Stolen CRU emails: Who are the criminals behind the conspiracy theorists?

[Snowy Owl]

Stolen CRU emails:


Who are the criminals behind the conspiracy theorists?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-..._b_366474.html
Kevin Grandia

Former Republican strategist Marc Morano is having as much fun with the stolen emails from the Climate Research Unit that he did with the Swift Boat Veteran's for Truth attack he led against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

Morano and his site Climate Depot has become the climate conspiracy hub since this story broke on late Thursday.

This cabal of climate deniers seems to think that 12 year-old emails between climate scientists somehow refutes the thousands of research papers produced over decades by thousands of researchers at some of the best scientific institutions in the world.


While Morano is the master of right-wing spin and is using these emails for his political agenda, the bigger question here is:
Who stole all this private data from the University in the first place?

The folder of information contains over 3,800 separate files and it is clear that someone has taken a lot of time to pull together what they thought would be the most damaging. This is not the work of a hacker, unless that hacker is extremely well-versed in climate science, and specifically the conspiracy theories of the climate denial movement.


This package of stolen data and emails would have taken hundreds of hours to compile and someone out there knows exactly how all this went down.


Terry Hurlbut at the Examiner has a time line of the stolen data going public which is a good start. I am sure one of our intrepid readers will get to the bottom of this. Tell you what. I'll race you.

[Snowy Owl]

Who leaked the Hadley CRU files and why

November 21

http://www.examiner.com/x-28973-Esse...-files-and-why

The anonymous tipster, whom many people initially assumed had "hacked" into the computers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (repeatedly called the "Hadley CRU," by mistake), might in fact be a CRU insider who released the files for his own reasons.


The user, known only as "FOIA" (which now appears to be a reference to the British equivalent of the US Freedom of Information Act), left only one comment on The Air Vent to announce his release of his 61-MB ZIP archive.



He has never been heard from since, nor has anyone stepped forward claiming to be that person since the story became widely known.


Persons knowledgeable in information security hold that this is not the behavior of a hacker. A hacker normally boasts of his act, even if he were hired or otherwise suborned to commit his act by someone else. These two reports provide illustrations of such behavior.


Other commenters have observed that the very form and organization of the archive, which expands to 168 MB of text files, word-processing documents, PDF files, raw data, and even program code, indicate that someone already having access to the system logged in through his usual channels, made the archive, and then logged out.


The user's choice of words indicate someone having a motive to disclose to the world certain activities and mindsets that the user found distasteful, at least.


This Examiner has been able to reconstruct a timeline of the story, from the initial attempt by the user to publish his material to another site, to the events of yesterday morning.



However, before presenting this timeline, this Examiner is obliged to issue a correction: the phrase "Hadley CRU" is not the true name of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. The first person to use that phrase was Anthony Watts, of Watts Up With That. As RealClimate.org and others have noted, Watts is the first person to use the phrase "Hadley Centre" to describe the CRU. This is incorrect; the CRU does not use the word "Hadley" in its name, and the "Hadley Centre" is an entirely separate institution, having no connection with Phil Jones or his team beyond, perhaps, being in sympathy with Jones' stated theories and goals. That Watts was initially confused becomes evident when the photograph of the Hadley Centre headquarters, published on the Centre's own web site, is compared with the photograph that Watts initially ran with his own comment. Watts has since replaced that photograph with one of the actual CRU building.


The timeline begins on November 17, when the user named "FOIA" left this comment at The Air Vent site:

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.
We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.
This is a limited time offer, download now:

He then continued with a link to a Russian anonymous FTP account. (That account no longer works, but this Examiner was able to obtain the archive from it when a correspondent alerted him to it.)


This is consistent with Phil Jones' statement to Ian Wishart of Investigate magazine, dated November 20. Jones said that he had known about a security breach of his organizations computers "three or four days ago," having heard about the matter first from the administrators of RealClimate.org. Concerning RealClimate's immediate reaction, Jones said:

Real Climate were given information, but took it down off their site and told me they would send it across to me. They didn’t do that. I only found out it had been released five minutes ago.

RealClimate's own statement says this:

We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

This indicates that the tipster first tried to submit his material to RealClimate.org, and when the administrators refused to accept it, he then established his Russian anonymous FTP account and submitted the link in his comment to The Air Vent.
The Air Vent's administrator, Jeff Id, was out-of-contact when the comment was posted. No one said another word about it until, two days later, the user named Steven Mosher alerted The Blackboard. Initially he left only a link to the original post, not a specific comment link. But apparently Lucia, the Blackboard administrator, followed the link and examined the files for herself. She was, however, reluctant to publish the link, but another user, Jean S, published it for her. In the process, she said this:

Seems to me that someone has hacked UAH computers. All e-mails seem to contain at least an addrees ending uea.ac.uk. Also all the files seem to be UAH-related. At least some of the material has to be real, there are just so many small details that were just impossible to fake (for instance under briffa-treering-external/timonen there are some file names only a Finn would use).

