Attention has been drawn today to Mann’s request to other Team members for suggestions as to how to take direct action at Harvard against Soon and Baliunas. Not noticed thus far is that Kevin Trenberth reverted almost immediately with suggestions and that Mann followed up on these suggestions. Later, Soon’s supervisor has a small cameo when we (Ross and I) enter on the scene.
The email reported today (4032, 276) was dated 2003-07-23. It was by no means an isolated attempt.
On April 24, 2003 (email 1999), Mann complained to a very large email distribution list that Soon and Baliunas’ association with Harvard-Smithsonian added damaging prestige to their article:
This latest assault uses a compromised peer-review process as a vehicle for launching a scientific disinformation campaign (often viscious and ad hominem) under the guise of apparently legitimately reviewed science, allowing them to make use of the “Harvard” moniker in the process.
On May 14, 2003, (email 2524), Mann wrote to Trenberth and other “colleagues” alleging that Soon and Baliunas had “hijacked” Harvard’s public relations office. Mann requested contacts at Harvard:
Dear Colleagues,
Baliunas and co. appear to have successfully hijacked Harvard’s PR office on this. Any of you have contacts there you might be able to get some information from? Both of these appeared in the “Harvard Gazette”:
[1]http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/04.24/04-sun.html
[2]http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/04.24/01-weather.html
That provides the appearance of Harvard’s stamp of approval for unsound claims which have otherwise been ignored by any other mainstream media outlets (despite the repeated attempts of the authors and their promoters to get wider coverage, the story has generally only been picked up by right-wing online sites and Murdoch-owned newspapers).
Trenberth wrote back suggesting Dan Schrag and Paul Epstein.
On May 15, Mann wrote Epstein as follows (email 2524), claiming that there was an “investigation” into the practices of editor de Freitas.
Dear Paul,
Kevin reminded me that you would be a good person to contact. I don’t know if you have followed this story. Baliunas and company have published these two terrible paper which purport, without any credibility whatsoever, to undermine IPCC conclusions. The papers were published in “Energy and Environment” (an industry shill) and “Climate Research” (with help from some dubious individuals on the editorial boards–there is an investigation now into the practices of the editor in question, Chris DeFrietas of New Zealand, who rights anti-IPCC and anti-Kyoto op ed pieces in New Zealand). They are making some headway within the beltway, though the mainstream media and scientific community recognize the stuff for what it is [I’ll resist using the appropriate words here, because my message might then not make it through the email filters].Any insights you might have into the goings on within the PR office at Harvard would be of interest. It is disappointing to see Harvard’s press office allow itself to be used as a pawn in this transparently political, pseudo-scientific, and industry-backed stunt…
thanks in advance for any help or insight you can provide,
mike
Epstein immediately sent back a cordial response, copying Eric Chivian, James McCarthy and Trenberth:
Dear Michael Mann,
It is indeed a great pleasure to receive your message (showing your famous graph for the last millennium so often in talks). My feelings — and those of Eric Chivian, our center’s director — are mutual. It is appalling what Baliunus et al. are doing, using the past 50 year window for example, to tell their distorted story. And of course the story is used by those who’s interests have become self evident.Have you spoken with Mike McElroy and Jim McCarthy? I know that Dan S is steaming mad and I do suggest a call to Mike to encourage a response from the Harvard University Committee on the Environment. I have discussed this with both Mike and Jim, but a note from you might help move things along.
I look forward to hearing back and would certainly be open to developing a response based on climatology and the accumulating biological and health responses to climate change.
With best regards, Paul
The emails shed no light on further developments. Harvard is next mentioned in the Wigley email (1700, 4032) of July 23 to which attention has been drawn. Wigley, as Mann had done in April, complains about the Harvard association and asks what they “as a community” can do:
The work appears to have the imprimateur of Harvard, which gives it added credibility. So, what can we as a community do about this?
Wigley goes on to say that it would be useful to have”Harvard disassociate themselves” from the article:
It would also be useful to have Harvard disassociate themselves
from the work…Similarly, perhaps some of you know some influential Harvard types better than I do and can make some suggestions here. The only way to counter this crap is to use the biggest guns we can muster.
As too often, Mann was once again inflamed by Wigley, responding immediately (4032, 276 – July 23, 2003), asking for suggestions on “Harvard colleagues” who might help the Team “take action” against Soon and Baliunas:
Their ability to repeatedly co-opt the Harvard news office remains a real problem. Nobody I’ve talked to at Harvard is happy about this, and there’s been talk of action on the part of various of the faculty, but nobody seems willing or able to mount enough of an effort to get anything done about this. Apparently there was a threat of a lawsuit against Harvard last time folks there tried to do something about Baliunas, and so they may have lost their nerve. But I know our Harvard colleagues are not happy about continually having their institutional name dragged through the mud. If someone has close ties w/ any individuals there who might be in a position to actually get some action taken on this, I’d highly encourage pursuing this.
Two weeks later (3013. 2003-08-04), Mann reported about the recent Senate EPW hearings (taking enormous pleasure in the news of the von Storch resignation announced at the hearings) to Pachauri, the Australian correspondents involved in the April emails (Nicholls, Whetton, Francey, Etheridge, Smith, Torok, Bouma, Ayers, Bailey, Pearman) as well as MacCracken, Crowley and Bradley. In the email, Mann reported that “something is up” in connection with their campaign against Soon and Baliunas at Harvard:
There is a rumour that Harvard may have had enough w/ their name being dragged through the mud by the activities of Baliunas and Soon, and that “something is up”. Baliunas and Soon, as alluded to in the WSJ article, are now no longer talking to the media. Will keep you posted on that…
The Climategate-2 emails do not return to this point.
In the Climategate-1 emails, the first reference to McIntyre and McKitrick 2003 came in an email from Mann to his closest associates. Mann had received a copy of our still unpublished article from a confidential informant:
From: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: CONFIDENTIAL Fwd:
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 13:47:44 -0500
Dear All,
This has been passed along to me by someone whose identity will remain in confidence.
Who knows what trickery has been pulled or selective use of data made. It’s clear that “Energy and Environment” is being run by the baddies–only a shill for industry would have republished the original Soon and Baliunas paper as submitted to “Climate
Research” without even editing it. Now apparently they’re at it again…My suggested response is: 1) to dismiss this as stunt, appearing in a so-called “journal” which is already known to have defied standard practices of peer-review. It is clear, for example, that nobody we know has been asked to “review” this so-called paper 2) to point out the claim is nonsense since the same basic result has been obtained by numerous other researchers, using different data, elementary compositing techniques, etc. Who knows what sleight of hand the authors of this thing have pulled. Of course, the usual suspects are going to try to peddle this crap. The important thing is to deny that this has any intellectual credibility whatsoever and, if contacted by any media, to dismiss this for the stunt that it is..
On Oct 28, Eugene Avrett sent an email to Mann about the new paper (see email 4469) described by Mann as follows:
This seems to be the HTML version of McIntyre’s paper. (I got this unsolicited from Gene Avrett, Soon & Baliunas’s boss at Harvard
You may be interested in the article by McIntyre and McKitrick just published in Energy and Environment which questions the validity of the Mann et al. (1998) study that provided the basis for the claim that 20th century warming is unprecedented. See [2]http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html.
Yours sincerely,
Gene Avrett
Climate Audit 
185 Comments
Do we know who’s name was expunged to protect their identity and does it matter?
