Marc Morano, probably first up against the wall, had this post a while back with a number of public threats, from TPM, Joe Romm, Joe Kennedy, Grist Magazine, David Suzuki, and James Hansen, among others.

The Bishop Hill Blog has a summary of a lot of the more interesting emails.

A search engine of the content is here.

John Hinderaker here.

I thought this was one of the more interesting quotes unearthed so far from the Hadley CRU emails:

“When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA [Climate Audit] was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals.”

I am not familiar with the ins and outs of the British FOI request process, but in the US such requests must be honored based on the content of the information requested, and NOT based on the views of the requester or the intended us of the information.  Basically, what the FOI officer has determined here is that this was a perfectly legitimate request that had to be honored UNTIL it was learned that it came from a person or group who disagreed with the center’s scientific conclusions and wished to use the data to try to replicate and/or criticize their work — then it could be ignored.   In the US, this would be a gross violation of  FOIA rules.  I am willing to be that it is not too kosher under British law either.

From PHD Comics via Flowing Data, check out the lower left.

An interesting development you have probably seen at other climate sites already (I am pretty conservative about posting this stuff), apparently someone may have hacked the servers at the Hadley Center Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the UK and copied a bunch of data and emails and dropped it into the public realm (via links in a number of site’s comment sections).  I downloaded the file but have not checked it out.  It is unclear if this is real or a skeptic spoof or even an alarmist-set trap, though initial reactions from the Hadley Center CRU seem to point to it being real.  The ethics of the folks who grabbed this material are also seriously in question, though if it turns out to be real I have no problem using the material as it is public / government material that should have been in the public domain anyway (which is why I use the Pentagon Papers analogy).

Andrew Bolt has some background and excerpts from the material.  The very first email he has from Phil Jones seems to confirm my suspicions about splicing thermometer data onto proxy series I expressed here.   (Update:  much more from Steve McIntyre here).

A lot of the stuff in Bolt’s post is really stuff we in the skeptic community already know.  RealClimate ruthlessly purges comments of any dissenting or critical voices?  Who’d have thunk it.

I got an email today in response to this post that allows me to cover some ground I wanted to cover.  A number of commenters are citing this paragraph from Tedesco and Monaghan as evidence that I and others are somehow mischaracterizing the results of the study:

“Negative melting anomalies observed in recent years do not contradict recently published results on surface temperature trends over Antarctica [e.g., Steig et al., 2009]. The time period used for those studies extends back to the 1950’s, well beyond 1980, and the largest temperature increases are found during winter and spring rather than summer, and are generally limited to West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula. Summer SAM trends have increased since the 1970s [Marshall, 2003], suppressing warming over much of Antarctica during the satellite melt record [Turner et al., 2005]. Moreover, melting and surface temperature are not necessarily linearly related because the entire surface energy balance must be considered [Liston and Winther, 2005; Torinesi et al., 2003].”

First, the point of the original post was not about somehow falsifying global warming, but about the asymmetry in press coverage to emerging data.  It is in fact staggeringly unlikely that I would use claims of increasing ice buildup in Antarctica as “proof” that anthropogenic global warming theory as outlined, say, by the fourth IPCC report, is falsified.  This is because the models in the fourth IPCC report actually predict increasing snowmass in Antarctica under global warming.

Of course, the study was not exactly increasing ice mass, but decreasing ice melting rates, which should be more correlated with temperatures.  Which brings us to the quote above.
I see a lot of studies in climate that seem to have results that falsify some portion of AGW theory but which throw in acknowledgments of the truth and beauty of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory in the final paragraphs that almost contradict their study results, much like natural philosophers in past centuries would put in boiler plate in their writing to protect them from the ire of the Catholic Church.   One way to interpret this statement is “I know you are not going to like these findings but I am still loyal to the Cause so please don’t revoke by AGW decoder ring.”