She might be referring to file names like "kilpisj" and "hossapal", and extensions like "tuc". The file names fail to translate when subjected to Google's Translate routines.


At the same time, Steven Mosher published an alert to Climate Audit. Then within hours, Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That published his own brief commentary. Shortly after that, this Examiner made his initial report, which is, as far as this Examiner has been able to determine, the first report by a professional or semi-professional journalist of this whole affair.



Ian Wishart, editor and publisher of Investigate, also took note of the story at the same time and published his own initial blog entry, in which he announced that he had sent an e-mail to Phil Jones requesting an interview.


In all that time, the original poster of the Russian FTP link never made another comment in any forum. As discussed above, this is not typical of a hacker. A hacker would be boasting about his act, and loudly. Instead, his file sat in that anonymous FTP account for more than forty-eight hours, and the poster never made any further attempt to publicize his find. Hence the conclusion, by this Examiner and a host of other commenters, including IP security professionals, that this unknown user was one who had had access to CRU computers, in accordance with his duties at the CRU.


Mr. Stephen McIntyre at Climate Audit has made no secret of his repeated attempts to demand, under Britain's Freedom of Information Act, that Phil Jones and his team yield up the data that are the basis of their claims for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and its effects.



Preliminary analysis of the archived e-mails also indicates that Jones knew of McIntyre's efforts and was taking steps to stall and thwart them, in violation of the law. Perhaps, then, someone at CRU decided to take the law into his own hands.

A request-for-comment to Mr. McIntyre from this Examiner is now pending.
Climate Audit is back on-line, though it appears to be slow to load.

more at http://www.examiner.com/x-28973-Esse...-files-and-why

[Snowy Owl]

From WAtts Up With That

CRU Emails – search engine now online

21 11 2009 Quite a lot of interest continues in the files from CRU that were leaked/hacked and placed on a Russian FTP server. Quite a number of other websites have been things with them ranging from commentary to evaluation of validity. With over 1000 emails, it is a bit of a task to wade through.


Release of CRU files forges a new hockey stick reconstruction

20 11 2009 It seems no matter where you look, “hockey stick” shapes pop out of data related to climate. Today, the most extraordinary day in climate science seen in quite some time, was no exception.
And, the day is not over. But honestly I’m too tired to continue. Thus I’m going to present the dataset gleaned today in raw form, but without the final endpoint. There’s no smoothing nor splicing of dissimilar datasets, but granted it is not a complete dataset. I’ll have complete data tomorrow.
Readers will recognize that even though the endpoint has not been established, the conclusion from the graph is clear. We are living in times of extraordinary data, never before seen. It’s accelerating, and worse than we though

Read the rest of this entry »

[Snowy Owl]

Although these leaked or stolen informations might impact Scientists of all Fields (I am thinking of the Medical Experts and Scientists) we cannot copy and paste the content of these emails because it has been declared stolen by the U.K. and might be illegal to relay stolen private emails.

But here is what Wall Street Journal has to say about it;
Hacked Emails Show Climate Science Ridden with Rancor

NOVEMBER 21, 2009, 3:39 P.M. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1258...googlenews_wsj

By KEITH JOHNSON

The picture that emerges of prominent climate-change scientists from the more than 3,000 documents and emails accessed by hackers and put on the Internet this week is one of professional backbiting and questionable scientific practices.



It could undermine the idea that the science of man-made global warming is entirely settled just weeks before a crucial climate-change summit.

Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England, were victims of a cyberattack by hackers sometime Thursday. A collection of emails dating back to the mid-1990s as well as scientific documents were splashed across the Internet. University officials confirmed the hacker attack, but couldn't immediately confirm the authenticity of all the documents posted on the Internet.

The publicly posted material includes years of correspondence among leading climate researchers, most of whom participate in the preparation of climate-change reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authoritative summaries of global climate science that influence policy makers around the world.

The release of the documents comes just weeks before a big climate-change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, meant to lay the groundwork for a new global treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change.

Momentum for an agreement has been undermined by the economic slump, which has put environmental issues on the back burner in most countries, and by a 10-year cooling trend in global temperatures that runs contrary to many of the dire predictions in climate models such as the IPCC's.

A partial review of the emails shows that in many cases, climate scientists revealed that their own research wasn't always conclusive. In others, they discussed ways to paper over differences among themselves in order to present a "unified" view on climate change. On at least one occasion, climate scientists were asked to "beef up" conclusions about climate change and extreme weather events because environmental officials in one country were planning a "big public splash."

The release of the documents has given ammunition to many skeptics of man-made global warming, who for years have argued that the scientific "consensus" was less robust than the official IPCC summaries indicated and that climate researchers systematically ostracized other scientists who presented findings that differed from orthodox views.

Since the hacking, many Web sites catering to climate skeptics have pored over the material and concluded that it shows a concerted effort to distort climate science. Other Web sites catering to climate scientists have dismissed those claims.


