Watts Up With That: “They’re real and they’re spectacular!” Scroll down to find the bit torrent link to the FOIA2011.zip file, though it is not working for me right now.
Leo Hickman in the Guardian: not happy.
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There’s a bittorrent link at WUWT. Also a link to a copy of the zip at megaupload in the comments at 7:15 am.
(you need to be patient for the latter)
Normally, those are 5 very happy words. Not this time, so much.
The Bad Astronomer isn’t happy either.
Which is sad, since he claims to be a skeptic and his posts about astronomy are downright amazing, but he’s got such a huge blind spot concerning CAGW it’s scary.
Which just goes to show that it’s actually his religion, despite his claims of atheism.
Just a nit: One can be an atheist and still have AGW (or any of numerous other things) as a religion. Atheist just means denying the existence of a supreme being (e.g., the Christian God), it doesn’t mean irreligious, or even anti-religious. Buddhists, for example, are atheists.
Well in this case I’d say Gaia is his god(dess), and CAGW is his religion as a result.
This data dump won’t change anyone’s mind. I can’t imagine the level of proof necessary to change anyone’s mind. The emails could show blatant data tampering, and the %’s of Skeptics vs. True Believers would remain constant. I should be rejoicing, but I’m kinda down after reading some of these.
-Allen in Fort Worth
There is a 7zip file in that download with another 20,000 emails encrypted. Enterprising cryptanalysts are encouraged to try to crack it (+10 Internets for you if you manage to hijack a climate modeling supercomputer to do the work for you).
I understand your pessimism, but I don’t share it. It’s true that many, if not most, people don’t change their mind on an issue like this once they’ve made it up. But not all. I personally know several people who’ve changed — even reversed — their stance on AGW over the last few years.
And sometimes a seemingly small shift in the momentum of opinion, one way or another, can cascade into a wholesale shift in “consensus.”
The committed on each side will not change their allegiances, but there are a considerable number of ,”don’t knows” and “lukewarmists” who might be swayed by further evidence of sientific malpractice in support of a political objective.
scientific. Not enough coffee
My (now very committed against CAGW) mind hasn’t been changed yet, in the way it was the first time around (from being cautiously against CAGW to being very against CAGW). I’m waiting to see exactly what further skulduggery this reveals that hasn’t already been revealed. But presumably expert skeptics will now home in on (e.g.) which post-Climategate-1 defence by the CAGWers now lies in tatters on the floor.
It will all add to the sense of a bunch of either Watermelons or mediocre chancers (or both) who got lucky by providing the latest big excuse for statist ruination. And then not so lucky, when their story is blown to smithereens.
The money being poured down the toilet because of these lies will look even more ridiculous, to even more people.
The atmosphere of the emails I’ve read reminds me of the atmosphere between Marx, Engels and (I think) Marx’s publisher, when Marx had announced that he had Final Proof of the forthcoming collapse of capitalism, and that Capital would be ready Real Soon Now, with the Final Proof. In the end all he could supply was waffle. I can’t remember where I read this Marx stuff. It may have been in The Red Prussian.
Marx’s problem was that he had proclaimed a water-tight case proving catastrophe, before and instead of actually being able to provide it. The sales department got ahead of the production department. It has remained there ever since.
The defence now being offered by these people seems to be, well, we weren’t as certain in private as we might have been in public. So what? We’re scientists. What did you expect? Answer: so why the hell were you so certain in public? Answer: money. This is both intellectual and financial corruption.
The contrast between the impeccably cautious public statements made by the scientists who thought they might have evidence of faster than light travel by neutrinos (or whatever) is extreme. Their public statement: Yes, we agree, there is probably something wrong with this. But what? Our data is now all out there. Please tell us where we’ve gone wrong in our interpretation of it. What silly superficial experimental error might we have made? We have tried to think of one, but can’t. But, we are ready to admit it at once, as soon as our error is explained. Help.
That’s how you do science.
I can confirm this to be true. When I read the first set of Climate Gate e-mails my stance changed from ‘AGW is just bad science’ to ‘AGW is a fraud’. The reason for this was the sheer amount of manipulation that was going.
Ultimately, Governments started all of this to tackle various political problems (from the miners strike in 1984 to the Government funding issues of today).
That scientists have effectively collaborated in this to create the statist BigEco that we see today is almost as vile as some of the things scientists did during the 1930’s (trying to avoid a Godwin).
If this wasn’t supported by Government, people would be going to jail right now for obtaining money by deception. The fact that the scientific establishment has supported this farce, or at best turned a blind eye to it makes matters worse.
Not that i suppose anyone on this site is surprised, but the BBC’s Roger Black’s article covering this news is incredibly biased – even by Beeb standards. It reads like a Green Party press release.
Roger Black?! Richard Black.
