Climate Scientists and Preaching to the Choir

Nov 27, 2009 – 12:07 AM

Climate scientists like preaching to the choir, but right now, perhaps they should consider the possibility that a little outreach would be in order.

In normal times, Climate Audit has a large audience; right now, its audience is far larger than normal and includes journalists as well as the public. Given recent events, I made an extra effort to solicit editorial content that would be supportive of IPCC views and asked Jones’ long-time associate, Tom Wigley, to write a contribution for Climate Audit:

Dear Dr Wigley,

Would you be interested in writing a guest post for Climate Audit (see camirror.wordpress.com for recent posts) and responding to comments?

Regardless of how Jones and Mann have portrayed me, I’ve tried to be conscientious. My interest has been primarily in statistical questions that I found interesting and where I was convinced that I was right. Obviously the reception of these points has been frustrating. I notice in the CRU letters that you occasionally considered the possibility that we had made valid points.

I realize that there’s been sort of a community boycott against climate scientists speaking directly to the audience at Climate Audit. Despite this past, I think that it is important that climate scientists now speak directly to this audience (which presently extends far beyond the core audience.) I don’t think that it will suffice to merely present through Real Climate in the present circumstances.

You may write whatever editorial you wish without any restrictions on my part and have an author password.

Regards,
Steve McIntyre

Wigley replied:

No thanks.
Tom.

I’ll try to solicit some other contributions. This situation shall pass. I don’t think that it’s helpful for people in the field right now to merely congregate at realclimate, though that is obviously more comfortable. I appreciate Judy Curry’s editorial and I’ll make some other attempts along this line.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (110)

The Trick

Nov 26, 2009 – 8:25 PM

For the benefit of new readers, we discussed some aspects of the “trick” at Climate Audit in the past. Obviously, the Climategate Letters clarify many things that were murky in the past. On the left is a blowup of IPCC 2001 Fig 2.21 showing where the Briffa reconstruction (green) ends. More on this below. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate | Tagged , | Comments (74)

IPCC: “Inappropriate” to show the decline

Nov 26, 2009 – 7:45 PM

One reviewer of the IPCC 2007 Assessment Report specifically asked IPCC not to hide the decline. The reviewer stated very clearly:

Show the Briffa et al reconstruction through to its end; don’t stop in 1960. Then comment and deal with the “divergence problem” if you need to. Don’t cover up the divergence by truncating this graphic. This was done in IPCC TAR; this was misleading (comment ID #: 309-18)

The IPCC said that it would be “inappropriate to show recent section of Briffa et al. series“.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, IPCC, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (25)

New!! Data from the Decline

Nov 26, 2009 – 5:12 PM

For the very first time, the Climategate Letters “archived” the deleted portion of the Briffa MXD reconstruction of “Hide the Decline” fame – see here.

Gavin Schmidt claimed that the decline had been “hidden in plain sight” (see here. ). This isn’t true. The post-1960 data was deleted from the archived version of this reconstruction at NOAA here and not shown in the corresponding figure in Briffa et al 2001, though pre-calibration values were archived in a different NCDC file here. While the decline was shown in Briffa et al 1998 and Briffa 2000, it was not shown in the IPCC 2001 graph, one that Mann, Jones, Briffa, Folland and Karl were working in the two weeks prior to the “trick” email (or for that matter in the IPCC 2007 graph, an issue that I’ll return to.) For now, here is a graphic showing the deleted data in red. A retrieval script follows.


Figure 1. Two versions of Briffa MXD reconstruction, showing archived and climategate versions. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Briffa, climategate, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (106)

The Deleted Portion of the Briffa Reconstruction

Nov 26, 2009 – 3:25 PM

“Hide the decline” refers to the decline in the Briffa MXD temperature reconstruction in the last half of the 20th century, a decline that called into question the validity of the tree ring reconstructions. (I’m going to analyze the letters on another occasion.) In the IPCC Third and Fourth Assessment Reports, IPCC “hid the decline” by simply deleting the post-1960 values of the troublesome Briffa reconstruction – an artifice that Gavin Schmidt characterizes as an “a good way to deal with a problem” and tells us that there is “nothing problematic” about such an artifice (see here. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, General | Tagged , , | Comments (123)

Willis Eschenbach’s FOI Request

Nov 25, 2009 – 11:42 PM

Willis Eschenbach’s account of his FOI request has been published on other blogs (e.g. here ) but I’m re-publishing it because Willis actually sent it to me first and the events all played out and were documented in real time at Climate Audit (see here for posts on FOI).  After pursuing matters until April 2007, Willis gave up.  The next part of the story started again in June 2009 when I decided to try again for the station data, this time initially requesting station data received by the Hadley Center (on the basis that they might not be able to assert exemptions claimed by Hadley Center. ) This, of course, led to an interesting sequence of events last summer, resulting in the present situation.