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=4469.txt&search=Gene+Avrett
“At 02:38 PM 10/27/2003 -0500, Michael E. Mann wrote:
Dear All,
The link below has been passed along to me by a colleague (whose name has been expunged
to protect his identity):”
“Mike,
This seems to be the HTML version of McIntyre’s paper. (I got this
unsolicited from Gene Avrett, Soon & Baliunas’s boss at Harvard.)
———————- Original Message ———————–
From: “Eugene H. Avrett”
To:
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 12:09:22 -0500
Subject: article in Energy and Environment
—-
Dear ,
You may be interested in the article by McIntyre and McKitrick
just published in Energy and Environment which questions the
validity of the Mann et al. (1998) study that provided the basis
for the claim that 20th century warming is unprecedented.
See [2]http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html.
Yours sincerely,
Gene Avrett”
I wonder if he had to think very long about that wording or if it just rolled off his fingertips. “assault”,”launching”,”campaign”,”vicious” I mean, really. Didn’t anyone think maybe this response might be a little “over the top”? Grepping through the emails, “vicious” in the context of “attack” seems to be a rather common phrase among academics. Maybe that is because their positions are experienced as part of their self-identity so they experience an attack on that position as an attack on their “self”. “Assault” appears to be fairly commonly used, too.
Does anyone speak French? (0431.txt Edouard BARD reporting to Jones about various “vicious attacks”.) There are apparently a lot of “Secret Committee” meetings at the Academy.
I’m surprised these people get any work done considering how much time they spend on these various intrigues.
google translate:
I took the time to watch the conference Courtillot IPGP January 10 available online at the website of IPGP: [2] http://www.ipgp.jussieu.fr/, click on news, seminars, videos, Jan. 10)
Many things to complain about, but it would take too long (especially on the spin of translation + scaling for solar irradiance). About curve they called gb, Courtillot said very clearly:
File “Paper I” at 23 min and 40 sec. “This curve is of Mr. Jones. It is in his 1999 article in Reviews of Geophysics. ”
File “Conclusions” to 7 min. and 30 sec. “It is they who were wrong. When we made this curve, five years ago in the article Reviews of Geophysics, was of course admitted that the legend of Jones and the data were true. this are data, but the legend is false. ”
Anyone who takes this famous paper by Jones et al. (1999, rev. Geophys.) Can that these two assertions are totally false. Note that the President of CNRS is sitting in the front row.
“I’m surprised these people get any work done considering how much time they spend on these various intrigues.”
The myriad FOI requests don’t appear to be distracting them from their work in any way whatsoever.
More work was done to circumvent the LEGAL FOI requests then it would have taken to comply.
Frankly come across as a rather paranoid little individual who can simply not accept other people can have views different from himself and that his work should ever be critically reviewed . You been tempted to ask if he was a only child of over indulgent parents and someone with little or no social grace.
And once again if the paper is bad why its so hard from them to point out where its so bad, rather than attempt to smear the authors?
Those read more like desperate dispatches from some trench in France circa 1917, than a scientist gauging the validity of a differing scientific view point.
There are no valid differing points of view.
I guess that is the mindset isn’t it?
Surely there must be some capable and sensible climate scientists already within the field who have not been tarred with the “denier” label and are doing credible work who are appalled at the domination of the field by these hacks.
Will they ever reach a critical mass sufficient to rescue climate science from the carnival barkers?
That’s 1067194064.txt in Climategate 1, which seems be duplicated in 2527.txt in Climategate 2, with a slightly different email header format.
Thank you already for the hard work to piece together the stories behind the new tranche Steve. I’m thinking interesting systems could arise (incrementally is normally best) from the challenge.
This Man does certainly belong in the State, Penn.
“Dear Michael Mann,
It is indeed a great pleasure to receive your message (showing your famous graph for the last millennium so often in talks)…”
Was Mann putting his hockey stick in his email signatures or something?
I think he’s just saying that he uses Mann’s graph in his talks, you know, the graph that really wasn’t that important.
Yep, that’s the way I read it.
I think they should have used a much finer filter on his email account.
Wow! Can it really be true that Prof Mann doesn’t know the difference between “write” and “right”?
Shocking indictment of the intellectual calibre of the man if he doesn’t.
Well, that’s something I observe, too: they write quite poorly. Many mistakes, poor syntax, confused sentences, etc. Really not impressive. To me, great minds are clear and articulate. Or, at least, have enough self-respect to read again a message and correct the obvious mistakes before sending it.
More likely that he was “righting” in his usual high dudgeon, and not completely in control.
a trivia point – “right” “write” “rite” and “wright” are 4 different spellings for words that are pronounced the same way. Can anyone think of any other combinations that reach 4? (I have one other.)
Weigh, way, whey, wey.
=============
very sharp. Didn’t know “wey” was a word before.
My other combo was: air, err, ere, heir.
Me neither.
=====
haha I did
Wey is a bit obscure for non-Brits (et. al.)
Two, too, to, tu
(English is happy to rip off words from other languages, even dead ones)
bi, buy, by, bye
ewe, U, you, yew
byte bite bight beit
tout toux
French is not dead…
I’m homophone phobic 🙂
ear makes five
Hear Here Ear Year
Especially if you are welsh as in “by ear” 🙂
Hmm. Does this work for the Australians?
wile while wail whale
I don’t get the australian one, they have two different pronounciations??
It’s been my impression that the latter two might be pronounced by them rather like the former two, instead of in the “normal” way (whatever that means). But I wasn’t sure, thus my query to any Aussies in the audience.
This impression is almost entirely from viewing American television, so I don’t know how much it might simply be caricature.
But it’s the only one I could think of, so there it is! 🙂
RTF
Actually all 4 would be subtley different, but your ears wouldn’t pick it.
wile and while would differ due to a slightly [and I mean slightly] more aspirated “wh” in the second.
and wail and whale would have a similar aspirated “wh” for whale, and would both differ from the first two though there would be a slight shift from “a” to “i” in wail/whale, they would still sound different to wile/while, it’s probably more the tonal rise of the “i” in the latter two rather thana full vowel shift.
I persoanlly cannot see that “air, err, ere and heir’ are the same. Only “air” and “heir” are close, the rest are not similar.
‘ere’ is more like ‘ear’ and ‘err’ is more the final sound of ‘grrrrrr’
I thought that “have, half, halve” are the “definitive” American homophones that are rather different in British pronounciation.
Shirts, shorts, per the Irish nanny we had years ago who announced that she had just ironed the latter, while meaning the former.
peak, peek, pique, peke
How about eight ate ait eyot.
+eyre
mall moll mawl maul
Some might say that the last two are the same word, but I think this shows they are not exactly the same word
Please don’t use the cat to clean the oven.
mal·kin
[maw-kin, mawl-, mal-] Show IPA
noun British Dialect .
1. an untidy woman; slattern.
2. a scarecrow, ragged puppet, or grotesque effigy.
3. a mop, especially one made from a bundle of rags and used to clean out a baker’s oven.
4. a cat.
5. a hare.
What about Eire?
New, knew, nu, and gnu.
Mew, moue, mu and moo.
Fish, fiche, phish, ghoti.
==============
This is why I never got to play in the adult games, I never understood the rules.
The only one I could come up with is: palls, pause, paws, and Paul’s.
This is fun.
I’ll go with pair, pare, payor, pear 😀
Two, too, to, tu (if foreign language is fair game)
Ooh, another: fair, fare, fayre, phare
If foreign languages are in play we can add guey, making it 5 for that one.
As in – ?que paso’, guey?
Eye halve a spelling checker
It came with my pea sea.
It plainly marks four my revue miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word and weight for it to say
Weather eye yam wrong oar write.