Another theme of the CAGW team’s defence is: “Cherry picking”.
But what else is news reporting, if not cherry picking the most newsworthy items out of an enormous harvest of stuff?
Also: quotes are being quoted “out of context”. How the hell do you quote anything any other way?
What they object to is not the actual processes of cherry picking and quoting. It is who is now doing the picking of the cherries and the quoting of the quotes. Answer: all sorts of damn people.
They have lost control of the news, and they don’t like it.
To highlight how parts of the MSM operate in a different world, I read the Financial Times’s Saturday edition and there was a long item on AGW and how firms are supposedly reacting to demands to do something. It was a long news item. Not a single reference to skepticism or recent matters like this. Nothing. Zip.
Back in the early 1990s (yes, this nonsense has been going on for 20 years), when I first heard of CAGW, I was at least willing to listen to it. There was little data available back then, and it appeared to be something that at least merited further study. But almost right away I noticed how eager CAGW advocates were to jump on any little thing that “proved” their case, science be damned. Circa 1993, there was an incident of a NASA satellite (TOPEX/Posiedon) that appeared to be showing a small but steady, almost monotonic rise in ocean levels. This was held out as “proof”… until someone discovered a bug in a data calibration program at GSFC. When the bug was corrected, the rise disappeared.
So, as time went on, I noticed how the warmist side was skewing the standards of proof. Any little thing “proved” their case, whereas overwhelming evidence to the contrary still did not disprove it. They gradually constructed their theory such that it was non-falsifiable — heat waves “proved” global warming, but so did freezes and heavy snow. In fact, every weather event of any type “proved” CAGW! I’d challenge warmists as to what evidence would disprove CAGW, and they’d reply that since CAGW was proven fact, it was a meaningless question. How clever, in a Marxist way. And of course, the necessary solutions were all remarkably statist. So convenient.
(Further, I had access at the time to some space experiment data regarding total solar input on the Earth’s sphere (the investigation of which only began in the mid-’80s). Not only could I see that the “solar constant” was not as constant as some supposed, but that there was a good correlation between solar activity and overall troposphere temperatures. So to the extent that climate variation existed, it was possible to show it as being entirely of solar origin.)
Now, of course, we’re at the point where CAGW is totally shattered. The extent of the crimes which the warmists have committed is sufficient to disprove it; were there any substance to CAGW, it would not have been necessary to conduct this massive fraud to advance the theory. The question at this point is no longer a scientific inquiry; it is (or should be) a criminal investigation.
This kind of comment from the Warble Gloaming cheerleading squad as well as comments from politicians and heads of state like Obama’s “The Science is Settled” bullshit are exactly what makes me so annoyed.
This isn’t science – its a collectivists wet dream pretending (very badly) to be science. The worst thing is that the real scientists are unable to strangle this spawned bitch without destroying their own careers in the process.
This is what happens when you believe in some Iron laws of economics or history- you get RUST (Reality Upsetting Supposed Truths).
Cousin Dave writes “The question at this point is no longer a scientific inquiry; it is (or should be) a criminal investigation.”
There I must cavil. Let’s stay well away from anything even slightly resembling criminalising any scientific opinion. For one thing, why should anyone believe any opinion from which it is dangerous to deviate? I realise you probably are talking about the deletion of emails, which probably did violate the FOIA, but still, dangerous territory.
*For the record, I am still inclined to believe the Earth is warming somewhat, and that mankind probably paid a part in this – it’s the “C” in “CAGW” that I actively disbelieve. That part is a crisis whipped up to justify a power grab, a familiar thing throughout history.
The problem for AGW “skeptics” is that, once a certain version of “the truth” or “how the world works'” i.e., “the pictures in people’s heads” (V.O.Key) has been established, it is almost immune to mere “facts.” As Thomas Kuhn as observed, an established and widely accepted paradigm cannot be defeated by facts alone, but only by the power of a competing paradigm, i.e., a shinier, newer, more alluring high-powered model–preferably w. leather seats rather than vinyl. Competing facts may chip away at the edifice/dominate paradigm around the edges, but in the nature of things they arise randomly in serial fashion in seriatim out of the scientific process of experiment and discovery and are thus that much easier to “defeat in detail” (to use a military term.) Only by artfully “connecting the dots” to form a more accurate version/vision of reality may the established “truth” accepted by the public mind be overthrown. The current AGW status quo is helped (indeed it could have not have achieved a purchase on both the public and intellectual/academic mind without it) by the increasing secularization of Western Civilization and the decline of the role of religion with the resultant civic residue which sees “man as the measure of all things.” So indeed, if the universe revolves around man and his wonderful, infinitely perfectible mind, why should not one conclude that man–and only man–must not only be responsible for “global warming”/”climate change” but also capable of reversing/altering it?