greenhouse gasses even under dispute? They either act as a greenhouse gas, or not? Should be falsifiable, no?[/quote]

Cause and effect is harder to establish. For example, Russian scientists have determined from ice core samples CO2 levels going back hundreds of thousands of years, and temperatures are also known (I believe this is from ratios of isotopes differing very slightly in organisms at different temperatures, but am not positive on this latter point.)

Their finding?

CO2 levels have been rising and falling in very long term patterns all this time, and the current trend is no different than has happened in the past at the end of every interglacial period.

CO2 levels rise to their peak at the end of such periods, and fall again as cold descends.

A logical reason is that water dissolves less CO2 at warmer temperatures, and can dissolve more at lower temperatures: thus, as the Earth warms, CO2 in the past rose precisely as it has done now – but without man.

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[quote]Sloth wrote:
I’d have to find it, but an article I read recently tells of data being shared with a few prominent Statisticians. They’re conclusion was that what describe, cooling/stagnation, is simply a short trend in an overall long term warming.[/quote]

I am not a statistician but certainly had to work with it, and at least three of the papers I coauthored (with me doing the hands-on work and all of the statistics) are very heavily statistical.

It is all the time a matter in science whether this dataset differs significantly from that dataset. You learn pretty fast that when there’s noise, what seems to be a slight trend can readily just be from chance.

Judging simply from eye, there is NO way that a dataset with as much noise in it as the graphs I’ve seen of temperatures over the last 100 years can be stated, to say p < 0.01, to have a rising trend that must be long-term.

It’s actually not easy to demonstrate to high significance that one fit to data – long term straight line rising trend, for example – is to very high probability the correct fit versus another fit such as a cyclical pattern with no long term trend.

Of course, that’s not remotely as good as actually analyzing it. However, until an actual article is provided, I think it’s fair for me personally to consider it much more likely that the article you mention had weasel words which leave it not really stating that there must be a long term continuing trend versus possibly only cyclical (different fits to the same data.)

This doesn’t look remotely close to me as something provable that way.

Further, in terms of actual papers (as opposed to popular press reports) I’ve never seen man-made climate change scientists arguing that this century’s temperature dataset alone proves long term trend that must continue. No, it’s their computer model that “proves” it.

There’s way too many hot years in (if I recall correctly) the 30’s and the 50’s. Or for that matter, how is that there were quite a number of very hot years in the 1800’s? Shouldn’t be possible without that man-made global warming, right?

Or how about Greenland having actually been green not that far back?

How was that, without industrial CO2?

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Hate to use huff, but it popped up near the top. It’s an AP story, really.

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They did not say what you said, that the data proves a long term continuing (or as you put it, overall) warming trend.

I never stated that the last decade proves any positive conclusion.

Where you may be interpreting statements differently than a scientist may mean them is that for example when I say something on average decreased, and nothing more than that, the meaning is that the measured values on average decreased.

There is a tendency among many scientists to imprecisely say, after determining statistically that a dataset affected by chance alone could have with sufficient frequency such as 5% yielded the same or greater change, that there was no decrease, or was no trend, rather than what they should say, that it wasn’t demonstrated as statistically significant.