The tension between those two camps is apparent in the emails. More recent messages showed climate scientists were increasingly concerned about blog postings and articles on leading skeptical Web sites. Much of the internal discussion over scientific papers centered on how to pre-empt attacks from prominent skeptics, for example.
Fellow scientists who disagreed with orthodox views on climate change were variously referred to as "prats" and "utter prats." In other exchanges, one climate researcher said he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap out of" a prominent, skeptical U.S. climate scientist.

In several of the emails, climate researchers discussed how to arrange for favorable reviewers for papers they planned to publish in scientific journals. At the same time, climate researchers at times appeared to pressure scientific journals not to publish research by other scientists whose findings they disagreed with.

One email from 1999, titled "CENSORED!!!!!" showed one U.S.-based scientist uncomfortable with such tactics. "As for thinking that it is 'Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us' … as though we are the gatekeepers of all that is acceptable in the world of paleoclimatology seems amazingly arrogant.



Science moves forward whether we agree with individual articles or not," the email said.

More recent exchanges centered on requests by independent climate researchers for access to data used by British scientists for some of their papers. The hacked folder is labeled "FOIA," a reference to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by other scientists for access to raw data used to reach conclusions about global temperatures.

Many of the email exchanges discussed ways to decline such requests for information, on the grounds that the data was confidential or was intellectual property.

In other email exchanges related to the FOIA requests, some U.K. researchers asked foreign scientists to delete all emails related to their work for the upcoming IPCC summary. In others, they discussed boycotting scientific journals that require them to make their data public.

[Snowy Owl]

Here is what the NY Times has to say about this;

Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: November 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/sc...21climate.html

Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views.



Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.


Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.



The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.



However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.
In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discuss gaps in understanding of recent variations in temperature.



Skeptic Web sites pointed out one line in particular: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.

The cache of e-mail messages also includes references to journalists, including this reporter, and queries from journalists related to articles they were reporting.



Officials at the University of East Anglia confirmed in a statement on Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and that the police had been brought in to investigate the breach. They added, however, that they could not confirm that all the material circulating on the Internet was authentic.


But several scientists and others contacted by The New York Times confirmed that they were the authors or recipients of specific e-mail messages included in the file. The revelations are bound to inflame the public debate as hundreds of negotiators prepare to negotiate an international climate accord at meetings in Copenhagen next month, and at least one scientist speculated that the timing was not coincidental.
Dr. Trenberth said Friday that he was appalled at the release of the e-mail messages.

But he added that he thought the revelations might backfire against climate skeptics. He said that he thought that the messages showed “the integrity of scientists.” Still, some of the comments might lend themselves to being interpreted as sinister.

In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns over the last two millenniums, Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide the decline” in temperatures.

Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, confirmed in an interview that the e-mail message was real. He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often used the word “trick” to refer to a good way to solve a problem, “and not something secret.”

At issue were sets of data, both employed in two studies. One data set showed long-term temperature effects on tree rings; the other, thermometer readings for the past 100 years.



Through the last century, tree rings and thermometers show a consistent rise in temperature until 1960, when some tree rings, for unknown reasons, no longer show that rise, while the thermometers continue to do so until the present.


Dr. Mann explained that the reliability of the tree-ring data was called into question, so they were no longer used to track temperature fluctuations. But he said dropping the use of the tree rings was never something that was hidden, and had been in the scientific literature for more than a decade. “It sounds incriminating, but when you look at what you’re talking about, there’s nothing there,” Dr. Mann said.


In addition, other independent but indirect measurements of temperature fluctuations in the studies broadly agreed with the thermometer data showing rising temperatures.



Dr. Jones, writing in an e-mail message, declined to be interviewed.
Stephen McIntyre, a blogger who on his Web site, climateaudit.org, has for years been challenging data used to chart climate patterns, and who came in for heated criticism in some e-mail messages, called the revelations “quite breathtaking.”

But several scientists whose names appear in the e-mail messages said they merely revealed that scientists were human, and did nothing to undercut the body of research on global warming.



“Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA whose e-mail exchanges with colleagues over a variety of climate studies were in the cache. “Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.”

He said the breach at the University of East Anglia was discovered after hackers who had gained access to the correspondence sought Tuesday to hack into a different server supporting realclimate.org, a blog unrelated to NASA that he runs with several other scientists pressing the case that global warming is true.

The intruders sought to create a mock blog post there and to upload the full batch of files from Britain. That effort was thwarted, Dr. Schmidt said, and scientists immediately notified colleagues at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The first posts that revealed details from the files appeared Thursday at The Air Vent, a Web site devoted to skeptics’ arguments.


At first, said Dr. Michaels, the climatologist who has faulted some of the science of the global warming consensus, his instinct was to ignore the correspondence as “just the way scientists talk.”

But on Friday, he said that after reading more deeply, he felt that some exchanges reflected an effort to block the release of data for independent review.


He said some messages mused about discrediting him by challenging the veracity of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin by claiming he knew his research was wrong. “This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people’s reputations in very serious ways,” he said.

