Disconcerted at being left out of the recent Climategate publicity, Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island breathlessly blamed (now here) recent break-ins at the university’s climate center on shadowy fossil fuel groups. Weaver connected the break-ins to Britain’s Climategate, which IPCC officials have attributed to shadowy Russian secret agents. Weaver said that the shadowy group took a “dead” computer and ruffled his papers. Weaver said that the ruffling of his papers was “evidence of a larger effort to discredit climate science”.
In other news from the University of Victoria, the Department of Anthropology issued an urgent warning about numerous break-ins throughout the campus, an excerpt from which folows: Continue reading →
We have a new and hopefully final home. It has been a very big and complicated job moving climateaudit.org with its nearly 2000 threads, over 200,000 comments, plus images, data, scripts to wordpress.com, which has large enough facilities to prevent the chronic server problems that plagued climateaudit as a standalone server. camirror.wordpress.com was set up to deal with overthrow while our new “home” was being prepared and has been transferred as well.
What substantially complicated the move was our desire to preserve the very large number of links to existing climateaudit images and threads (which I’m told create a subterranean draw and which we didn’t want to disconnect.) Anthony, Mr Pete and John A all contributed to the move, which was accomplished during a period when I was otherwise occupied so to speak. I’m very grateful to them. WordPress.com went several extra yards to accomodate the move and I’m very grateful to their staff as well. We think the old addresses are all pointing to the new addresses – let us know if you have any problems.
Known issues:
– Tip jar not workingtemp fix installed – P
– Prev-page links for older comments not working on some postsfixed – A
– Many images are missingfixed -A
– Some sidebar links missing/brokenfixed all but one which will be fixed soon as I have the file -A
– Author highlighting broken on (some) old postsfixed – P
– Comment reply box not showing for some readers.should be fixed – P
– Long post titles “wrap” on top of author/date
– Most-recent comments should be at the end, even if threaded. They are not.
Features from the old CA we would like to restore if/when possible:
– “Paste Link” allowing visible linkage between comments
– Enhanced reply box with formatting buttons
A new thread. Just back from the studio. I’ve been interviewed a couple of times now, but I’m not experienced at television. This was the first time that I’ve been on a panel.
My main impressions. You sure don’t have time to expand a point. You’d better be thinking in point form before you get there. Second, everyone wants to put you into a pigeonhole. And when you’re dealing in sound bites, there’s not much that you can do about. I appreciated the invitation from CNN (as I have other invitations). I thought that the questions were polite.
The video is here:
Update: Invited by John Roberts to be on CNN tomorrow morning (Dec 11) about 7.30 a.m.
An excellent analysis of whether the CRU zipfile was “hacked” or “leaked” here, arguing for a combination of a dossier prepared by the university in relation to potential FOI responsibilities (though not necessarily FOI requests in hand) and discovery of the dossier by someone at the university who released it to the outside world – very much along the lines hypothesized by Charles the Moderator of WUWT, but substantially fleshed out.
This is a detailed analysis, unlike IPCC allegations of attacks by the Russian secret service (their version of “A miracle occurred”).
Michael Schlesinger, apparently oblivious to the adverse public reaction to behavior of CRU scientists, threatened Andy Revkin of the New York Times with the “Big Cutoff”. Schlesinger’s email expressed particular annoyance that this was the second time in a week that he had had to give directions to Revkin, an earlier email having instructed Revkin not to give space in his blog to the Pielkes.
. Continue reading →
First, the bad news. I lost in the final of the Canadian “Century” doubles squash championships today. I played a good semi-final yesterday and not so well today.
I’ve agreed to appear on Campbell Brown, CNN tomorrow. Normally they don’t take an interest in doubles squash, but these are unusual times, I guess. I presume that they’re interested in my take on the squash matches over the weekend. Also, the respective merits of three-wall nicks versus reverse corners.