It shows me strait a weigh as soon as a mist ache is maid.
It nose bee fore two long and eye can put the error rite.
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it,
I am shore your pleased to no.
Its letter perfect awl the way.
My checker told me sew.
“Eye yam watt Eye yam”.
And Mann is watt he is.
RTF
ROFL!! Good one Glen! Eye like you’re whey of righting pros, butt halve too se eye em knot tu shore watt its Gott two dew with Mans crewel correspondents.
Would you accept ‘or, oar, or, o’er’? Yeah, I know it’s archaic, but we still sing it at baseball games. (USA custom, you know.)
And thanks to Crosspatch for explicating ‘viscious’. I had interpreted it as ‘viscous,’ as in ‘hard to wade through.’
Make that second ‘or’ into ‘ore.’
1 1 was a race horse. 2 2 was 1 2. If 1 1 1 1 race 1 day did 2 2 1 1 2?
I can’t resist since you’ve started the horse race – and everyone is on word plays… Sawyer Brown “The Race Is On” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYp9SRR7gP0
two, too, to, 2, tu, tutu
And don’t forget “tew”.
by, bye, buy, bi
Sorry to be late to the party.
Tour, taw, tor, tau, tore.
Who beats the French? 22 times “O”:
au, aud, auds, ault, aulx, aut, auts, aux, eau, eaud, eaux, haut, hauts, ho, o, ô, od, ods, oh, os, ot, ots
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographie
Other nice examples of homophones are at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone and
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophon
Ok, kinda modern and slangy, but I checked to make sure, and they’re all in Merriam-Websters:
laze lays leis lase leas
To be fair, I’ve always pronounced “lea” as “LEE” in my head, it can actually be pronounced “LAY”, but I had to cheat and look this up. 🙂
Also, debatably, “leys” (as in multiple ley lines, but “ley” isn’t in MW).
Dang! Leave town for a day and miss all the fun. Since it’s the Season, these popped to mind immediately (the homophones, not the doggerel), but I don’t mind admitting the fourth was a mission (and a bit of a stretch, I also admit; but if there’s a village of Clows Top, then I figure there must be a Clows to be on top of).
The rhyming is shaky and the meter’s all over the place, but I don’t have time to polish, so here goes:
In Clows this year be Claus and kin,
Pressed into service yet again
Of handselen gifts to all the world,
Straight from their saucy shire
Fought they well the writ, both tooths and claws,
But efforts naught availed them in the end
Bound they were in sooth, but in sullen ire,
To the onerous Santa Clause
(with abject apologies to Tim Allen)
Team Homonyms:
“Random” and “Robust”, “Significant”, “Unprecedented”
“Opinion” and “Smear”, “Disinformation”, “Attack”
pair pare pear pere
OK I cheated. Loads of homophones here:
http://www.homophone.com/
In the list of “rites” you could also include “wright” as in one who makes something – e.g. wood wright.
bo, beau, bow, beaux
there’s always the legendry “Four Candles” two -Rronnies sketch
haw, hoar, Hor, whore, hors (d’oevre)
Alastair,
FWIW, at 69, I find I have the same problem with homonyms; not “write”/”right” but fairly often “their”/”there.” I would like to think that what I write sounds intelligent if read aloud, but those damned homonyms keep showing up. Hopefully I catch them.
I suspect this problem is an expression of some mental disorder, recent for me, but for MM?
you are right/rite/wright/write
AAAAK, homphone, not homonym
Mann just made a simple Freudian slip. Clearly he knew Chris DeFrietas was right in all his actions. =8-)
Those hypocrites call themselves climate scientists and cannot come up with one scientific point countering S & B.
What I don’t understand is why his colleagues can tolerate Mann.
I liked his denier quote: “The important thing is to deny that this has any intellectual credibility whatsoever…”
pax,
And even more importantly, this was written before they had even read the paper. No bias there!
Reading the emails it is clear that they tolerate him because they fear him. The subtext implies that he is a loose canon, and they don’t want to be in the way. I haven’t searched the archives for “the cause,” but the few uses I am aware of were all Mann’s. I need to work out a better approach than “less | grep.” I know there are already searchable databases, but where’s the fun?
I don’t know how I have managed to navigate the complexities of life without someone wise enough to advise me on how to respond to incoming literature…/sarc
“Dear Michael Mann (…) My feelings — and those of Eric Chivian, our center’s director — are mutual.” (Paul Epstein)
“Love is such a beautiful thing.” (The Bee Gees)
I agree, Gerald.
Indeed, one of the strangest things about the emails is the relative LACK of actual discussion of science in it. I would have expected long discussions of papers people were working on together, methods, validity of this or that data — there is a bit of that but surprisingly little and generally not particularly technical. Observe Mann’s reply to a COLLEAGUE who asks for clarification on why tree ring data doesn’t behave the way it should in the late twentieth century. Everything but an actual answer — Severinghaus himself manages to come up with a coherent (if unsupported) proposal in one page. I would have many SCIENTIFIC questions for him if I were in a discussion, such as how he can account for the various things that confound his perhaps overly simple explanation — the warmer nights mean a longer growing season, the higher CO_2 levels (much higher!) mean a lot more carbon uptake during the day and loss against a higher partial pressure at night, and the effect isn’t uniformly seen in all tree species and location. Proving this, in other words, is more than stating the hypothesis, it would require explicit experiments with hothouse growing of trees under carefully controlled conditions (none of which has been done, of course, although none of it appears terribly difficult).
Mann, OTOH, isn’t capable of any sort of coherent, believable reply. I do better explaining quantum theory on slashdot to people that are completely ignorant than he manages when replying to supposedly knowledgeable colleagues in a forum intended for precisely this sort of high level discussion.
And odd way to do science, or (if you prefer) a symptom of science, badly done by somebody that really doesn’t have the faintest grasp on what they are doing. I’ve almost NEVER met a professional scientist who could not clearly explain their work and answer questions about it on the fly. The whole point of that “defending your dissertation” thing is to teach you that as a standard, you should always know your work and all of its basis better than any other human alive and be able to explain it clearly to anyone with a kindergarten explanation on up to a Ph.D. who works in your field and disagrees with you. We don’t all succeed in this, but this is the idea and responsible scientists strive for it.
Why not Mann?
rgb
And Mann has the gall to say **This latest assault uses a compromised peer-review process as a vehicle for launching a scientific disinformation campaign (often viscious and ad hominem) under the guise of apparently legitimately reviewed science, allowing them to make use of the—**
Mann should look in the mirror (Hello Gavin, are you reading this?) because this applies to him.
I left some dashes where I would insert the following “so-called respected Journals and their poor peer review process to denigrate climate science”.
Mann is projecting, as he frequently does.It’s a central part of his psychology. He’s putting onto others what his unconscious anxiety is saying to him about his own work and his own self.
Do keep in mind that FOIA has shown care is sorting these emails. With 200,000 to go – if that is correct – then there is ample room for back-and-forth emails on secience. Maybe we merely have not been exposed to them – yet. Exposure was the purpose of some prior Inquiries ……
So emails are the only way they discuss science?
There are those conferences, letters, live chat, or even telephones, including skype.
Why not try a FOI rrequest on phone calls – many systems record calls. Even better do a “Schnare” and request all paper documents, note books, paper (bog paper as well?), from all including assistants, secretaries, wives, children?
It is very strange but I have not seen any references to how all these £billions they have supposedly personally received, have been spent. Where are the reports of fast cars, new Rollers, swimming pools, vast houses?
Perhaps some kind soul could give me the email numbers?
