Tough article by WSJ here.
They conclude:
However, we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.
Climate Audit 
21 Comments
I think they got this spot on.
“Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn’t have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them. ”
For a change the devil is in the big picture.
Alex
Sounds like a bureaucrat’s utopia. You have an organization of people that nobody elected, responsible to nobody but itself, that is exempt from every transparency regulation on the planet.
It would be funny if the US passed a regulation that stated that as long as the UN is headquartered in the US and funded with US tax dollars, that it must have provide some mechanism for transparency. Such a rule might accomplish a few things.
It must be the offspring of Brussels.
What are you saying…we can’t get “transparency” from our own government, let alone a rogue agency like the IPCC…lol!
First I am east of greenwich,
So I can only presume that being one of the “TOP STORIES IN Opinion” at the Wall Strret Journal – Online, carries weight and is what the well informed politico would see as a must read, I do hope so.
What I would like to see come from all this is some Glasnost and Perestroika.
My problem with climatic change is that I won’t buy a plot of land until I know where all the bodies are buried.
I am always more happy with a warts and all picture than the dumbed down one. Perhaps I am more Morlock than Eloi.
I have no problem with the truth if it is the whole truth. And I am sure that I am not alone. Ironically I, and I think quite a few others have been soured by RealClimate. There are still a lot of things that we don’t understand (these are my buried bodies) and that don’t make sense (like the 1940s blip) but that is the joy in it. I would welcome the blip being resolved but is it a data or an understanding problem, or both. And I think that we can see that neither Jones nor Wigley know the answer (BTW I think that the Wigley comments are probably quite innocent because near the end of the email he indicates that he is going to present his thoughts to some group or other).
My problem is I don’t like being hoodwinked, EVEN WITH THE TRUTH. I don’t like kangaroo courts, or their “Trust me I’m an expert”. Also blogs like RealClimate make it really difficult to convince people that there may be some truth in AGW because AGW has a lot of leeway in it and is perhaps more uniformitarian that catastrophic. Yet the catastrophists wish to build a concensus of and for the extreme. I am tired of my AGW position being seen as aligning me with a lot of humourless catastrophic revolutionary zealots. Given the chance I would rather march the wrong way than march under the yoke of zealotry. We must always attack zealots even if it cut off our nose. Once they are done for, we can do what is needed even if it is what they prescribed, at least we do it freely and with eyes to see.
Finally, despite wat they may say, this is NOT ROCKET SCIENCE (or QCD). Yes it is detailed but it is not conceptually difficult.
There are so many questions I would like answered. Many are detailed, I just want to assure myself that the application of the science really is solid, and that it is possible, if we try hard enough for long enough, to model the past and the future of climate.
Alex
“(BTW I think that the Wigley comments are probably quite innocent because near the end of the email he indicates that he is going to present his thoughts to some group or other).”
The other way of reading it was that the blip was currently unexplained and his report would be much better if it could be explained using the explanation given. Unfortunately, the reply is “Maybe I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying, but the adjustments won’t reduce the 1940s blip but enhance it.” making it clear that the data aren’t cooperating.
Alex
I think many of us ended up at Climate Audit because we could smell the propaganda at Realclimate. If Gavin and co. are so sure of their science why do they obfuscate and disappear posts that question their “orthodoxy”? As a scientist I do not react well to people hiding their data and/or there methodology, especially if they are publicly funded. I wanted to understand how they arrived at their their conclusions, and that lead me to CA.
I didn’t expect the rabbit hole that I fell into in my search for reason to be so twisty and deep.
Eddie
FWIW: Inhofe Says He Will Call for Investigation on “Climategate” on Washington Times Americas Morning Show
And I don’t know where else to put this, but it’s absolutely hilarious:
Iowahawk Geographic: The Secret Life of Climate Researchers
Iowahawk is frequently quite entertaining. He is a wingnut’s wingnut, but very very funny. See also his classic Pelosi GTxi SS/RT sport edition ad:
Wow, this is a fantastic thread, one of my favourite ever on CA.
First a link to an amazing, perhaps UNPRECEDENTED article on WSJ.
Then a very well-thought, well-written post by Alex.
Then we find out that Senator Inhofe is all over this.
I have hoped for a long time something like this would happen, but didn’t want to hope too much. I never would have believed it, but now it actually seems possible that the AGW house of cards is going to unravel before our very eyes. I would love to see Congress and the press descend on Jones, Mann and the rest of the hockey team like a pack of wild dogs and tear them to shreds.
