Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

since Lord Longford toured the vice dens of Europe to gather evidence

Inquiry: Climate data not manipulated
British lawmakers say science sound, but want transparency

Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP
The University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, was at the center of the climate controversy.


msnbc.com news services
updated 6:52 p.m. ET, Tues., March. 30, 2010
LONDON - The first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from one of the world's leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved.

The House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee said they had seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming " two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.

In their report released Wednesday, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, "the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact," adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that "global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity."

The 14-member committee's investigation is one of three launched after the dissemination, in November, of e-mails and data stolen from the research unit.

The e-mails appeared to show scientists berating skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks, discussing ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discussing ways to keep skeptics' research out of peer-reviewed journals.

One that attracted particular media attention was Jones' reference to a "trick" that could be used to "hide the decline" of temperatures.

"Hide the decline" was not an attempt to conceal data but was scientific shorthand for discarding erroneous data, the committee concluded. Similarly, Jones intended "trick" to mean a neat way of handling evidence, rather than anything underhanded, the inquiry found.

The e-mails' publication ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit sparked an online furor, with skeptics of manmade climate change calling the e-mails' publication "Climategate" and claiming them as proof that the science behind global warming had been exaggerated " or even made up altogether.

The lawmakers said they decided to investigate due to "the serious implications for U.K. science."

Some e-mails 'appalling'
Phil Willis, the committee's chairman, said of the e-mails that "there's no denying that some of them were pretty appalling."

But the committee found no evidence of anything beyond "a blunt refusal to share data," adding that the idea that Jones was part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that weakened the case for global warming was clearly wrong.

In a briefing to journalists ahead of the report's release, Willis said the controversy would ultimately help buttress the case for global warming by forcing the University East Anglia " and other research institutions " to stop hoarding their data.

"The winner in the end will be climate science itself," he said.

The winner on Wednesday was Jones, who stepped down temporarily as chief of the climate research unit about week after the e-mail scandal broke. The committee expressed sympathy with Jones, whom Willis said had been made a scapegoat for larger problems within the climate science community.

"The focus on Professor Jones and the CRU has been largely misplaced," the report said.

But the lawmakers did criticize the way Jones and his colleagues handled freedom of information requests, saying scientists could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by aggressively publishing all their data instead of worrying about how to stonewall their critics.

"The culture of non-disclosure at CRU and instances where information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure, particularly to climate change skeptics, we felt was reprehensible," Willis told reporters.

Deeper inquiries promised
Lawmakers stressed that their report " which was written after only a single day of oral testimony " did not cover all the issues and would not be as in-depth as the two other inquiries into the e-mail scandal that are still pending and which were instigated by the University of East Anglia.

Willis said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish something before Britain's next national election, which is widely expected in just over a month's time.

"Clearly we would have liked to spend more time of this," he said, before adding jokingly: "We had to get something out before we were sent packing."

One of the two pending inquiries is being headed by former civil servant Muir Russell, who is looking into whether scientists, including Jones, fudged data or manipulated the peer review process. It also is examining the extent to which university followed applicable freedom of information laws. That report is due to report sometime this spring.

Geologist Ernest Oxburgh is leading a parallel investigation into the integrity of the science itself, one staffed by academics including Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Huw Davies, a former president of the International Association of Meteorology & Atmospheric Science.

The committee said that climate scientists had to be much more open in future " for example by publishing all their data, including raw data and the software programs used to interpret them, to the Internet. Willis said there was far too much money at stake not to be completely transparent.

"Governments across the world are spending trillions of pounds, or trillions of dollars, on mitigating climate change. The science has got to be irreproachable," he said.

The word "trick"
People seem to often be focusing first on this word "trick" used in a Phil Jones email:


In one e-mail from 1999, the center's director, Phil Jones, alludes to one of Mann's articles in the journal Nature and writes, "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Mann said the "trick" Jones referred to was placing a chart of proxy temperature records, which ended in 1980, next to a line showing the temperature record collected by instruments from that time onward. "It's hardly anything you would call a trick," Mann said, adding that both charts were differentiated and clearly marked.



Mann is certainly right: "trick" is a word scientists use all the time to mean a clever way to refocus a problem or transform it somehow to make progress. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a professor say "Now here's a trick you can use," I'd be able to buy a Lexus.

