FOIed Emails on Hansen Y2K

Jan 14, 2010 – 5:37 PM

If anyone is wondering whether emails by U.S. government employees are “private” and “personal” – an assertion sometimes made in respect to emails at CRU, an institution subject to UK FOI – the answer in respect to NASA GISS appears to be no.

Link: 

Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained internal documents from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) related to a controversy that erupted in 2007 when Canadian blogger Stephen McIntyre exposed an error in NASA’s handling of raw temperature data from 2000-2006 that exaggerated the reported rise in temperature readings in the United States.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (250)

The Mosher Timeline

Jan 12, 2010 – 11:35 PM

Patrick Courrielche has done an interesting timeline on the outing of the Climategate emails here, here, here in which Mosher’s busy November 17-19 has been publicized for the first time.

I thought that it would be useful to collect my own memory of the events while it is still relatively fresh, which I’ll do today. In doing so, I reviewed contemporary blog comments, reconciling the various blog times to a common time zone, and reviewed the timeline with Mosh, Lucia, Anthony and Jeff Id, in order that it would be as accurate as possible.

Mosh has a forthcoming book on Climategate that I haven’t seen and which will amplify the story. In addition, Bishop Hill has an excellent book that I have seen that was finished before Climategate, written in his usual lucid style that should be published this month as well.
Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate | Tagged | Comments (578)

Nature Anti-FOI Editorial Criticized

Jan 12, 2010 – 2:12 PM

A Nature reader has run the gauntlet at Nature, who published a criticism of their anti-FOI editorial. David Bell of the University of Nottingham’s letter reads as follows:

Climate e-mails: lack of data sharing is a real concern

Your Editorial (Nature 462, 545; 2009) castigates “denialists” for making “endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts”. But you do not mention the reason — that the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has systematically tried to avoid revealing data and code.

Science relies upon open analysis of data and methods, and the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has a clear data-sharing policy that expects scientists “to cooperate in validating and publishing [data] in their entirety”. The university’s leaked e-mails imply a concerted effort to avoid data sharing, which both violates the best practice defined in NERC policy and prevents verification of the results obtained by the unit. Asking for scientific data and code should not lead to anyone being branded as part of the “climate-change denialist fringe”.

David R. Bell
Molecular Toxicology,
School of Biology,
University of Nottingham, Nottingham

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate | Tagged , | Comments (107)

National Domestic Extremism Team

Jan 8, 2010 – 3:11 PM

Bishop Hill reports here that he was advised today that the UK National Domestic Extremism Team has been called in by the Norfolk Constabulary. Bishop Hill reports the following statement:

Norfolk Constabulary continues its investigations into criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia. During the enquiry officers have been working in liaison with the Office of the Information Commissioner and with officers from the National Domestic Extremism Team. The UEA continues to co-operate with the enquiry however major investigations of this nature are of necessity very detailed and as a consequence can take time to reach a conclusion. It would be inappropriate to comment further at this stage.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate | Tagged | Comments (275)

Team Responses to MM2003

Jan 7, 2010 – 12:16 PM

As I mentioned the other day, it’s very interesting for me to re-read the responses of Team members to the publication of MM2003. While Mann, Briffa and Bradley all start shooting bullets in every direction, Osborn’s reaction is thoughtful and nuanced and I urge readers to read it in full. Unfortunately, the Team paid little attention to Osborn’s suggestions. Had they done so, much time and effort would have been saved.
Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate | Tagged | Comments (137)

Climategatekeeping: the Nature Intervention

Jan 5, 2010 – 11:42 AM

Today I’ll review one interesting sentence in Climategate Letter 1080257056 on March 22, 2004, in which Jones tells Santer

She [Heike] sent me an email to review a paper two weeks ago. Said I didn’t have time until May.

Innocuous enough on the surface. What makes this sentence interesting (and I noticed it because I looked for something like this) is that, in my opinion, the sentence is sufficient to identify the paper in question. Further, there is convincing evidence that Jones did in fact carry out the requested review (after May, as he says here) and, even though the review is not in the Climategate documents, it is nonetheless accessible and, together with other Climategate Letters, leads on to many backstories.
Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (197)

Back to 2003

Jan 4, 2010 – 11:42 PM

Today I spent some time re-visiting 2003 in light of the Climategate Letters.

I was intrigued by the very first allusion to Mc and Mc in the Climategage Letters in a trailer to an Oct 26, 2003 letter (the day before MM2003 was released) here . A climate scientist (not identified in the trailer), stated that the instability of Mann’s reconstruction to variations in input data was “known by most people who understand Mann’s methodology”:

Personally, I’d offer that this was known by most people who understand Mann’s methodology: it can be quite sensitive to the input data in the early centuries . Anyway, there’s going to be a lot of noise on this one, and knowing Mann’s very thin skin I am afraid he will react strongly, unless he has learned (as I hope he has) from the past.

Mann’s very first response – before he even considered what was in the paper – was to email the Team (in this case, Bradley, Hughes, MacCracken, Schneider , Crowley, Wigley, Socc, Oppenheimer, Briffa, Jones, Osborn, Tim Profeta of Lieberman’s staff, Santer, Hegerl, Mosley-Thompson, Lonnie Thompson and Trenberth) concluding as follows:

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.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, MBH98 | Comments (73)

What Happened to Polar Urals?