This particular statement by the authors is hilarious in one way.  Their stated defense is that Steig’s period was longer and thus not comparable.  The don’t outright say it, but they kind of beat around the bush at it, that the real issue is not the study length, but that most of the warming in Steig’s 50-year period was actually in the first 20 years.  This is in fact something we skeptics have been saying since Steig was released, but was not forthrightly acknowledged in Steig.   Here is some work that has been done to deconstruct the numbers in Steig.  Don’t worry about the cases with different numbers of “PCs”, these are just sensitivities with different geographic regionalizations.  Basically, under any set of replication approaches to Steig, all the warming is in the first 2 decades.

Now, knowing this, here is Steig’s synopsis:

Assessments of Antarctic temperature change have emphasized the contrast between strong warming of the Antarctic Peninsula and slight cooling of the Antarctic continental interior in recent decades¹. This pattern of temperature change has been attributed to the increased strength of the circumpolar westerlies, largely in response to changes in stratospheric ozone². This picture, however, is substantially incomplete owing to the sparseness and short duration of the observations. Here we show that significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1 °C per decade over the past 50 years, and is strongest in winter and spring. Although this is partly offset by autumn cooling in East Antarctica, the continent-wide average near-surface temperature trend is positive. Simulations using a general circulation model reproduce the essential features of the spatial pattern and the long-term trend, and we suggest that neither can be attributed directly to increases in the strength of the westerlies. Instead, regional changes in atmospheric circulation and associated changes in sea surface temperature and sea ice are required to explain the enhanced warming in West Antarctica.

Wow – don’t see much acknowledgment that all the warming trend was before 1980.   They find the space to recognize seasonal differences but not the fact that all the warming they found was in the first 40% of their study period?   (And all of the above is not even to get into the huge flaws in the Steig methodology, which purports to deemphasize the Antarctic Peninsula but still does not)

This is where the semantic games of trying to keep the science consistent with a political position get to be a problem.  If Steig et al had just said “Antarctica warmed from 1957 to 1979 and then has cooled since,” which is what their data showed, then the authors of this new study would not have been in a quandary.  In that alternate universe, of course decreased ice melt since 1980 makes sense, because Steig said it was cooler.  But because the illusion must be maintained that Steig showed a warming trend that continues to this date, these guys must deal with the fact that their study agrees with the data in Steig, but not the public conclusions drawn from Steig.  And thus they have to jump through some semantic hoops.

Via Radley Balko:

The phrase shaken baby syndrome entered the pop culture lexicon in 1997, when British au pair Louise Woodward was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Massachusetts infant Matthew Eappen. At the time, the medical community almost universally agreed on the symptoms of SBS. But starting around 1999, a fringe group of SBS skeptics began growing into a powerful reform movement. The Woodward case brought additional attention to the issue, inviting new research into the legitimacy of SBS. Today, as reflected in the Edmunds case, there are significant doubts about both the diagnosis of SBS and how it’s being used in court.

In a compelling article published this month in the Washington University Law Review, DePaul University law professor Deborah Teurkheimer argues that the medical research has now shifted to the point where U.S. courts must conduct a major review of most SBS cases from the last 20 years. The problem, Teurkheimer explains, is that the presence of three symptoms in an infant victim—bleeding at the back of the eye, bleeding in the protective area of the brain, and brain swelling—have led doctors and child protective workers to immediately reach a conclusion of SBS. These symptoms have long been considered pathognomic, or exclusive, to SBS. As this line of thinking goes, if those three symptoms are present in the autopsy, then the child could only have been shaken to death.

Moreover, an SBS medical diagnosis has typically served as a legal diagnosis as well. Medical consensus previously held that these symptoms present immediately in the victim. Therefore, a diagnosis of SBS established cause of death (shaking), the identity of the killer (the person who was with the child when it died), and even the intent of the accused (the vigorous nature of the shaking established mens rea). Medical opinion was so uniform that the accused, like Edmunds, often didn’t bother questioning the science. Instead, they’d often try to establish the possibility that someone else shook the child.