Except for specific purposes recording phone calls is illegal even within corporations and government agencies. When done it has to be known that the recording was being made. Unless you are advised that this call may be monitored or recorded for training purposes the call is not recorded unless you are calling emergency services.
try James Hansen, with over $1 Million in outside income over the past few years, earned by trading on the reputation of NASA, and apparently some of it not properly reported as required by law. http://tinyurl.com/74soqx7
I think you will find most of the money comes from “prizes” and is not income
Please explain the difference from Hansen’s perspective.
There is no difference when it comes to NASA’s ethic’s policy, or for that matter for any civil servant (e.g., salary paid by USA taxpayer), or anyone’s IRS tax return. In the USA, if you win the lottery, or are given a gift by someone, you are required to report it as income. By definition, that’s what monetary ‘prizes’ are – or for that matter, non-monetary goods also. Win a new car? Win the lottery? Win a free trip? In all cases, must report $$ value as income and pay taxes.
Now I don’t know if Hansen properly reported to IRS or not, but if you had read the link I provided you’d see that he apparently did not report it as required by NASA ethics regulations.
“…Ethics laws require that such payments or gifts be reported on an SF278 public financial disclosure form. As detailed, below, Hansen nonetheless regularly refused to report this income.
Also, he seems to have inappropriately taken between $10,000 and $26,000 for speeches unlawfully promoting him as a NASA employee. This is despite NASA ordering him to return at least some of the money, with the rest apparently unnoticed by NASA. This raises troubling issues about Hansen’s, and NASA’s, compliance with ethics rules, the general prohibition on not privately benefiting from public service, and even the criminal code prohibition on not having one’s public employment income supplemented.
All of this lucrative activity followed Hansen ratcheting up his global warming alarmism and activism to be more political which, now to his possible detriment, he has insisted is part of his job. As he cannot receive outside income for doing his job, he has placed himself in peril, assuming the Department of Justice can find a way to be interested in these revelations….”
It’s also clear that he can’t use the excuse “I didn’t know” (which is no defense against the law in any case):
“…The records reveal that NASA initially was very direct in warning Hansen of his responsibilities and prohibitions relating to these activities, which covered the subject of his public employment….”
Bingo.
This nugget speaks volumes about Mann:
“Apparently there was a threat of a lawsuit against Harvard last time folks there tried to do something about Baliunas, and so they may have lost their nerve. But I know our Harvard colleagues are not happy about continually having their institutional name dragged through the mud.”
So – the Harvard Crimson’s publishing a story about a new paper authored from Harvard scientists is, in Mann’s eyes, equivalent to dragging Harvard’s name through the mud, only because that paper casts doubt on Mann’s work.
How vicious can you get? This isn’t science, this is politics as practiced by the Massachusetts legislature when Billy Bulger, Whitey’s brother, was the Senate president. Or maybe the Chicago City council.
Has anyone looked for emails that discuss project funding and exchanges with any of the funding agencies? The US Department of Energy was funding Jones. The politics of that must be something else. I wonder what kind of control this gang, and that’s the only correct word to describe them, exercised in the awarding of grant money?
It’d be interesting to see exactly who signed off on Jones’ US Gov’t funding year after year after year and who they know in the CAGW Cabal.
Did others in the inner CAGW circle direct the U.S. taxpayer/borrower Climate Ca$h to Jones?
You can look up present and former NSF and DOE awards online (searching by name of the principal investigator). For example:
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/
If you really want to know where the climate ca$h (in the U.S.) is coming from, you can read this document… Please note the year over year INCREASES in funding. This, I believe, partly explains the behavior of these scientists (and as exemplified by Mike Mann in these e-mails) – there’s too much money at stake for these people, and they will do what they can to get (and keep) their piece of the pie.
Meanwhile, I have to pay a HUGE check to my daughter’s university for the coming semester’s tuition…
The thing that comes out again and again in the Climategate flap is that the Team chappies are not doing science. They are doing politics.
And they are encouraging people to think that they aren’t much good at either.
Bully.
To The Team, review apparently means trashing M+M 2003 in the most contemptuous terms while acknowledging that they have not read the paper and have no idea what is in it:
Add projection to Michael Mann’s list of stunts. He doesn’t know M+M are honest, because he can’t bring himself to actually pay attention to what any who contradicts him is actually saying, but because he himself is a liar, he presume everyone else is too. He simply cannot conceive of another way that the human mind can operate. It is beyond his experience.
What if Mann simply has never grown up?
Apparently he has a book coming out early next year about the “hockey stick wars”. I’d be curious to read it just as a window into his personality. He definitely comes across as having the emotional maturity of a 12 year old girl.
While I’m sure many “consensus” scientists are merely defending the paradigm because it’s the reigning explanation, Mann appears to genuinely believe he’s “saving the planet”.
Is Mann writing the book? Hope he has spell check.
Bet there will not be too much stats in it.
Fodder for Steve Mc & company.
Steve was essentially the first to challenge the shoddy statistics and that is why we are here now. A good number have followed in Steve’s footsteps, and that is the way the truth will come out.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/023115254X/ref=redir_mdp_mobile
Comes out March 6th. On his Twitter feed Mann said it will “put the CRU hack in context”.
So Mann calls it a hack now?
Climategate 2.0 will put his book back out of context.
I would not be surprised to see the book delayed. There must be a mad scramble underway to adjust the “context” to explain the new tranche…
A scientist with a twitter feed? What would one post? “Coding…” “3pm, still coding” “editing a paper..” pretty exciting stuff.
Wonder no more:
https://twitter.com/#!/MichaelEMann
I am currently “blocked” – “hide the timeline” – but of course that just means I don’t get automatic notification.
I can scarcely wait for “just the right context”
I just busted a gut laughing at this one:
Not Mann (directly) but how’s this precis for unadulterated brass neck?
Really they are friends. I guess this makes sense as both hide many things in their persuit of the “scientific method”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/18/replicating-al-gores-climate-101-video-experiment-shows-that-his-high-school-physics-could-never-work-as-advertised/
I’d say that’s a given.
When reading through these e-mails, maturity certainly isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But we should remember that his style has certainly worked well for him so far. He’s gotten an enormous amount of positive reinforcement. Penn St’s strange argument that his funding confirms integrity and competence is likely pretty close to how he sees himself.
I have to think that there is a distinct possibility that a time will come in the future when he is no longer viewed as an asset by team members. Or perhaps may even come to be regarded as a liability. When that happens, I don’t think it will be very pretty. Not what his former ‘friends’ dump on him and most definitely not his response. Ugly indeed, I imagine.
Mann be man be mad;
Trillions of doubloons wasted.
Easy come; so goes.
===========
I should be more precise. Mann’s comment — “Who knows what sleight of hand the authors of this thing have pulled” — doesn’t show that he hasn’t looked at the paper at all, but that he doesn’t need to find anything wrong with it in order to condemn it.
Not exactly usual its it , after all they can condemn a book without even reading it. Frankly when you start from a position that only your views are right , its very easy to get to one that says all other views are wrong and never mind the content .
Has anybody seen this?
http://live.psu.edu/story/56383
So much for skeptics winning the debate.
Old news … nothing to see, move on.
http://assess-systems.com.au/blog/2007/bullies-rewarded-with-promotion/
Yes, he is a crude bully (who can’t spell and writes like a teenager). But why does everybody knuckle under to him? Is there a single example of someone in the climate science community standing up to him? Calling him out? How weird.
