Articles Tagged "ClimateGate"

The Science and Technology Committee will hold an oral evidence session following-up to the previous committee’s report on the disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

The session will be on:

Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 10.30 am

Thatcher Room, House of Commons

The Committee will take evidence from Lord Oxburgh, who headed the International Panel that was set up by the University to assess the integrity of the research published by the Climatic Research Unit.

An oral evidence session with Sir Muir Russell, who headed the Independent Climate Change E-mails Review, will be announced in October.

The sessions will focus on how the two reviews responded to the former committee’s recommendations about the reviews and how they carried out their work.

Inquiry page: The Reviews into the Climatic Research Unit’s E-mails at the University of East Anglia

A group investigating the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will recommend in a report Monday that the scientific organization beef up its capacity to ferret out errors in its scientific assessments, a member of the investigating body said.

But the group, appointed by the InterAcademy Council, a consortium of national scientific academies, won't pass judgment in its report on the state of knowledge about global warming and its causes. It also won't address whether IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri should resign—a step that some critics have called for and that the chairman has said he doesn't intend to take.

The IPCC and the U.N. requested the probe in March, under mounting public pressure following the disclosure of a handful of errors in a roughly 3,000-page scientific report the IPCC published in 2007.

The IPCC is a sprawling organization in which thousands of scientists and other experts around the world volunteer their time to help write massive reports about every six years assessing climate science.

CHARLOTTESVILLE -- A team of lawyers for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, a vocal skeptic of global warming, went to court Friday to further his investigation into whether former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann manipulated data to show that there has been a rapid, recent rise in the Earth's temperature.

Lawyers from the attorney general's office said the climate scientist might have engaged in fraud by purposely designing his well-known "hockey-stick" graph to show global warming or including manipulated research on his curriculum vitae, which he submitted for grants.

Deputy Attorney General Wesley G. Russell Jr., who argued the case on Cuccinelli's behalf, said there was a possibility of a "consistent pattern of manipulation of data."

But attorneys for the university say other investigations found no wrongdoing by Mann, who did not attend Friday's hearing.

Cuccinelli issued a civil investigative demand, essentially a subpoena, for documents from U-Va. for five grant applications Mann prepared and all e-mail between Mann and his research assistants, secretaries and 39 other scientists across the country. U-Va. is fighting back, arguing that the demand exceeds Cuccinelli's authority under state law and intrudes on the rights of professors to pursue academic inquiry free from political pressure.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that meteorologist Joe Bastardi is one of my favorites. Yesterday he wrote a scathing piece at his European blog about his alma mater Penn State for the way it whitewashed the Michael Mann affair, and other things.

Joe Bastardi is a graduate of Penn State, receiving a degree in Meteorology and is a leading Accuweather meteorologist. His seasonal forecasts almost always far outperform those of “climate scientists”. It’s because Joe knows what he’s talking about, the “climate scientists” don’t. A Penn State investigation of Michael Mann, author of the infamous hockey stick graph, led to his exoneration, much to the protest of the scientific community. Many called the investigation a whitewash. Bastardi agrees. At his blog he writes:

Though I have a degree from the once proud and great meteorology department, it was EARNED during its glory day, when we graduated 2/3rds of the worlds meteorologists, and were the envy of other schools. That was yesterday, and yesterdays gone.

and says:

Penn State has lost its way.

I will no longer refer to myself as a Penn State grad, nor promote the university in my appearances.

Click source to read FULL report from P Gosselin

The University of East Anglia is to receive JISC funding for a project to open up its research on global warming to scrutiny and re-use.

The university, which was at the centre of a scandal revealed by leaked emails from its Climatic Research Unit, will examine how best to expose climate data for re-use, make it easier for researchers to find the data and to understand its validity.

The results will be used by the British Atmospheric Data Centre, which already provides access to a significant proportion of the climate data output of the UK research community.

Dr Simon Hodson, programme manager at JISC, said: "Climate scientists have been under the spotlight recently: there have been technical and cultural challenges to making data and methods openly available, and a perception of failure to do so has been taken by critics of mainstream climate science as an indication of unsound science.

1. Introduction

News broke on or around November 19 2009 that a large archive of emails and files from the Climate Research Unit had been released on the internet. The contents of the files were sufficiently disconcerting to the public, governments and university administrations to prompt the establishment of a number of inquiries. This paper reviews the official inquiries.