But now the consensus has shifted. Where the near-unanimous opinion once held that the SBS triad of symptoms could only result from a shaking with the force equivalent of a fall from a three-story to four-story window, or a car moving at 25 mph to 40 mph (depending on the source), research completed in 2003 using lifelike infant dolls suggested that vigorous human shaking produces bleeding similar to that of only a 2-foot to 3-foot fall. Furthermore, the shaking experiments failed to produce symptoms with the severity of those typically seen in SBS deaths….
“When I put all of this together, I said, my God, this is a sham,” Uscinski told Discover. “Somebody made a mistake right at the very beginning, and look at what’s come out of it.”

Before I am purposefully misunderstood, I am not committing the logical fallacy that an incorrect consensus in issue A means the consensus on issue B is incorrect.  The message instead is simple:  beware scientific “consensus,” particularly when that consensus is only a decade or two old.

I am late on this, so you probably have seen it, but the EPA was apparently working hard to make sure that the settled science remained settled, but shutting up anyone who dissented from its conclusions.

From Odd Citizen.  More at Watts Up With That.

Though less subtle than I would have expected, this should come as no surprise to readers of my series on the recent government climate report.  All even-handed discussion or inclusion of data that might muddy the core message have been purged from a document that is far more like an advocacy group press release than a scientific document.

Update: More here.

Update #2: I understand those who are skeptical of this, and feel this may have been some kind of entirely justified rebuff.  I have folks all the time sending me emails begging me to post their articles as guest authors on this blog and I say no to them all, and there is no scandal to that.  Thomas Fuller, and environmental writer for the San Francisco Examiner, was skeptical at first as well.  His story here.

For some months now, I have struggled with this site.

In the political and economics arena, there never seems to be any shortage of stuff to write about.  That is in large part because when I and others take a position, folks who disagree will respond, and interesting discussions rage back and forth between blogs.

For some years on this site, I have endeavored as a layman to help other laymen understand the key issues in the science.  When I first started, I had assumed my role would be pure journalism, simplifying complex arguments for a wider audience.  But I soon found that my background in modelling dynamic systems (both physical and social) allowed me to spot holes in the science on my own as well.

But of late I began to run down.  Unlike in the political / economic world, there is little cross-talk between blogs on different sides of issues.  I could flood the site with stupid media misinterpretations of the site, but it is not what I am trying to do here and besides Tom Nelson has that pretty well covered.

As in the political world, I try to read blogs on all sides of the debate, but in the climate world there was far less interaction.  There is only so long I can go on repeating the same arguments in different ways.  The problem is not that these arguments and holes in the science get quickly dispatched on other sites, it is that they get ignored.  Both sides are guilty of this, but alarmists in particular thrive on knocking down straw men and refusing to address head on the best skeptics’ arguments  (which is not to say that certain skeptic sites don’t have the same problem).

But the new Global Climate Change Impacts Report (pdf) released yesterday has re-energized me.  This document represents such an embarrassment that it simply begs to be critiqued in depth.  So over the coming weeks I will work through the report, in semi-random order, picking out particularly egregious omissions and inaccuracies.

I thought this post by Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit was pretty amazing, even by the standards of climate science.

We begin with a felt need by fear mongers to link CO2 and global warming to bad stuff, in this case a decline of growth or calcification rates on the Great Barrier Reef.  So, abracadabra, some scientist-paladins generate this, which is eaten up by the media:

Wow, that looks bad.  And if we stop there, we can write a really nice front-page article full of doom and gloom.  Or we can do some actual science.  First, lets pull back and look at a longer trend:

Hmmm.   That looks kind of different.  Like the recent decline is by no means unprecedented, and that in fact one might call the 1850-1950 levels, rather than the recent drop, the anomaly.  This latter is a tough question, of course, in all of climate science.  Just what is normal?