There’s a decent amount of entertainment in the email list looking at exchanges that contain 4 consecutive exclamation marks:
grep -i “\!\!\!\!” *
Phil Jones is a serial abuser; when reading, it helps to remember it’s sometimes informally referred to as a “shriek”
It’s also known as (ahem) a “bang”.
Only in academia would you see everyone lining up behind the beta male in the pack!
That is as bad as the Noble Price.
(atcchhooo!)
Mann is the perfect illustration for the old verse admonishing one about finding splinters in your brother’s eye while having a log in your own.
Of course, in Mann’s case he believes his log teleconnects with the global temperature and is quite pleased with it.
Very clever. Dendro-optometry. You see what you want to see.
At the same time the Team is creating a response to Soon & Baliunas for publication in EOS.
The development of this response paper can be seen in these emails:
0031
0404
0716
0910
1889
2922
2398
2361
3366
It is interesting to watch sausage being made.
Apologies:
#2922 above should be #2022.
#2361 should be #2461
I recall being told, maybe by Willie Soon, that Sallie was no longer active in climate studies due to pressures being put on her personally after their 2003 paper in Climate Research. In these emails, we now see the face of that pressure — Michael Mann, Paul Epstein, and possibly even Sallie’s immediate superior Gene Avrett.
Mike Mann’s description of their 2003 paper as “a compromised peer-review process as a vehicle for launching a scientific disinformation campaign (often viscious and ad hominem)” is wrong throughout. The peer-review was investigated and proved legitimate and De Frietas’ editorial work was standard ethical practice. I read the Soon/Baliunas 2003 paper, and it was a very straight-forward analytical discussion of evidence world-wide for the MWP. There was nothing ad hominem or vicious anywhere in it. It was also not “disinformation;” their points were all referenced to published peer-reviewed literature.
I was also immediately and strongly struck by the internal contradiction of Mike Mann’s fierce language expressing outrage at purporting miscarriages of the scientific process, all the while knowing that his own MBH98 paper was a conscious fr- snip- — her knew it failed statistical tests, he knew that the short centering distorted the PCA analysis, and he knew that the bristlecones improperly produced the entire message. All prior to publication.
And then it passed review at Nature, allowing Mike enough camouflage to later on accuse others of having “defied standard practices of peer-review.” And given the unvarying recourse to press-release science by the AGW crowd, one is bemused with bitter irony at Mike Mann’s complaint that Soon and Baliunas had “successfully hijacked Harvard’s PR office.” Such cynical posturing is intolerable.
Given the Climategate 2.0 revelations, plus what we know about the meaning of ‘back to 1400 CENSORED,’ thanks to Steve McI and Ross, and the interplay of green NGOs with the IPCC process, thanks to Donna Laframbiose, not to mention the known association of the RC folk with Fenton Communications, it’s fair to say that Michael Mann’s own work has been, using his own words, a “transparently political, pseudo-scientific, and industry-backed stunt,” with the politics being green, the science being pseudo-proxies, and the stunt-backing industry being the billion-dollar NGO machines whose financial blood supply battened on his efforts.
More and more evidence that Mann is a serial l**r, using such a fast stream of sciency-sounding language spiked so hard with slanderous language, so far beyond one’s expectations, accusing others of the faults with which he himself is so familiar that he knows how to accuse in context, that it bowls one over before one has had time to think. He can’t be all that wrong!
Where have we heard that before?
Thank you Steve. I look forward to your piece on Soon & Baliunas’ paper, to give a chance for that most gross of Mann’s iniquities to be addressed – to give the science itself a public hearing.
I think the worst part of the above was the obsequious reply Epstein wrote to Mann
“Dear Michael Mann,
It is indeed a great pleasure to receive your message (showing your famous graph for the last millennium so often in talks).”
Ugh… I just threw up a little.
I was wondering if I was the only one…
No, you weren’t.
It made me puke too.
I agree also, and it reminds us once again of the wisdom of William F. Buckley’s quip, “that he would rather be governed by the first five hundred names in the Boston phonebook than by the faculty of Harvard University.”
Read 1999.txt, perhaps Mann & Co. like useless generals have simply been fighting the past war.
Is the alleged “investigation” one that that they were trying to instigate?
I seem to recall that at some point they decided they wanted de Freitas removed, and had urged he be removed
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/27/the-tribalistic-corruption-of-peer-review-the-chris-de-freitas-incident/
A request for a new thread for interesting FOIA emails as there are some doozies and I don’t want to derail a thread.
Silenced Science
The new emails look like a can of worms of legal matters, which cannot be overlooked by biased non-investigating investigations. I also think a witness protection program is overdue in climate science.
Comments have been made on this thread about how this is just politics masquerading as science. I think it’s far worse than that.
It’s more KGB-style strong-arm politics; people disdainfully reviewing in secret what has been written and then planning to destroy the authors for deviating from the party line.
It really is that Machiavellian and, sadly, so far removed from the ideal of the scientific method that every person who has ever attempted to do an objective study in the physical sciences should be appalled and alarmed.
Aside from the usual Mannian self-righteousness & high excitability, it is really fascinating to see all this self-reinforcing group-think at work – the volleying and amplifying of missionary zeal and righteous indignation. It’s becoming clearer and clearer, as the emails are parceled out, that the Climate Cabal is 1), actually a pretty small group, and 2), is utterly convinced of it’s rightness – as others have noted, not a word on the facts of the matter, just good-guys vs. bad-guys moral posturing. I believe that as the great climate hysteria winds down these people will continue to be impervious to evidence and reason, to the very end.
I understand that systems engineers all know that physical systems dominated by positive feed-back are unstable & self-destructive. Could the same be true of social systems? Is that what we’re seeing as this thing unravels?
I can understand why so many went along with the bullying at the time. It takes a very brave and, possibly, foolhardy individual to buck the trend in public. Some did and persisted; then subsisted on a diet of crow for years. Some did, took tribal heat, and eventually folded; can’t blame them. It’s called surviving.
It’s the ones that bitched amongst themselves, never in public, but still presented a united front to the world that really makes me want to vomit.
The silence of the lambs is far more harmful than any amount of the lions roar!
This is why Judy Curry deserves recognition for her questioning of the “Cause”.
My admiration for Judith Curry is second to none, but the fact is that she was established and entrenched with, presumably, some kind of protection provided by tenure. If she wrote a paper that angered the powers that be, it wouldn’t appreciably effect her status. I worry about all the students who were indoctrinated by people like Jones and Mann and their disciples, and all the grad students who felt compelled to slant their theses to toe the “consensus” party line. I worry about those who, in applying for jobs at the institutions in question, were rejected for employment because they were deemed less than supportive of the “consensus” party line.
I studied English, History and Philosophy at a small liberal arts college in the late 60s. There were a handful of professors who were preaching left-wing politics instead of teaching their subject, but they were not taken all that seriously by the majority of students and faculty. I can’t imagine what it would be like in a situation where, say, left-wing or deconstructionist professors of literature, history and philosophy are the controlling authorities in the departments of these disciplines– where they dictate what can be taught and who gets to teach it. The ideal of true academic freedom is a joke to these people.
I can’t imagine what it would be like in a situation where, say, left-wing or deconstructionist professors of literature, history and philosophy are the controlling authorities in the departments of these disciplines– where they dictate what can be taught and who gets to teach it. The ideal of true academic freedom is a joke to these people.
######
as a deconstructionist in the early 80s, I can tell you that
most marxists considered decons to be vile because of De Mann and
because they found our anti historicism problematic and our refusal to
grant stable meaning to any text made all of their statements problematic.
In it’s derridean form deconstruction seeks to display how the rhetoric
in any text undermines itself.