If I seem vindictive toward the hockey team, I guess thats because I am, but right now I’m not scowling. I’m grinning from ear to ear because of the delightful article from Iowahawk Geographic. That is a keeper.
Dr Phil Jones – “all gut feeling, no science”
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=440&filename=1098472400.txt
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Bottom line – their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.
Must got to Florence now. Back in Nov 1.
Cheers
Phil
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I hope this charlatan gets the sack soon.
The sort of “gut feeling” that would cause somebody to suggest the MWP should be “contained”, to prevent any inconvenient truths from emerging?
I’m a bit amused that the face-saving meme is that the emails show there is no climate science conspiracy, that idea is just an invention of an industry-funded denier conspiracy. To start to think in this inane contradictory fashion must be one of the symptoms of group-think.
Climate Science and Candor
http://tinyurl.com/yagnrzt
WSJ
Folks, I think the big cover up was not the MWP, but that 1940’s blip which can be seen in the CRU land temp data everywhere. Clearly the CRU gang was covering up the fact that there has been no significant warming in the last 100 years – see for yourself with their own data:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11466
Cheers, AJStrata
AJStrata,
I’ve pointed this out many times in the past, that Hansen, Schmidt et al. were, and still are, mystified by the Arctic warmth in the 1930s. They simply can not account for it (Hansen et al. 2005). It is the single biggest failing of the GCMs – the failure to get that early warm pulse. Only by cranking the aerosol cooling knob very high can you get the cooling of the 1970s – and even that fails to account for the strength of the Arctic warming in the 1930s. And you will recall that it was McIntyre who discovered Hansen’s error that forced 1998 to appear warmer than 1934:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1880
Bender,
No argument – but it seems CRU had the data that proved Steve M right.
Thank Heavens for the Americans. There will always be some ornery Senator to have a proper investigation.
The Met Office has just sent out some amazing scaremongering, in The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6930523.ece
Potsdam is now projecting 7degrees.
The figures are becoming ridiculous. But they’ll be easy to see with the naked eye (or the bikini …) won’t they?
I suspect we’ll all look back at this and it will be a famous “bubble”. Rather like tulip mania.
Aha I see a pattern, East Anglia is the UK’s tulip capital … tulips create global warming!
I suggest we name the “very artificial, hide the decline” corrections “McKay Corrections” in honour of his
“Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_bubble#Mackay.27s_Madness_of_Crowds
This is very good: A brand new opinion piece in the WSJ online is getting down to the real heart of the matter. (IMO this is the manipulation of peer review, IPCC review and so forth. This is what needs to be noticed. WSJ gets it.)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574559630382048494.html
Cosmic rays create clouds, as the interaction of a cosmic particle with a water molecule acts as a seed to create water droplets. Clouds reflect sunlight and cool the earth. Changes in cosmic rays over time (centuries and millennia) are correlated with cooling.
Nir Shaviv stated that cosmic rays have a period of 135 million years, as the solar system passes through the bright arms of the Milky Way. In 2002, Shaviv hypothesised that passages through the Milky Way’s spiral arms appear to have been the cause behind the major ice-ages over the past billion years. Jan Veizer examined sea shells, and found a cooling-warming cycle of 135 million years.
Solar wind is a current (flow of charged particles) that reflects some cosmic rays, which are also charged particles. Increased solar wind means less cosmic rays to create water droplets. That is, increased solar wind means less clouds, and a warmer earth.
Solar wind varies with sunspots, being greater when sunspots are larger. Few sunspots mean little wind, and a cloudy cool earth.
Charts show sunspot variation over the past centuries, and temperature variation. These charts demonstrate the relation between sunspots and temperature. The Maunder Minimum was a period spanning 1645 to 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare. The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity lasting from about 1790 to 1830. Like the Maunder Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Dalton Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures.
In summary, if it is cloudy and rainy, it will be cold. Cosmic rays are influential in causing rain. Solar wind reduces cosmic rays, and so rain. Now there are less sunspots, and so less wind, which means more rain and cold. For a more detailed explanation, including charts of weather and sunspots for the past several centuries, go to my website: http://www.analysis-knowledge.com/msgTeaching.htm, and scroll down to read the pdf file “Cosmic rays create clouds”.