Anyway, we can go further.  McIntyre notices the plot looks awfully smooth.  What if we were to move out of USA Today mode and look at the raw data rather than a pleasantly smooth graph.  This is what we would see:

Wow, that looks really different.  That must be some amazing smoothing algorithm they used.  Because what I see is a generally increasing trend in reef growth, with a single low number in 2005.  Rather than being some change in slope in the whole trend, as portrayed in the smoothing, this is a single one-year low data point.  (It turns out there are several smoothing approaches one can take that put inordinate value on the end point — this was a trick first found in Mann’s hockey stick trying to make hay of the 1998 high temperature anomaly).

I think just looking at the raw data would cause any reasonable person to shake their head and determine that the author’s were grossly disingenuous in their smoothing and conclusions.  But, as they say on TV, “Wait, there’s more.”

Because it turns out the 2005 drop seems to be less a function of any real drop but in fact due to serious gaps in the data set.  The black line is a close-up of the raw growth data, while the pink area is the size of the measurement data set used, with its scale on the right.

Just by the strangest of coincidences, the large drop in 2005 occurs at the same time the number of data points in the data set drops down to 2!  While most of the data has been driven by measurement of 40 or more reefs, the key two years that drive the entire conclusion come from just 2 reefs?  This is the worst possible science.  Most real scientists would have dropped out the last several years and probably would have dropped all the data since about 1990.   Or else go out and get themselves some more freaking data.   It is easily possible, in fact quite likely, that the 2005 drop was due to mix, as high growth measurement site were dropped out of the data set, leaving only lower growth sites in the average.  These changes in mix say absolutely nothing about underlying growth rates.

I am just visually integrating the pink curve, but its reasonable to guess that there are about 600 measurements in the post 1980 period when the averaged trend in the first chart above turns down.  Somehow these guys have come up with a methodology that allows 4-5 measurements in 2004-5 to grossly outweigh the other 600 and pull the whole curve down.  Unless there is something I do not understand, this borders on outright fraud.  This can’t be accidental – the authors simply had to understand the game they were playing here.

Update: Here is another interesting one — An apparent increase spike in ocean heat content:

Just coincidentally turns out to exactly coincide with a change in the source for the data.  The jump occurs exactly at the splice between two data sets.  And everyone just blithely accepts this jump as a physical fact??

This is particularly hard to accept, as the ARGO data set (the newer data) has shown flat to declining ocean heat content since the day it was turned on.  So what is the justification for the spike at the splice?

I try really, really hard not to get pulled into the ad hominem attacks that fly around the climate debate.  So the following is just for fun on a Friday, and is not in any way meant to be a real climate argument.  However, since so many alarmists like to attack skeptics as being anti-science, I thought I would have a bit of fun.

This diagram was spurred by this post from Reason’s Radley Balko:

The Science Blogs are having fun with the “wellness editor” at the Huffington Post, a woman who claims to have a “doctorate in homeopathic medicine.” An odd choice for a lefty website that makes such hay of the right’s hostility to science. I like this comment: “…a doctorate in homeopathic medicine would be a blank piece of paper soaked in a 1:10,000,000 tincture made from the ink of an actual doctor’s diploma.”

Just to head off the obvious, I have no doubt a similar Venn diagram could be created for skeptics and people who believe the world is only 4000 years old.  Both arguments are equally meaningless when it comes down to whether the science is correct.

Any number of folks have achnowleged that, nowadays, the surest road to academic funding is to tie your pet subject in with climate change.  If, for example, you and your academic buddies want funding to study tourist resort destinations (good work if you can get it), you will have a better chance if you add climate change into the mix.

John Moore did a bit of work with the Google Scholar search engine to find out how many studies referencing, say, surfing, also referenced climate change.  It is a lot.  When you click through to the searches, you will find a number of the matches are spurious  (ie matches to random unrelated links on the same page) but the details of the studies and how climate change is sometimes force-fit is actually more illuminating than the summary numbers.