Spencer R. Weart, a physicist and historian who is charting the course of research on global warming, said the hacked material would serve as “great material for historians.”

[Snowy Owl]

Here comes Washington Post

In the trenches on climate change, hostility among foes

Stolen e-mails reveal venomous feelings toward skeptics


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...112102186.html

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 22, 2009 (40 minutes ago)

Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.

While few U.S. politicians bother to question whether humans are changing the world's climate -- nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal -- public debate over the debate persists. And the newly disclosed private exchanges among climate scientists at Britain's Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and eager to punish its enemies.


In one e-mail, the center's director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University's Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"


In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes.


"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones replies.


Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who comes under fire in the e-mails, said these same academics repeatedly criticized him for not having published more peer-reviewed papers.


"There's an egregious problem here, their intimidation of journal editors," he said. "They're saying, 'If you print anything by this group, we won't send you any papers.' "


Mann, who directs Penn State's Earth System Science Center, said the e-mails reflected the sort of "vigorous debate" researchers engage in before reaching scientific conclusions. "We shouldn't expect the sort of refined statements that scientists make when they're speaking in public," he said.

Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute who has questioned whether climate change is human-caused, blogged that the e-mails have "the makings of a very big" scandal.


"Imagine this sort of news coming in the field of AIDS research," he added.

The story of the hacking has ranked among the most popular on Web sites ranging from The Washington Post's to that of London's Daily Telegraph.

And it has spurred a flood of e-mails from climate skeptics to U.S. news organizations, some likening the disclosure to the release of the Pentagon Papers during Vietnam.


Kevin Trenberth, who heads the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and wrote some of the pirated e-mails, said it is the implications rather than the content of climate research that make some people uncomfortable.

"It is incontrovertible" that the world is warming as a result of human actions, Trenberth said. "The question to me is what to do."
"It's certainly a legitimate question," he added. "Unfortunately one of the side effects of this is the messengers get attacked."



In his new book, "Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save the Earth's Climate," Stanford University climate scientist Stephen H. Schneider details the intense debate over warming, arguing that it has helped slow the nation's public policy response.

"I've been here on the ground, in the trenches, for my entire career," writes Schneider, who was copied on one of the controversial e-mails. "I'm still at it, and the battle, while looking more winnable these days, is still not a done deal."

[Snowy Owl]

Climate scientists accused of 'manipulating global warming data'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/env...ming-data.html
Some of the world’s top climate scientists have been accused of manipulating data on global warming after hundreds of private emails were stolen by hackers and published online.


Published: 8:00AM GMT 21 Nov 2009

The material was taken from servers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – a world-renowned climate change research centre – before it was published on websites run by climate change sceptics.

It has been claimed that the emails show that scientists manipulated data to bolster their argument that global warming is genuine and is being caused by human actions.

One email seized upon by sceptics as supposed evidence of this, refers to a “trick” being employed to massage temperature statistics to “hide the decline”.


The university yesterday confirmed that research data had been stolen and published online and said it had reported the security breach to police.
A spokesman said: “We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites.



“Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all this material is genuine.


“This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and have involved the police in this inquiry."


The files were apparently first uploaded on to a Russian server and then mirrored across the internet.



An anonymous statement accompanying the emails said: “We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”



One of the emails under scrutiny, dated November 1999, reads: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."


Scientists who are alleged to be the authors of the emails in question have declined to comment on the matter.

[Snowy Owl]

This climate email-hacking episode is generating more heat than light

Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate scientists and so-called sceptics, and this one is likely to lead to more public confusion

Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate scientists and so-called sceptics, with the hacking of email messages between some of the world's leading researchers on global temperature trends. But as usually happens in the blogosphere, this episode is generating more heat than light and is likely to lead to more public confusion over the causes of climate change.

For the past few years, a small group of climate change 'sceptics' have been poring over scientific journal papers that report historical trends in temperatures from around the world, as recorded by directly by thermometers and other instruments, and by 'proxies', such as tree rings.



Their primary objective has been to seek out evidence that global warming has been invented by climate researchers who fake their data.

Among their main targets have been papers published by research teams led by Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University and Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia, and particularly those featuring the famous 'hockey stick' graph, showing that average temperature in the northern hemisphere was relatively stable and constant for most of the last couple of millennia, but rose dramatically upwards in the last 100 years.



This graph appeared prominently in the landmark Third Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001, which concluded that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations".
The attacks on the hockey stick graph led the United States National Academy of Sciences to carry out an investigation, concluding in 2006 that although there had been no improper conduct by the researchers, they may have expressed higher levels of confidence in their main conclusions than was warranted by the evidence.

The 'sceptics' believe they have been vindicated and have presented the hockey stick graph as proof that global warming is not occurring. In doing so, they have ignored the academy's other conclusion that "surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence".

More importantly, these skeptics have not overturned the well-established basic physics of the greenhouse effect, namely that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and increasing its concentration in the atmosphere causes the earth to warm.



They also have not managed to make melting glaciers and rising sea levels, or any other evidence of warming, disappear into thin air. But they have managed to confuse some of the public about the causes of climate change.