Also, I was taped last week by Fox News for a documentary which (I think) will be on this week. They interviewed me for a couple of hours. This was before the weekend squash tournament and they were interested in climate rather than squash. They were in Toronto for the Munk Debates and also interviewed George Monbiot (who I had a very pleasant cup of coffee with off both our records) and others. They were very well prepared – far more than anyone else. They knew (and asked) about such esoterica as the Starbucks Hypothesis. I’m not experienced in this type of interview and I’m sure that my answers were invariably too dull. We’ll see.
Obviously, there’s been lots of coverage on Climategate. Jon Stewart’s commentary on the Daily Show neatly rebutted spin by Gavin Schmidt on the “trick”, on the availability of “value added” data and closing with a sensible moral: don’t cut corners. It’s too bad that he wasn’t on the case with Upside Down Mann, where, at a certain point, the only reasonable discussion was satire.
James Delingpole is one of the first to observe the Climategate phenomenon as “uber-viral” – a story where there is much larger internet exposure than MSM exposure.
Citing Richard North, he compares the number of Google hits to the number of Google News hits for phrases of interest, comparing, for example, “Climategate”, a word that did not exist 14 days ago, to “Tiger Woods”, who has been adding to his celebrity in unexpected ways.
Updating the comparisons, “Climategate” has 32,000,000 google hits as compared to 4,080 news stories (Google), while “Tiger Woods” has 29,500,000 google hits with 54,018 news stories (Google). Although Tiger has over 10 times as many news stories, Climategate (remarkably) has more google hits than Tiger Woods (and many other famous search items e.g. Britney Spears, NFL, NBA or for that matter “climate”).
“IPCC” has 1,320,000 Google hits and 7,839 news stories (Google). If nothing else, the numbers show an extraordinarily intense interest in this story in the blogosphere, with increasing news media interest.
Obviously, I’ve done less blogging in the last couple of weeks than I have for a long time. A variety of reasons. I’ve done a lot of interviews, not all of which have resulted in quotes. I find it hard to write when I’m doing a lot of talking. Maybe, some people can’t, but I have trouble. Second, there are so many interesting topics for me in the Climategate Letters that I hardly know where to begin. I start down one interesting aspect and then get distracted and end up with notes on 15 things. Third, I’ve felt very tired.
Gerry North told the Washington post that the NAS panel did exactly the same thing as Phil Jones’ trick. (Dec. 1, 2009) North is talking through his hat. North:
We put the tree ring record on the graph and stuck the instrument record on for the last 50 years in exactly the way [Phil] Jones in his [leaked] email referred to as a ʻtrickʼ. We did not know of his email (it was happening at the same time and we were careful not to have any contact with the IPCC process going on at that time), and we did precisely the same thing because it was the natural thing to do
This isn’t Jones’ trick.
The “problem” arises because Briffa reconstruction goes down from 1940 to 1994 instead of up.
Jones deleted the post-1960 values of the Briffa reconstruction, replaced them with instrumental values, smoothed the spliced series (see posts by both Jean S and myself proving this) and ended up with a reconstruction that looked like an accurate reconstruction of late 20th century temperatures. He didn’t merely show a temperature series alongside a proxy reconstruction, which is what the NAS panel did.
The NAS panel had a different approach to the “problem” of the Briffa reconstruction. They simply didn’t show it.
If North is going to issue pronouncements on Jones’ trick, then he should at least know what Jones’ trick is. If he doesn’t know precisely what it was (as he obviously doesn’t), then it’s better to say nothing than to pretend that he knows what it was.
Disconcerted at being left out of the recent Climategate publicity, Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island breathlessly blamed (now here) recent break-ins at the university’s climate center on shadowy fossil fuel groups. Weaver connected the break-ins to Britain’s Climategate, which IPCC officials have attributed to shadowy Russian secret agents. Weaver said that the shadowy group took a “dead” computer and ruffled his papers. Weaver said that the ruffling of his papers was “evidence of a larger effort to discredit climate science”.