An elementary example of what might be considered a trick is converting from Euclidean (x,y) coordinates to polar (r,θ) coordinates where a calculation simplifies. A more complicated example is dimensional regularization in quantum field theory, where, since some observable factors are calculated to be infinity, you instead do the calculation in 4+d dimensions and then in the end let d go to zero, and the answers are finite. (No, there is no good mathematical basis for this, as a mathematician will tell you, but as a physicist will tell you, it works.)


Skeptics who are focusing on this particular word just do not understand some of the inside language scientists use

British lawmakers say science sound

The first of several British investigations

they had seen no evidence to support charges that .....had tampered with data or perverted the peer review

as far as it was able to ascertain

the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact

"Hide the decline" was not an attempt to conceal data but was scientific shorthand for discarding erroneous data, the committee concluded.

Similarly, Jones intended "trick" to mean a neat way of handling evidence, rather than anything underhanded, the inquiry found.

The lawmakers

The lawmakers said they decided to investigate due to "the serious implications for U.K. science."

But the committee found no evidence of anything beyond "a blunt refusal to share data,"

Lawmakers stressed that their report " which was written after only a single day of oral testimony " did not cover all the issues

Willis said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish something before Britain's next national election

Willis said there was far too much money at stake

Governments across the world are spending trillions of pounds, or trillions of dollars, on mitigating climate change. The science has got to be irreproachable

Anyone who read the farces that took place at East Anglia would not trust the group to make a good cup of coffee without first submitting the coffee to a thorough analysis!

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport#report
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Climate scientist Dr. David Douglass of the University of Rochester refuted the entire basis for man-made climate fears in 2007. Douglass co-authored a December 2007 peer-reviewed paper published in the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society which found the evidence for human influence for warming temperatures lacking in the atmosphere. "The observed pattern of warming, comparing surface and atmospheric temperature trends does not show the characteristic fingerprint associated with greenhouse warming. The inescapable conclusion is that the human contribution is not significant and that observed increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases make only a negligible contribution to climate warming," said Douglass, the paper's lead author on December 10, 2007. The paper was co-authored with Physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer, Climatologist Dr. John Christy and Benjamin D. Pearson. (LINK)

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Climate scientist Dr. Dick Morgan, former director of Canada's Met/Oceano Policy and Plans, a marine meteorologist and a climate researcher at both Exeter University and the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, rejected man-made climate fears in 2007. "I have had over 65 years of global climatic experience in every ocean of the world and am convinced that solar variability is the major component of climate change. It influences the global thermohaline circulation and the quasi-permanent pressure oscillations which export polar air towards the ITF via the Trade Winds. Hence, seasonal Monsoons, Tropical Storms and ENSO generation," Morgan, a former associate of the British Antarctic Survey Group at Cambridge, wrote to EPW on November 18, 2007. "The Major GHGs (greenhouse gases) are water vapour and ozone -- the latter being more important than CO2 in fossil fuel emissions because of its effect upon aerosols which determine cloud albedo and chemistry. Having been a forecaster at an airfield in Glasgow, during the coal burning period, I can vouch for that statement empirically," Morgan explained. "CO2 warming is not entirely detrimental because of its feedback as a catalyst for the greening of the terrestrial surface as its own sink in forestry, food production and grazing crops for animals. Its attributes and detriments are probably near balanced," he wrote. "As there is a perfect correlation between population growth and CO2, the major objective of Kyoto should be population control, otherwise it is simply pissing against the wind," he added. "As the IPCC does not have an adequate representation of oceanographers and solar scientists in its WG1 (Working Group 1) and [IPCC] Panel, it is not representative of the total scientific forum of experts in climate change integers, Centers of expertise in oceanography are almost unanimously advising that if IPCC models are right then the Gulf Stream will fail and scientists in highly reputable solar research centers are anticipating 60 years of solar quiescence are imminent. The IPCC are not advising the public of these alternative theses which advocate cooling -- countering anthropogenic warming," he concluded.

The UK scientist at the center of the “Climategate” controversy over leaked e-mails has been cleared of hiding or manipulating data by a parliamentary committee.

But lawmakers who had been investigating the row over global warming science said in a report published Wednesday that climate scientists must publish all their raw data and methods to ensure the research is “irreproachable.”

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The Commons report said the leaked emails suggested a “blunt refusal” by Jones to share scientific data but its chairman Phil Willis said there was no evidence that Jones hid or manipulated data to back up his own science.