Over the past five years, Mann and Jones in particular have been subjected not only to legitimate scrutiny by other researchers, but also to a co-ordinated campaign of personal attacks on their reputation by 'sceptics'.

If the hacked e-mails are genuine, they only show that climate researchers are human, and that they speak badly in private about 'sceptics' who accuse them of fraud.

It is inevitable as we approach the crucial meeting in conference in Copenhagen in December that the sceptics would try some stunt to try to undermine a global agreement on climate change. There is no smoking gun, but just a lot of smoke without fire.

• Bob Ward is Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science

[Snowy Owl]

Harrabin's Notes: E-mail arguments

In his regular column, the BBC's environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, assesses the arguments sparked by the leaking of information on climate change.


Hacked e-mails have raised questions on climate change data

Scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia are facing a fierce attack from climate sceptics following the hacking of the university's computer.

The hacker stole thousands of e-mails and data. Much of it has been posted on the web. And some of the e-mails are causing acute embarrassment.

My contacts at the CRU tell me the e-mails are being taken out of context and insist they are part of the normal hurly-burly of conversations between scientists working on some of the most complicated questions of our times.


They ask how many of us would feel completely comfortable if our own inboxes were emptied out for the world to see. How much of what we had said to close colleagues in industry jargon would be liable to misinterpretation?



"If the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) can't do closed e-mail, no-one with any expertise could do anything. I don't know how you are supposed to work if you don't have e-mail," my source said.

But the e-mail stash is proving a treasure trove for sceptics who have challenged every facet of climate science and policy.

Some of the e-mails reveal the frustration and annoyance among mainstream climate researchers about the probings they face from critics who relentlessly question their methodology.



And although my contact insists that the e-mails are about how data is presented and interpreted, sceptics say the e-mailers may have been discussing how the data could be manipulated.



The CRU has been repeatedly asked to publish the entire data set from which it compiled an important grid-based record of global temperatures.
It says it will publish full details when it has clearance from all the world's meteorological offices whose permission is needed.



But speaking to my source at the CRU, it is also clear that the unit has been dragged down by what it considers to be nit-picking and unreasonable demands for data - and that there is personal animus against their intellectual rivals.



Now this sort of hostility is nothing new in academia - but the revelations come at a sensitive time as the world's nations gather for the climate meeting in Copenhagen.



My CRU source points out that its unpublished full data set is almost identical to the ones at the National Climatic Data Center and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies.



Both of these are in the US, where there are no restrictions on publication. The CRU view is that when the sceptics see the full data in due course they will be very disappointed.



The scientific establishment is likely to support the CRU. Despite continuing uncertainties in some areas of climate science, they say officially that their overall confidence that humans are warming the climate is now more than 90%.



One leading figure told me unofficially that confidence was now at 99%.

But the email controversy may prove an uncomfortable moment in the careers of some researchers in the spotlight and will undoubtedly provoke demands for renewed scrutiny of the CRU's influential work.

These demands may surface in the US Senate, where climate change sceptics and their allies are holding up the energy and climate bill which President Obama needs before he can sign a legally-binding agreement over cutting emissions.

Myron Ebell, a climate sceptic from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is funded by US business interests, told me: "We sceptics have been winning the argument for some time and this will further undermine confidence in IPCC science.


"This is very embarrassing indeed for the scientists behind these emails."

The climate science website RealClimate sees the CRU computer raid as the latest attempt by lobbyists to discredit mainstream climate science at a critical time.

It explains in detail what it says is the legitimate scientific rationale behind some of the apparently incriminating emails, and says they offer a glimpse into the real world of science.


It says people should not be shocked by "scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in 'robust' discussions; scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense...

"It's obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this," says RealClimate. "But it's important to remember that… gravity isn't a useful theory because Newton was a nice person."

[Snowy Owl]

Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists

Hundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world's leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online


http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...-leaked-emails


Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world's leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.


The files, which in total amount to 160MbB of data, were first uploaded on to a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it."

A spokesperson for the University of East Anglia said: "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all this material is genuine. This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and have involved the police in this inquiry."

In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

This sentence, in particular, has been leapt upon by sceptics as evidence of manipulating data, but the credibility of the email has not been verified.


The scientists who allegedly sent it declined to comment on the email.


"It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating," said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "You can't tell what they are talking about. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick."


In another alleged email, one of the scientists apparently refers to the death of a prominent climate change sceptic by saying "in an odd way this is cheering news".

Ward said that if the emails are correct, they "might highlight behaviour that those individuals might not like to have made public." But he added, "Let's separate out [the climate scientists] reacting badly to the personal attacks [from sceptics] to the idea that their work has been carried out in an inappropriate way."


The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data - reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. "Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data," he said. "At the heart of this is basic physics."


Ward pointed out that the individuals named in the alleged emails had numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. "It would be very surprising if after all this time, suddenly they were found out doing something as wrong as that."

Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: "I'm not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity.



