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Climategate fallout

December 1, 2009

Update: Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.

Climate politics continue to be interesting.  Australia’s opposition Liberal Party has ousted its leader, Malcolm Turnbull, after the resignation last week of several senators from their “front-seat” positions.  The Aussie government’s climate change bill is now in jeopardy, raising the potential of an early general election in 2010.

The Climategate emails and documents are being investigated by a number of organizations, including an inquiry by Penn State University, where Michael Mann, creator of the discredited hockey stick graph – used by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth – is a professor. Inquiries are also under way at the University of East Anglia, the source of the leaked material.  Government investigations are either ongoing or pending and there has been at least one civil lawsuit filed.

climategateAt a minimum, the emails document the violation of UK Freedom of Information laws.

Many believe that the leaker was not a hacker, but, rather, was an insider acting as a anonymous whistleblower by leaking the emails and documents, including information that had been unsuccessfully been sought under the UK FOI statutes.

The emails are not the only incriminating material.  Computer codes and their documentation show fudged numbers and “blatant data-cooking” that tell a story of twisting reality to a desired view.

Many of the fantastic claims in the media about climate change are likely predicated on the same sort of skewed science.

An article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Climate Science Isn’t Settled, by Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT gives a more balanced view of the state of climate science.

Al Gore on Saturday Night LiveClaims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

While I have been skeptical of global warming claims for quite some time, this Climategate fiasco appears to show  a conspiracy to doctor the evidence.

In my interest in climate change, I wasn’t looking for a conspiracy, just the truth.

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Climategate update

November 22, 2009

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Click on any of the images to go to the associated webpage.

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While I have spent a bit of time reading some of the emails that were leaked earlier the week, I simply do not have the time – or desire – to delve deeply into the files.  There are many others around the world digging into this.

I think that there have been serious consequences that have resulted from the actions of some of the scientists whose correspondence has been leaked.  In their zeal to “prove” — at all costs — CO2 as the cause of anthropogenic global warming, other potential causes have been marginalized.  Evidence is mounting that changes in land use may have a significantly greater impact on climate change than rising CO2.  If true, mitigation and adaptation to successfully address human impacts on climate could be done at a fraction of the cost of  the drastic actions and expenses that are being called for today.  It may be that efforts could have been started a decade ago, but for an obsession on CO2 as the global warming culprit.

On Examiner.com, Thomas Fuller is writing a series of articles regarding the actions and communications of a group of climate scientists and paleoclimatologists known as The Team. Click here to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 , Part 6, and Part 7.

My first post on this was Climategate.

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Climategate

November 21, 2009

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While I haven’t blogged about it for a while, I read material related to global warming climate change every day, so it was with great interest yesterday morning that I read of the release of allegedly stolen anthropogenic global warming climate change correspondence.

I had woken early for some reason and was unable to get back to sleep.  By 4:30, I was up and checking email, blogs and the news-feeds that I subscribe to.

A little over an hour later, I was downloading the files.

It’s going to be interesting to see where this is going to end up.  Articles are already appearing in the mainstream media.

See new article: Climategate update.

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Peter Sissons, a veteran British newsman, left BBC’s Television Centre for the last time in June, without a “pang of regret.”

In The Mail of Sunday, July 15th,  he launched a blistering attack on the BBC, claiming standards have dropped and producers are too concerned about being politically correct to do anything about it.

His article was an interesting read and, given my growing disillusion over the news media and what I believe to be a misrepresentation of the facts on climate change, I was particularly interested in the part of the article that talked about the BBC position on global warming.

Mr. Sissons writes:

Sissons_PeterOn a wintry Saturday last December, there was what was billed as a major climate change rally in London.

The leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, went into the Westminster studio to be interviewed by me on the BBC News channel. She clearly expected what I call a ‘free hit’; to be allowed to voice her views without being challenged on them.

I pointed out to her that the climate didn’t seem to be playing ball at the moment. We were having a particularly cold winter, even though carbon emissions were increasing. Indeed, there had been no warming for ten years, contradicting all the alarming computer predictions.

Well, she was outraged. I don’t have the actual transcript, but Miss Lucas told me angrily that it was disgraceful that the BBC – the BBC! – should be giving any kind of publicity to those sort of views.

I believe I am one of a tiny number of BBC interviewers who have so much as raised the possibility that there is another side to the debate on climate change.

The Corporation’s most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that ‘the science is settled’, when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn’t.

But it is effectively BBC policy, enthusiastically carried out by the BBC environment correspondents, that those views should not be heard – witness the BBC statement last year that ‘BBC News currently takes the view that their reporting needs to be calibrated to take into account the scientific consensus that global warming is man-made’.

Politically the argument may be settled, but any inquisitive journalist can find ample evidence that scientifically it is not.

I was not proud to be working for an organisation with a corporate mind so closed on such an important issue. Disquiet over my interview with Miss Lucas, incidentally, went right to the top at the BBC although, naturally, they never sought to discuss it with me.

For me, this is not an issue about the climate, it is an issue about the duty of the journalist.

I suspect the policy of most major media outlets on climate change is similar to the BBC’s.

day 61

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I’m tired of it!

July 1, 2009

We don’t watch much TV and we’ve already seen way too much of the current Michael Jackson media circus and the morbid fascination of the public and  some of the Michael Jackson fans.

Most people realized that Jackson had problems, but there seems to be some sort of sick fascination of the man and those problems. The media seems to think that the public wants or needs every detail of his life and the aftermath.

While I like much of his music, he was just another wealthy celebrity with problems that were exacerbated and enabled by his wealth and influence as far as I’m concerned.

I don’t need or want excruciating details about his funeral, his will, his mom, his dad, his kids, his ex-wife, etc., etc.

Just report whatever is actually newsworthy in this story and move on, please.  If there’s anything new, update us tomorrow.

I just find it annoying when there are so many more important things going on in the world that are being under reported because of this sensationalism.

Comments?

day 27

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THAT isn’t news!

June 1, 2009


photo
originally posted on flickr
by Stitch


While we were traveling, though unintended, I only watched television a few hours.

If I subtract the time that the TV was on a food channel at my sister-in-law’s and watching Mama Mia at my brother-in-law’s, it’s down to less than an hour of TV for 27 days away from home — and that was primarily checking for weather forecasts.

It was a good break from television and some of the things that bug me about it.

Today, watching the evening news, it struck me just how much of what is presented as news really isn’t news, at least as far as I’m concerned.

I was watching a story about the shooting of two young soldiers  — one killed — in Little Rock at a joint Army – Navy recruiting office. The story is still new so there are a lot of unanswered questions and it’s understandable that the story is still rough and not fully fleshed out.

However, a couple of things about the story struck me the wrong way.

The alleged shooter was apprehended 30 minutes later and the story had to mention that their station was the only one that had a camera at the police station when the suspect was brought in.  That’s not news.  It’s gratuitous self-promotion.

As is fairly common, I guess, they found it necessary to get some local reaction from people at the scene.  They interviewed one young fellow who had driven down to shopping center that the recruiting office was in because his girlfriend works there, she gets upset easily and, besides checking on her,  he wanted to find out  what was going on.  I’m sorry, but local reaction is generally not news.

While the specifics may vary, local reaction to a shooting is going to be predictable, but it’s not news unless the reaction is something unexpected.

For instance, if the local reaction had been for citizens to have apprehended the suspect instead of the police, that would have been news.

Comments, anyone?

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