Jan 4, 2010 – 9:57 AM

Addiction of paleoclimate reconstructions to particular proxies has been a longstanding concern at Climate Audit.

One of the battleground issues has been the addiction to Briffa’s Yamal tree ring series, while the nearby update of Polar Urals (with a pronounced MWP) was disappeared. (See CA category.)

Just before Climategate, we raised questions about the Yamal reconstruction – noticing first that, contrary to prior belief, it was not “highly replicated”, having far fewer modern trees than is standard for an RCS reconstruction, and that the reconstruction was highly sensitive to inclusion of a nearby Schweingruber site (Khadyta River, Yamal). Briffa did not deny the validity of this criticism, instead attempting to salvage the reconstruction by adding in cores from some nearby sites (but notably not Polar Urals.)

The elephant in the room remained the disposition of the Polar Urals site. A 1995 Briffa reconstruction from this site purported to show that 1032 was the “coldest” year in the millennium. Updated data had shown elevated ring widths in the MWP. However, Briffa hadn’t reported this. (Schweingruber had archived the updated measurement data at the ITRDB, but no journal article had reported the results.

The Climategate Letters have a teaser here. On April 28, 2006 (almost exactly the same date as I was being stonewalled about Yamal, Taymir and Tornetrask measurement data), Osborn emailed Philip Brohan of the UK Met Office:

To: philip.brohan@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
From: Tim Osborn
Subject: Re: Standardisation uncertainty for tree-ring series
Cc: Keith Briffa ,simon.tett@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Hi Philip,
we have three “groups” of trees:
“SCAND” (which includes the Tornetrask and Finland multi-millennial chronologies, but also some shorter chronologies from the same region). …

“URALS” (which includes the Yamal and Polar Urals long chronologies, plus other shorter ones). These fall mainly within these 3 boxes:
52.5E, 67.5N
62.5E, 62.5N (note this is the only one not at 67.5N)
67.5E, 67.5N

“TAIMYR” (which includes the Taimyr long chronology, plus other shorter ones). These fall mainly within these 4 boxes:
87.5E, 67.5N
102.5E, 67.5N
112.5E, 67.5N
122.5E, 67.5N

We do some analysis at the group scale, and for this we take the JJA temperatures from each box and average to the group scale to obtain a single series from each of SCAND,
URALS and TAIMY.

We do some analysis at the overall scale, and for this we take these three group temperature series and average them to get an overall NW Eurasia temperature for boxes
with tree chronologies in them…

So on this occasion, the long Polar Urals chronology, together with other “shorter” chronologies (presumably the Schweingruber chronologies that Gavin Schmidt condemned) were included in a larger regional RCS reconstruction – something that Rob Wilson would have been interested in seeing.

But the subsequent Briffa et al (2008 Phil Trans B) only includes the very small Yamal data – without the long Polar Urals chronology or the shorter chronologies. Wonder why?

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, Yamal and Urals | Tagged , | Comments (50)

Difference in Yamal Versions “Not Insignificant”

Jan 4, 2010 – 9:20 AM

In July 2003, Tim Osborn advised Tom Crowley that there were multiple versions of Yamal (and Tornetrask) and that he needed to contact Briffa prior to using:

The other files are “tornad.rcs” and “yamal.rcs” which are RCS-standardised tree-ring width series. I would really strongly suggest that you contact Keith Briffa about exactly what these series are and what the primary reference to them should be. The reason is that there are multiple version of Tornetrask and Yamal series and the differences are certainly not insignificant!

Yep.

Something that people might bear in mind before assuming that the Yamal version used for corridor standardization in Hantemirov et al 2002 would also be used for RCS standardization.

On March 31, 2006, Osborn of CRU told the editors of Science:

We did not use tree-core measurement data in our paper, only chronologies that had previously been assembled by others from core measurement data. I don’t have any core measurement data and therefore have none to give out!

Contrary to Osborn’s claim not to have any “core measurement data” for Yamal, the Climategate documents show that CRU had an extensive collection of Yamal measurement data – see the Climategate Yamal directory. [Note: this website only lists the files, but doesn’t contain the files. The files are in the original download.]

Not only did CRU actually have Yamal measurement data (which it had had since the 1990s), the CRU letters showed that CRU had funded collection of the Yamal data (at least in part).

I haven’t parsed the Yamal measurement directory yet, but have glanced at it and readers will be interested in the results when I get to them.

[Update/Jean S:  FOIA files are online here: http://junkscience.com/FOIA/]

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, Yamal and Urals | Tagged , | Comments (69)

“Sent loads of station data to Scott”

Jan 1, 2010 – 3:15 PM

“Community” climate scientists (e.g. Nature, Realclimate) have been quick to accept the idea that CRU was prevented from releasing station data because of confidentiality agreements with originating meteorological services.

Something that Nature and Realclimate didn’t discuss or even seem to notice – and the blind spot is symptomatic – is that Jones delivered “confidential” data to his friends. In a Climategate Letter in early 2005, Jones told Mann that he had just sent “loads of station data to Scott [Rutherford]”, Mann’s close associate.

I guess that it didn’t occur to Nature or to Gavin Schmidt that confidentiality agreements also apply to masters of the universe. If the data is as confidential as Nature and Realclimate say, then the distribution of confidential data to associates and other third parties in breach of the confidentiality agreements may warrant just as much attention as Jones’ effort to obstruct FOI requests.
Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, CRU, FOIA | Tagged | Comments (205)