I'm hoping the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows."


When the Guardian asked Prof Phil Jones at UEA, who features in the correspondence, to verify whether the emails were genuine, he refused to comment.


The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from sceptics in recent years. There have been repeated calls, including Freedom of Information requests, for the Climate Research Unit to make public a confidential dataset of land and sea temperature recordings that is "value added" by the unit before being used by the Met Office.



The emails show the frustration some climatologists have had at having to operate under such intense, often politically motivated, scrutiny.


Prof Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, "Evidence for climate change is irrefutable. The world's leading scientists overwhelmingly agree what we're experiencing is not down to natural variation."


"With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic."


A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "If you looked through any organisation's emails from the last 10 years you'd find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world's leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke."

[Snowy Owl]

A climate change dust-up

One side sees hacked e-mail as a sign of a 'Warmist Conspiracy.' The other says it's being taken out of context. Analysts don't expect it to have much effect on the Senate greenhouse gas bill.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-a...0,913036.story

Reporting from Washington and London - Is it a "Warmist Conspiracy," or a case of an e-mail being "taken completely out of context"?

Regardless, the latest dust-up over the science of climate change appears unlikely to affect the dynamics of either a pending debate in the Senate or international climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month.

Conservative bloggers have seized on a series of e-mails between leading climate scientists, which were obtained by computer hackers and posted online last week, as evidence of a scientific conspiracy to push claims about human-caused global warming.

But advocates of action to curb global warming dismiss those claims, and political leaders and analysts say the Senate bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions will sink or swim based on economics, not science.

"The scientists are going to fight about this for decades," said Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of several Senate Republicans who say they are open to some form of a climate bill. "We should be doing something to curb our emissions that would not harm the economy, and could in fact boost the economy," he said.

The British institution at the center of the debate confirmed Saturday that its server had been hacked and that it had contacted the police to pursue an investigation of what it believes was a criminal act.

The University of East Anglia said it could not confirm the authenticity of all the hacked data, including e-mails that have been published on the Internet, because of their sheer volume.

But it accused the hackers of using the material selectively and out of context to undermine the "strong consensus" that global warming exists, and declared that such misuse of information "cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way."

An e-mail by one of the university's professors, Phil Jones, has been singled out by skeptics as proof that scientists have deliberately misled the public on the issue.

In the 1999 e-mail, Jones wrote of using a "trick" to hide an apparent decline in recent global temperatures on a chart being prepared for use by a meteorological organization. But in a statement posted on the university's website Saturday, Jones said that the e-mail had been "taken completely out of context" and that there had been no misrepresentation of data.

"The word 'trick' was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward," Jones said.

Skeptics of man-made global warming disagreed, trumpeting the e-mails online. "The Death Blow to Climate Science," one website headlined. Another hailed a "Warmist Conspiracy."

Last week, the leading Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, declared 2009 "The Year of the Skeptic"; on Saturday, a spokesman for environment committee Republicans, Matt Dempsey, said the e-mails, if authentic, "would have a profound impact on the debate" over the climate bill.

Advocates of the bill disagreed. "The science is clearly on the side of those who are concerned the world is warming," said Joshua Freed, a senior advisor for clean energy at the think tank Third Way.

The e-mail controversy, said Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the pro-climate bill group Clean Energy Works, "does absolutely nothing to change the fact that we are now closer than ever before to reaching binding international and domestic deals. We have a path to success in the Senate and at Copenhagen and beyond."

A clear majority of senators appears to back some action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. President Obama and congressional leaders have framed their support for the bill largely in terms of its potential to create "clean energy" jobs in the United States.

[Snowy Owl]

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ja...lobal-warming/
By James Delingpole

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)


When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential.



As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium.



Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause.



This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.


I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media.



And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.


The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

[sharon sanders]

EDITORIAL: Hiding evidence of global cooling



science exposed among climate-change believers



By THE WASHINGTON TIMES


Scientific progress depends on accurate and complete data. It also relies on replication. The past couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations about the baloney practices that pass as sound science about climate change.

There is a lot of damning evidence about these researchers concealing information that counters their bias. In another exchange, Mr. Jones told Mr. Mann: "If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone" and, "We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind." Mr. Jones further urged Mr. Mann to join him in deleting e-mail exchanges about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) controversial assessment report (ARA): "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re [the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report]?"
In another e-mail, Mr. Jones told Mr. Mann, professor Malcolm K. Hughes of the University of Arizona and professor Raymond S. Bradley of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst: "I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!"

snip



http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...lobal-cooling/

[Snowy Owl]

The Day Science Died


by Phillip Ellis Jackson | November 25th, 2009

Who are you going to believe? Scientists, or your lying eyes?

The revelations in recent days that prominent members of the scientific community have been deliberately falsifying data to support the political conclusion that man is primarily responsible for "Global Warming" (now commonly referred to as "Global Climate Change," since the planet is actually not getting warmer), has raised a troubling question.