It was more problematic being conservative than being a fun loving deconstructing skeptic.
To: Steven Mosher (Nov 30, 2011 at 8:41 PM)
Bl–dy hell! You were a deconstructionist! That’s one hell of a surprise to me.
It’s none of my business, I know, but I’d like to hear your views on Gross and Levitt’s “Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science”, but especially its take on decontructionists, if you wouldn’t mind. Add in the Sokal affair if you’re feeling genereous. 🙂
Regards,
John Archer
Nice to see such a robust display of academic freedom at Harvard.
Amazing how Mann projects his behavoir on Soon and Baliunus with his statement:
“Who knows what trickery has been pulled or selective use of data made.”
Mann knows exactly what trickery HE used to “hide the decline” and what selective use of data HE made.
Some of this is starting to look actionable by Soon and/or Baliunas. Is there a lawyer in the house that can comment?
Given the cross border nature of the conduct, and likely impact on income, I wonder if your Rico laws may apply?
Email 4933.txt – May 12, 2003
See the P.S. at the email of this email string.
How did Mann know Chris de Freitas was going to be dismissed?
Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 11:41:55 -0600
From: Jerry Meehl
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.79 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U)
X-Accept-Language: en
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Harvard-Smithsonian Climate study]
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-7.1 required=5.0
tests=FWD_MSG,QUOTED_EMAIL_TEXT,REFERENCES,SPAM_PHRASE_02_03,
USER_AGENT_MOZILLA_XM,X_ACCEPT_LANG
version=2.41
X-Spam-Level:
Mike,
Thanks! It never ceases to amaze me what tactics the naysayers come up
with–this latest, using what would appear to be a quasi-legitimate
“journal” to publish results that they then claim are peer-reviewed and
mainstream to launch a disinformation campaign, is very devious. Plus
it appears they have won–the current administration is on their
side–but they keep it up anyway. Bizarre.
Johannes Loschnigg (the AMS congressional fellow I mentioned) may
contact you directly if he needs more ammunition in his capacity of
climate person assigned to deal with these issues in Liebermann’s
office.
Thanks again!
Jerry
“Michael E. Mann” wrote:
>
> HI Jerry,
>
> This is crap of the worst kind–it was written explicitly for
> political purposes; there is no science there at all–the mainstream
> media completely ignored it, having figured that out, but various
> right-wing groups (such as “Western Fuels Association”) have continued
> to try to promote this in fringe media circles and through political
> channels within washington DC (so the story continued to appear on web
> sites like “Techcentralstation” and Murdoch-supported newspapers).
>
> I’ll forward a whole bunch of emails (in confidence) that should
> clarify the situation. We’ve all decided that this is so bad a direct
> response cannot even be made. Phil Jones and I, and Ray Bradley, Henry
> Diaz, and Malcolm Hughes are writing two review papers which will
> dismiss much of what they’ve said.
>
> please feel free to contact me for more information,
>
> cheers,
>
> mike
>
> p.s. NYT, Scientific American, and a few other journalists are working
> on exposes of Baliunas and co., and those should appear soon. It
> looks like Chris Defrietas, the editor at “Climate Research”
> responsible for publishing the Baliunas et al piece, and numerous
> other dubious other awful articles by “skeptics” over the past couple
> years, will be dismissed as a result of this latest act.
>
Should be email # 4993.txt – oops!
This tidbit contained in the above email too about Congressman Lieberman office connection.
Johannes Loschnigg (the AMS congressional fellow I mentioned) may
contact you directly if he needs more ammunition in his capacity of
climate person assigned to deal with these issues in Liebermann’s
office.
Thanks again!
Jerry
Apologies for O/T
I don’t know if this is a useful tool for anyone:
I’ve extracted date/time, to, from, cc and subject from the email headers of FOIA2009 & FOIA2011 and made a spreadsheet.
It’s especially useful if you want chronological ordering of the emails. The times are all corrected to GMT so the chronological order should be correct. There are about 15 files which didn’t parse correctly due to having massive CC lists or, in the case of Greenpeace, their server had dated their mail as been sent in the year 2094 (surely the Earth will have reached a tipping point by then).
I wrote the program to do this in MS C#…..but I’m about as capable as Phil Jones with Excell (though I actually used Open Office), so feel free to improve on my efforts…
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZXM4O4EQ
Steve: I have a similar collation at http://www.climateaudit.info/data/climategate2. I noticed the 2094 date as well.
Sounds good. Any chance of publishing the C# code as well?
Haha! Hi Richard! I can but I would find it a bit embarrasing as a recently self taught amateur ….just sorting out the Regex took me hours last night!
Ok, if you’re willing, send it to me – rdrake98 on the gmail label – and I will have a look in strictest confidence! Note I never laugh at useful software – that’s a professional promise. I appreciate you having a go at this and I’m sure I’ll learn something from it. If I clean it up in any way (including writing some unit tests, most likely) I’ll send it back to you and you can decide if you then want to make it more widely known. But I might use it to write a Ruby version of same thing. Or a CoffeeScript one. Regex doesn’t vary much between all these.
I’d also be thinking of exporting something more neutral than Excel format. But we can come to all that. I’ll only have a few hours for this in the next few days so think of this as just shooting the breeze for now. We must gradually do something truly open in honour of FOIA’s monumental efforts. But step at a time.
sent…maybe Richard can re-post it after tarting it up a bit.
Here’s my R-code for extracting information from the emails. There are a lot of date formats and the procedure is not very elegant. I could probably simplify it a bit if I did it again.