In the Climategate Letters, early on, Phil Jones expressed his worry that McKitrick and I might discover this legislation. In fact, it was Willis who discovered that the applicability of the legislation. Thus, his story below.  This is one perspective and an interesting one. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, FOIA | Tagged , | Comments (140)

Denying Email Deletion

Nov 24, 2009 – 12:51 PM

Phil Jones, Dec 3, 2008:

About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all.

Phil Jones, Nov 24, 2009 Guardian

We’ve not deleted any emails or data here at CRU.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (212)

More on the "RC Hack"

Nov 24, 2009 – 10:38 AM

Commenters on the earlier thread have presented another explanation of the “RC Hack”. The same idea occurred to several people and has been presented at several blogs (tAV for example). I’ll cite Steve Mosher’s below both because he knows computers and is very familiar with the facts:

If you look at all the emails you will that some bozo transmitted a logon and password ( steve, tosser) in one of the mails.

So, it’s entirely possible that at sometime Gavin or somebody else sent a admin logon and password for RC to somebody at CRU, say briffa. So that the person at CRU could upload a file. Then, the insider at CRU found this mail
and had everything he needed. A file to upload and a RC password to allow him to do it. And he completed the
irony by linking to the file by a post at CA.

just a theory.

An example of such an email with signon and password is in the ClimateGate Letters here.

I’ve sent similar emails to various people which entitle them to post at Climate Audit – Roman Mureika, Jean S, UC, Hu McCulloch, to name a few. Also Judy Curry who’s posted at CA but has probably lost her password. And a few who haven’t taken advantage of the offer e.g. Michael Tobis.

Admin status and editor status are separately defined. To upload a pdf file, Author status is enough. I’ve placed a variety of pdf’s in climateaudit directories and uploading the zip file seems analgous to (say) roman uploading a file to a CA directory. The next question to ask Gavin is whether they ever emailed a password to a CRU author. If they did, then that would seem to close the circle with the simplest explanation.

Reviewing Gavin’s statement on the matter under this theory:

At around 6.20am (EST) Nov 17th, somebody hacked into the RC server from an IP address associated with a computer somewhere in Turkey, disabled access from the legitimate users, and uploaded a file FOIA.zip to our server. They then created a draft post that would have been posted announcing the data to the world that was identical in content of the comment posted on The Air Vent later that day.

I don’t see any reason to contest the statement that the zip file was uploaded. I don’t understand why uploading the zip file would disable access to “legitimate users” or what purpose would have been gained by doing this. Further details on this would be interesting.

The idea of unveiling the files through a manifesto at RealClimate is definitely an interesting and odd aspect to the events.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (71)

"A miracle just happened"

Nov 23, 2009 – 7:32 PM

Gavin Schmidt states categorically that the FOIA.zip was uploaded to RC around 6.20 am Eastern [Update – Aug 23, 2011: noticed that this was changed to 7:20 am] and that 4 downloads took place prior to RC regaining control of their blog.

He also observes that there is a previously unnoticed reference to the file (and I confirm that I had not previously noticed the significance of the comment here at 5.24 am blog time (7.24 am Eastern) where the name of the poster “RC” (identified as contrib@realclimate.org ) included a hyperlink http://www.realclimate.org/FOIA.zip with a comment as follows:

A miracle just happened.

What was the miracle? Posting the file at RC or getting the file in the first place? Dunno. Gavin’s comment in full is as follows:

There seems to be some doubt about the timeline of events that led to the emails hack. For clarification and to save me going through this again, this is a summary of my knowledge of the topic. At around 6.20am (EST) Nov 17th,[Update – Aug 23, 2011: noticed that this was changed at RC to 7:20 am] somebody hacked into the RC server from an IP address associated with a computer somewhere in Turkey, disabled access from the legitimate users, and uploaded a file FOIA.zip to our server. They then created a draft post that would have been posted announcing the data to the world that was identical in content of the comment posted on The Air Vent later that day. They were intercepted before this could be posted on the blog. This archive appears to be identical to the one posted on the Russian server except for the name change. Curiously, and unnoticed by anyone else so far, the first comment posted on this subject was not at the Air Vent, but actually at ClimateAudit (comment 49 on a thread related to stripbark trees, dated Nov 17 5.24am (Central Time I think)). [SM note – actually 7.24 am Eastern] The username of the commenter was linked to the FOIA.zip file at realclimate.org. Four downloads occurred from that link while the file was still there (it no longer is).

The use of a turkish computer would seem to imply that this upload and hack was not solely a whistleblower act, but one that involved more sophisticated knowledge. If SM or JeffID want to share the IPs associated with the comments on their sites, I’ll be happy to post the IP address that was used to compromise RC.

I don’t know why Gavin wants to enter into negotiations about disclosing IP addresses. I’m not interested in such negotiations. The IP address of the commenter at CA was Russian 82.208.87.170.

Lots of theories.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (142)

WSJ

Nov 23, 2009 – 7:03 PM

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.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate, Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (21)