Unlike the social sciences, where agendas and opinions often substitute for "facts," the hard sciences are supposedly pure, objective and rational.



Here numbers don't lie, statistically demonstrable trends aren't self-serving conjecture, and the only agenda behind these scientific inquiries is a pure, unfettered, search for the truth.



If tree rings and dying polar bears tell us the planet is getting warmer, and an increase in C02 levels tell us man and man alone is responsible for the warming, then by God (or by Gore for those who can't quite fathom the notion that there is a Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe), the science is "settled."



Anyone who thinks differently is just a religious fanatic trying to impose his version of God on the rest of humanity, or equally despicable, an anti-intellectual moron who's missing several of his teeth as well as major neural synapses.


And yet, there's this nagging, troubling problem that surfaced a few days ago where these same Keepers of the Truth on Anthropogenic Global Cooling/Warming/Climate Change have been shown to be, well, a bunch of hypocrites and liars.



Contravening data is ignored, suppressed or destroyed; supporting data is cherry-picked or manufactured out of whole cloth, and overlapping all of this is a political agenda tied to utopian social change and economic redistribution. Other than that, the evidence is pretty clear and convincing that man is the primary agent of global climate change going back hundreds, if not thousands of years.


Now, to those of us imbued with a modicum of common sense, this "Joe vs. the Volcano" scenario where Joe supposedly affects the climate more than nature does seemed a little, well, stupid to borrow a favorite phrase of mine. No one denies that man can affect portions of the planet by setting off a nuclear bomb here, building a dam there, or paving over a field and building a city or highway system. But to claim that all this is more of a reason for presumed global climate change than erupting volcanoes or the presence or absence of sunspots is, well, there's that word again: stupid.


I first posed this question back in 2006, for which I was roundly criticized as a "wingnut" and anti-science flat-earther.

Al Gore tells us that the world is getting hotter, and that man is responsible for making it that way. Unless we take drastic steps now to correct this problem the ice caps will melt, our cities will flood, farmland will dry up and the rainforests will die. Before we get caught up in the same hysteria that thirty years earlier predicted the arrival of a new Ice Age, we might pause for a moment and ask: is any of this true? And if it is, what role did man really play in altering the climate, and if it is getting hotter, what (if anything) can he actually do about it?
. . .

In other words, if there's a big ball of vibrating, pulsating, fiery gas up in the sky that routinely heats the Earth, shouldn't we eliminate it first as the cause of this warming before making me trade in my Escalade for a Mini-Cooper?

When I wrote that piece, I was making an observation that we need to apply some common sense to our understanding of the world in which we live, rather than automatically accept the agenda-driven conclusions of others who use science to further their own venal interests.



If the scientist interpreting the data gets his funding from a government agency, and that agency won't fund the solving of a problem that is nature-made, then what other conclusion can the scientist draw than the problem — and solution — is man-made? Why spend $10 million to fund a research project on sunspot or volcano-driven global warming when we don't have the ability to stop a volcano from erupting, or do anything to affect the sun making its spots?



But if man is the culprit, then there's plenty of reason to keep seeking, and receiving, taxpayer support. And if man — not nature — is the ultimate villain in this modern day morality play, then think of all the social engineering, global reparation payments, or just plain nanny-state fun you can have changing society around to promote a "solution" that can't be proven or disproven for decades to come.


All of which leads to the contemporary notions of "consensus science" and "settled science," which is shorthand for "would you shut up and stop asking these kinds of embarrassing questions because we already have the conclusions we want."

It's the day real science was replaced with the notion that the consensus of non-scientists and scientists, who gather together in quasi-political organizations, was all that was needed to shut down debate. It is, in effect, the day science died.

I no longer trust "science" to be objective. As practiced today, it's just a different form of the base, venal, agenda-driven bilge we see in the mainstream media, whose purpose is not to educate and inform, but to protect and advance a private agenda. I wrote the following passage several months ago, and these words remain as true today as they were then.


Thirty years ago, if a major study said that the Earth was warming, or that red meat caused cancer, or that Candidate X was 30 points ahead in the polls, I may not automatically believe everything it says, but I wouldn't immediately dismiss it out of hand. Depending upon the degree of institutional credibility the study had (that is, The American Cancer Society vs. some organization I never heard of), I may start with the assumption that it's more right than wrong and proceed from there. If I had any questions, I'd look to see how and why the report arrived at its conclusions, and on this basis form a preliminary judgment about those issues.


Now the problem here is that unless you happen to have a degree in statistics, understand survey and polling methodology, or have an expertise in the scientific area of investigation under study, most people (myself included) can't really do this. So, we look instead for certain obvious clues. Is the study of 100 people, or 100,000? Does it say "will happen," or "might happen," or contain other qualifiers? Is the study peer reviewed, or put out by some organization with a vested interest in the matter?

These were the types of clues an intelligent observer would look to in forming an initial judgment. That opinion would be supplemented or diminished over the coming weeks and months as opposing experts in the field – who actually understood the technical stuff I didn't – would debate the matter. I'd learn about this debate from the press, which would summarize and report their findings in sufficient detail for me to see both sides of the issue.