#collate emails: info and list K=5349 alias=c("000","00","0","") numbertochar=function(j) { n=nchar(j); paste(alias[n],j,sep="") } cru=rep(list(NA),K) for(i in 1:K) { handle=try(unz("d:/foi/FOIA2011.zip", paste( "FOIA/mail/",numbertochar(i),".txt",sep=""),"r")) if(! class(handle)=="try-error") {cru[[i]]=scan(handle,sep="\n",what=""); close(handle)} } # save(cru,file="d:/climate/data/cru/cru2.tab") parse=function(X) { Out=rep(list(NA),5) names(Out)=c("date","from","to","cc","subject") work=X[1:5] test = work[grep("from:",work)];if(length(test)==1) Out[["from"]]=substr(test,7,nchar(test)) test = work[grep("to:",work)];if(length(test)==1) Out[["to"]]=substr(test,5,nchar(test)) test = work[grep("date:",work)];if(length(test)==1) Out[["date"]]=substr(test,7,nchar(test)) test = work[grep("cc:",work)];if(length(test)==1) Out[["cc"]]=substr(test,5,nchar(test)) test = work[grep("subject:",work)]; if(length(test)==1) Out[["cc"]]=substr(test,10,nchar(test)) return(Out) } Info=rep(list(NA),K) ; for (i in 1:K) Info[[i]]= parse(cru[[i]]) Date=unlist( sapply(Info, function(A) A$date) ) h=function(x) { weekday=substr(x,1,3) x=substr(x,6,nchar(x)) fred=substr(x,1,11) return( as.Date(fred,"%d %b %Y")) } K=5349 temp= sapply(cru,length) >1 Date=rep(NA,K); for(i in (1:K)[temp]) Date[i]=Info[[i]]$date Date=data.frame(work=Date) Date$work=as.character(Date$work) dim(Date) Date$date=h(Date$work) Date$time=NA Date$zone=NA n=nchar(Date$work) temp=!is.na(Date$date) Date$time[temp]= substr(Date$work[temp],17,25) Date$zone[temp]= substr(Date$work[temp],n[temp]-4,n[temp]) Date$time=gsub(" ","",Date$time) temp=!is.na(Date$work)& is.na(Date$date);sum(temp) temp1=temp&nchar(Date$work)==24; sum(temp1) #1442 Date$date[temp1]= as.Date( paste(substr(Date$work[temp1],5,10),substr(Date$work[temp1],21,24)),"%b %d %Y") Date$time[temp1]= substr(Date$work[temp1],11,20) Date$time=gsub(" ","",Date$time) temp=!is.na(Date$work)& is.na(Date$date);sum(temp) temp1= temp & is.na(match(1:K, grep(",",Date$work) )); sum(temp1) temp2=nchar(Date$work)<=24 Date$date[temp1&!temp2]= as.Date( substr(Date$work[temp1&!temp2],1,11),"%d %b %Y") Date$time[temp1&!temp2]= substr(Date$work[temp1&!temp2],12,20) Date$time=gsub(" ","",Date$time) Date$zone[temp1&!temp2]= substr(Date$work[temp1&!temp2],n[temp1&!temp2]-4,n[temp1&!temp2]) temp=!is.na(Date$work)& is.na(Date$date);sum(temp) temp1= temp & !is.na(match(1:K, grep(",",Date$work) ))&is.na(match(1:K, grep("E",Date$work) )) ; sum(temp1) Date[temp1,] fred=sapply( strsplit( Date$work[temp1],", ") , function(X) X[[2]]) Date$date[temp1]=as.Date( substr( fred ,1,11),"%d %b %Y") Date$time[temp1]= sapply(strsplit(fred," "),function(A) A[[4]]) Date$date[temp1&is.na(Date$date)]=as.Date( substr( Date$work[temp1&is.na(Date$date)] ,7,18),"%d %b. %Y") Date$date[1992]=as.Date( substr( Date$work[1992] ,1,11),"%d %b %Y") Date$time[1992]= substr( Date$work[1992] ,13,20) Date$work[1576]=unlist(strsplit(Date$work[1576],",")) [2] Date$zone[temp1]= substr(Date$work[temp1],n[temp1]-4,n[temp1]) temp=!is.na(Date$work)& is.na(Date$date);sum(temp) # 6 n=nchar(Date$work) Date[temp,] Date$date[temp]=as.Date( substr( Date$work[temp],1,9),"%d %b %y") Date$time[temp]= substr( Date$work[temp] ,11,19) index=c(1576,2371,3991) Date$zone[index]=substr(Date$work[index],n[index]-2,n[index]) Date$time=gsub(" ","",Date$time) Date$julian=julian(Date$date,origin=as.Date("1970-01-01")) temp=Date$julian<0 &!is.na(Date$date) Date[temp,] test=strsplit(Date$work[temp],", ") fred=sapply(test,function(A) A[[2]]) Date$work[temp]=fred Date$date[temp]=as.Date( substr( fred,1,9),"%d %b %y") temp1=substr(fred,1,1)==" " fred[temp1]=substr(fred[temp1],2,nchar(fred[temp1]) ) Date$work[temp][temp1]=fred[temp1] Date$work[temp]=gsub("\\(KRS)","",Date$work[temp]) Date$work[temp]=gsub("+$ ","",Date$work[temp]) Date$time[temp]= sapply( strsplit(fred," "),function (A) A[[4]]) Date$zone[temp]= sapply( strsplit(fred," "),function (A) A[[5]]) Date$julian[temp]=julian(Date$date[temp],origin=as.Date("1970-01-01")) Date$julian[Date$julian16000]=NA temp1=temp&is.na(Date$julian) Date[temp1,] Date$date[temp1]=as.Date( substr( Date$work[temp1],1,11),"%d %b %Y") Date$julian=julian(Date$date,origin=as.Date("1970-01-01")) Date$julian[Date$julian16000]=NA temp=!is.na(Date$date)&is.na(Date$julian) Date[temp,] cru[[338]] temp=is.na(as.numeric(Date$zone))&!is.na(Date$date) &!is.na(Date$zone) index=grep("GMT",Date$zone) Date$zone[index]="+0000" index=grep("GMT",Date$zone) Date$zone[index]="+0000" index=grep("EDT",Date$zone) Date$zone[index]="-4000" index=grep("EST",Date$zone) Date$zone[index]="-5000" temp=is.na(as.numeric(Date$zone))&!is.na(Date$date) &!is.na(Date$zone) Date[temp,] index=grep("\\(",Date$work) fred= sapply( strsplit(Date$work[index],", "),function(A) A[[2]]) Date$work[index]=fred fred= sapply( strsplit(Date$work[index],"\\("),function(A) A[[1]]) fred=gsub(" +$","",fred) Date$work[index]=fred n=nchar(Date$work) Date$zone[index]=substr(Date$work[index],n[index]-4,n[index]) temp=is.na(as.numeric(Date$zone))&!is.na(Date$date) &!is.na(Date$zone) Date[temp,] Date$zone[grep("UT",Date$zone)]="+0000" temp=is.na(as.numeric(Date$zone))&!is.na(Date$date) &!is.na(Date$zone) Date[temp,] Date$zone[grep("BST",Date$zone)]="+0000" temp=is.na(as.numeric(Date$zone))&!is.na(Date$date) &!is.na(Date$zone) Date[temp,] Date$zone[grep("PDT",Date$zone)]="-8000" temp=is.na(as.numeric(Date$zone))&!is.na(Date$date) &!is.na(Date$zone) Date[temp,] Date$zone[grep("CET",Date$zone)]="+0000" Date$zone[grep("AST",Date$zone)]="+0200" Date$zone[2645]="+0100" Date$zone[grep(":",Date$zone)]=NA Date$julian=julian(Date$date,origin=as.Date("1970-01-01")) h=function(x) { y= as.numeric(unlist(strsplit(unlist(x["time"]),":") )) ; z=as.numeric(unlist(x["zone"]))/100 y[1]=y[1]-z y[3]+60*y[2]+3600*y[1]} sec=apply(Date,1,h) Date$juliansec=Date$julian*24*3600+sec test=match(Date$juliansec,info$id) temp=!is.na(test); sum(temp)#125 info=Date #save(info,file="d:/articles/climategate2/info.tab")I knew if I didn’t mention R something would be forthcoming! And just in case we want to use it I’ve registered the following:
https://github.com/foia
Git (Linus Torvalds’ distributed source code management system) is an acquired taste but everyone agrees that GitHub is pretty awesome and makes it the tool of choice. Let me know what you think we should put there, anyone.
Re: Steve’s VOG comment
The link http://www.climateaudit.info/data/climategate2 is giving a 404.
I want to thank FOIA and all the blogs for proving I have not been paranoid about these people. And now I can show explicitly all the things I have inferred over the past 10 yrs.
I am surprised at the mangling of English that is present in the Mann Emails. I know I mangle English quite frequently in non-official correspondence, but when going to an official at Harvard, one would have expected at least a spell and grammar once over of the email.
I can imagine what his normal writing would look like.
Kevin Trenberth on Chris Landsea’s resignation from the IPCC in 2004:
“I understand he has resigned from CA of our chapter. I responded to his earlier message in a fairly low key fashion. I think he has behaved irresponsibly and ought to be fired by NOAA for not have an open enough mind to even consider that climate change might be affecting hurricanes.”
http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=3896
Kevin seems nice.
lol. Perfectly said!
Shame on all of you! I insist you email him an apology this minute!
Kevin Trenberth needs to get his story straight.
In the email referred to above he says Landsea resigned.
In his version of the Landsea story on his web page, he says “one can’t resign from something that one is not a member of!”