During the public uproar over the climategate emails, the main concerns that were repeated over and over could be distilled to the following questions.

1. Did the scientists involved in the email exchanges manipulate, hide, invent or otherwise misrepresent evidence in IPCC or WMO reports so as to mislead readers, including policymakers?
2. Did the scientists involved delete emails or other documents related to the IPCC process in order to prevent disclosure of information subject to Freedom of Information laws?
3. Did the scientists involved in the email exchanges express greater doubts or uncertainties about the science in their own professional writings and in their interactions with one another than they allowed to be stated in reports of the IPCC or WMO that were intended for policymakers?
4. Did the scientists involved in the email exchanges take steps individually or in collusion to block access to data or methodologies in order to prevent external examination of their work?
5. Did the scientists involved in the email exchanges take steps individually or in collusion to block publication of papers, or to intimidate or discredit journals, in order to prevent rival scientific evidence from being published?

My examination of the Climategate inquiries centers on the extent to which they succeeded in providing credible answers to these questions. As will be shown, the various inquiries reviewed evidence that leads to an affirmative answer in each case, and in many cases the inquiries reached affirmative answers, yet couched the conclusions in terms that gave the opposite impression. In other cases they simply left the questions unanswered. In some cases they avoided the issues by answering irrelevant questions.

Click source to download PDF file and read FULL report from Ross McKitrick

Two part YouTube from Piers Corbyn

Part 1


Piers Corbyns review of the July Forecast and Weather forecast for August 2010

See below for Part 2 (Climategate & Met Office News)

With inquiries into the affair now complete, Phil Jones reflects on his bruising experiences at the centre of the storm

UNTIL late November 2009, Phil Jones was just another successful scientist - director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK, and respected by his peers, but hardly a public figure. That changed abruptly when a selection of emails spanning more than a decade were hacked from the CRU and placed on a public server.

The Copenhagen climate negotiations were two weeks away. Within days, the emails were being scrutinised by millions, via the blogosphere and media. Those from Jones were among the most controversial. Some climate sceptics portrayed him as a fraud, conspiring with colleagues to manipulate data and distort peer review in order to perpetuate the global "conspiracy" of human-induced climate change.

The strain of these events is clear when Jones walks into the office UEA provided for our interview, and his gaze is averted as he folds his frame into the corner of an armchair. It has been two weeks since the last independent inquiry into "climategate", headed by former UK civil servant Muir Russell, was published. Jones has agreed to break a silence of five months as the CRU prepares to put its data and software online (see "Climategate data sets to be made public"). With him is Trevor Davies, the university's pro-vice-chancellor of research and himself a former director of the CRU.

Phil, how did the controversy affect you personally?

Click source to read FULL report

To the colourful Daily Telegraph blogger James Delingpole, it was winner of the coveted award for the "Biggest front page non-story in history of journalism". What he was referring to was a tale published a week ago under the by-line of The Times's enviromment correspondent Ben Webster which led the paper, covering virtually the entire front-page and with a whole further page inside, beneath the huge headline "Oil giant gives £1 million to fund climate sceptics."

Everything about this story was bizarre. Its essence, based on information which as Webster told us was had been supplied by Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Institute on Climate Change, was that Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, last year gave "almost £1 million" to four US think-tanks.

These hired lackeys had then shamefully gone on to describe the various official inquiries into the Climategate emails scandal as "whitewashes", apparently citing them as evidence that the dangers of global warming had been "grossly exaggerated".

The story concluded by suggesting that Exxon Mobil had clearly corrupted these four venal think tanks into giving "the oil company at least another year of freedom to reap the profits of its high-carbon strategy".

Do you remember the Institute of Physics submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry? The institute's criticisms, being so strongly worded and coming from such an important body, were seen as highly significant. The opening gambits of the paper gives a flavour of the rest:

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law.

Soon after the submission appeared, things became a little heated. Without warning, the IOP issued a clarification, stating that it still officially believed in global warming. Then a story appeared in the Guardian, linking the paper to a known sceptic named Peter Gill, a member of the IOP group responsible for the submission.

The Guardian reporter, David Adam, made much of Gill's involvement, entitling his article "Energy consultant linked to physics body's submission" and quoting statements Gill had made on the subject of global warming. This was despite the fact that the Institute had told him that Gill was not the main author of the submission nor did it mainly reflect his views. 

Click source to read FULL report