And in email 4697.txt, discussing authors for AR4 Ch 3, he writes
“Landsea (who was fired by Susan Solomon)”.
“I think he has behaved irresponsibly and ought to be fired by NOAA for not have an open enough mind to even consider that climate change might be affecting hurricanes.”
This should be highlighted, underlined, bolded (is that a word?), italicized, and repeated. For a whole lot of reasons.
You couldn’t make this stuff up. Beyond parody.
I think a bunch of them must have missed the seminar on self-awareness.
A semi-related question. Can someone extract the digital representations from Figure 1 of http://coast.gkss.de/staff/storch/pdf/Soon.EosForum20032.pdf . I’m particularly interested in the values of the Briffa 2001 reconstruction that are behind the spaghetti strands. (It’s yet another ‘hide the decline’ graphic – one that has some extra significance as it was used to “discredit” Soon and Baliunas. It looks to me that it incorporates Mike’s Nature trick as well as Keith’s Science trick, but I need to see the digitization to be sure.
Is this it?
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/n_hem_temp/briffa2001jgr2.txt
Steve – it’s related to that series (which is the truncated version of the Climategate series). I think that the EOS diagram used Mike’s Nature trick of splicing instrumental data in the projection (rather than actual data). This can only be assessed by comparing.
Steve,
If using a PC, You could just ctrl-alt-prtscr the adobe window view and then paste into MS Paint. In paint cut the graphic, copy and paste into New paint image. Save to whatever format you like. Some formats will retain better quality than others with this technique.
Mis-understood. You meant digitize the image.
Are you looking for the plot points in order to manipulate them (digitize), or for a graphic that can be zoomed into to try to visually decode the lines on a pixel by pixel basis?
Re: Kan (Nov 30 12:31),
I’ve got what I need now.
Lovely high-resolution plot. If you zoom in really close you can clearly see where Briffa et al’s orange line popped out from behind the red one and had its head cleanly sliced off in 1941 at -0.05C
I’ll email you the numbers. There’s gaps where it’s overlapped because I didn’t use any tricks. If it was a different line you were interested in let me know.
Actually, I think I misunderstood as well – is it that images on a pdf can sometimes be separated into their elements? If so I’m no help 🙂
Re: FergalR (Nov 30 10:06),
thanks for this. yes, you’re right. Here’s a high-res image as you suggest. As you observed, the Briffa series has been cleanly truncated around 1941. HIde-the-decline plus, so to speak.
My, my.
just wow, my oh my as you say. Hope this gets elevated to its own thread quickly. There’s a lot to comment!
Whiff old ewe respect, this ease gating sealy – tweet : gain its mails bad.
At high magnifications (say, 1200%), one can just tell that the orange curve (Briffa et al. 2001) terminates in 1940. I get a value of -.048 at that point. The peak in Briffa’s original reconstruction (Briffa’s figure 4) is, coincidentally enough, at 1940.
[Note that Mann et al.’s “40-year smoothing” (why can’t people be precise?) changes the character of the Briffa curve considerably, e.g. reducing the three bottoms between 1640-1700 in Briffa’s original (with “25-year filtering”), to only two, and reducing their amplitude.]
Steve: Mann’s smoothing is almost certainly a butterworth filter. I’ve emulated this in other articles. Briffa uses a gaussian smooth.
TO THE MODERATOR:
Two of my posts appear to be hung up in the wordpress cache/spam/moderated folder. Both still show: Your comment is awaiting moderation, on my screen, so I assume they haven’t posted to the list.
The first was posted Nov 29, 2011 at 11:30 PM, and the second Nov 30, 2011 at 1:54 AM. The second was an attempt to repost a shorter version of the first when the first hadn’t shown up after a few hours.
If you would please recover and post one of them for me?
Thank you!!
I am appalled at the behaviour of the “team”. Their actions are clearly unethical, but have they done anything illegal? If so, there should be a concerted effort to make these people pay.
Good one regarding the “scientific” culture of RealClimate: (Via Bishop Hill comments)
————
date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:33:06 -0400
from: Michael Mann
subject: attacks against Keith
to: Phil Jones , Tim Osborn
Phil, Tim,
…………………
Meanwhile, I suspect you’ve both seen the latest attack against his (Briffa’s) Yamal work by McIntyre.Gavin and I (having consulted also w/ Malcolm) are wondering what to make of this, and what sort of response—if any—is necessary and appropriate. So far, we’ve simply deleted all of the attempts by McIntyre and his minions to draw attention to this at RealClimate.
………………………..
mike
Similarly, 0208.txt:
date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 11:57:34 -0400
from: Michael Mann
to: Phil Jones
HI Phil,
…
thanks for the update re CA–caught a hint of this latest fuss in a comment that came in at
RC (which we deleted from the queue).
mike
CA comments must conform to the RC definition of offensive.
I just picked up the November/December 2011 copy of “Skeptical Inquirer”.
Interesting bit on the “Age of Denialism: When Beliefs Trump Scientific Facts”.
Of course, climate change is mentioned (along with evolution, vaccines, AIDS, 9/11, Holocaust). Blech.
Ironic reading lines like “Providing people who hold strong beliefs reliable information that might undermine those beliefs causes them to cling to those beliefs even more strongly” with regards to the revelations in the emails,isn’t it?
Second best bit: “Skepticism is itself another misleading term in this context. Science-oriented, evidence-based skeptics prefer to call those who don’t accept good scientific evidence doubters or deniers.”
A bit of a mouthful, but I’m proud to call myself a science-oriented, evidence-based skeptic.
However, the BEST bit is the “AAAS Condemns Personal Attacks on Climate Scientists”.
Fun to read in the context of the smears we’ve read from the emails. And one wonders if Mann even read it. My emphasis in italic:
We are deeply concerned by the extent and nature of personal attacks on climate scientists….
…The progress of science and protection of its integrity depend on both full transparency about the details of scientific methodology and the freedom to follow the pursuit of knowledge…
…the scientific community has proven and well-established methods for resolving disagreements about research results.
Science advances through a self-correcting system in which research results are shared and critically evaluated by peers
and experiments are repeated when necessary. Disagreements
about the interpretation of data, the methodology, and findings are part of daily scientific discourse. Scientists should not be subjected to fraud investigations or harassment simply for providing scientific results that are controversial…
…The scientific community takes seriously its responsibility for policing research misconduct, and extensive procedures exist to protect the rigor of the scientific method and to ensure the credibility of the research enterprise.
Not sure if trying to get someone fired, or banned from journals is a “proven and well-established method for resolving disagreements about research results”, but maybe that’s just the “new normal”.
I suspect that there is a nagging voice at the back of Mann’s psyche that is telling him he may be wrong and that a retraction might be forced upon him. This would explian the venom with which he tries to supress his critics.
The most discouraging aspect of these emails to me is that conclusions were reached on the Soon and Baliunas paper (sleight of hand was used) before anyone had actually studied the paper and tried to find real flaws. Apparently, the team assumed that because the conclusion was “wrong”, the work must be bad. I cannot imagine a response like this in my research area. Scientists in my field who make disagreements personal and attack people based on the fact that they reached different conclusions rapidly lose respect and credibility, and that is as it should be.
The pathological behavior revealed in these emails will hurt all of science in the realm of public opinion, which ultimately determines research funding levels. I should point out that there are some untainted climate scientists who still act like scientists and openly admit and address mistakes in previous publications (Lindzen comes to mind). However, the team seems incapable of admitting any mistakes ever, as indicated by the vigorous defense of “hide the decline”.
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