But today there is no "press." There are newspapers and TV companies that have chosen a side and become advocates, not reporters.



We've always had opinion-guided journalism in this country, so this in itself is nothing new. But again we're dealing with a sufficiently different degree of bias that has caused even Hillary (the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy") Clinton to condemn the press for its favoritism and prejudice.


This bias doesn't limit itself to swaying elections. Do you remember the last time you saw a debate on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, or read about it in The New York Times, etc. that explored the reality of man-made global warming? Don't bother to look it up. There hasn't been.

Despite the fact that sea levels aren't rising, that winters are getting colder, that virtually none of Al Gore's predictions have come true and an increasing number of mainstream scientists are challenging the methodology that produced these conclusions, the matter is "settled" in the eyes of the press.

This is because there's a lot more riding on this belief than whether we all need an extra pair of summer shorts to add to our wardrobe. An entire economic and political agenda of the Left is built around the premise that man is producing "global climate change" (the new term of choice since the Earth clearly isn't warming like it was supposed to). Challenge the premise, or at the very least allow for reasonable people to disagree, and suddenly the momentum is gone for acting now! Or, acting at all.


If the only consequence was that we could no longer believe our lying eyes (and ears) about what's being said about Republican politicians and global CO2 emissions, it would be bad enough. But the problem today extends much further than this. Because so much of what's being portrayed as "totally, completely, unmitigatedly true" in fact isn't, and adding insult to injury, the so-called truth of the matter may be the exact opposite of what is stated, the only reasonable course of action is to doubt everything.


And yet, not everything deserves to be automatically doubted. Some studies which show that X causes cancer, Y prolongs life, or Z is harmful or hurtful to man or the environment are undoubtedly legitimate. But damned if I can tell which ones are honestly conducted. Given how politics (with a small "p") has been injected into everything from eating beef to exhaling Co2, and that most studies rely on government funds (which means government biases) or private finds (which means private agendas), only a fool would automatically believe everything he's told. And momma Jackson didn't raise her little boy Phillip to be no fool, much like other people in this country who actually think.


Now, instead of accepting what "objective" sources tell me is true, my first reaction is to make them prove it. I don't care if their conclusions or remedy seem outwardly reasonable or not, or the scientific panel seemed wholly legitimate. I don't accept anything on face value anymore, regardless of its source. I rely entirely on my common sense, which is okay for those things I happen to have some direct experience in or knowledge about.

But there's a lot more I don't know than I do know, and therein lies the problem. In the absence of legitimate, objective, trustworthy outside sources, I still need to rely on my own common sense to figure things out.

Better to trust my gut on an issue I know nothing about, than put my trust in some political hack whose only purpose is to advance an agenda. I may not make the right choice, but at least I'm not a mindless lemming begging to be deceived.

Therefore, if 100 "independent" experts tell me that eating red meat causes cancer, I'll think about it between bites as I put some more Worchester sauce on my steak. If they tell me that more people are likely to die in car accidents if they're driving 75 instead of 55 mph while talking on their cell phones, I'll set the cruise control on 80 while I dial up my brother and ask him what he thinks. I may end up following the experts' advice, or I may not. They're no longer an intrinsic source of information, but rather simply a source of information – to be sifted through with as accepting and questioning an eye as I have for any other report or assessment, from any other source.


When there's no one you can really trust to give you the truth, you trust no one. Or, you make that source earn your trust with every new report they issue, rather than accepting what they say at face value.
Verify, then trust. And in the absence of either, ignore what they say and make your own judgment, as ignorant or informed as it may be.
This is the legacy that modern day "science" has bestowed upon the world. We intuitively understood that politicians were liars. We came to understand that the press covered up and distorted the facts as well to serve their own interests. But we always thought we could rely on science for an unbiased, objective, view of reality.
And now we find out that "scientists" may, in fact, be the worst offenders of all.

No wonder some scientists are atheists. Many of them don't believe in any Truth at all.

[Snowy Owl]

Head of Embattled UK Climate Center Steps Down Amid Misconduct Allegations
Michael Andrews - December 3, 2009

Director admits emails about apparent warming deception "do not read well"

The University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit is one of the world's primary sources for climate data analysis and a close partner to the UN's International Panel on Climate Change. Its researchers have published much of the work that has helped the theory of anthropogenic causation to global warming to gain acceptance in much of research community.

Last week the CRU was the subject of a cyberattack. Hackers released a 160 MB archive of stolen information from the center, including a number of emails from the center's director, Professor Phil Jones.

Some emails were merely embarrassing, such as Jones gloating over the death of a climate change skeptic. Others offer signs of misconduct, with Jones appearing to carry out a campaign to remove climate skeptics from peer review boards. The emails also show Jones discussing how he and researchers under him purposefully altered data to make warming trends seem greater -- what seems to be academic fraud.

The information in the emails has not been confirmed or denied, but the center has confirmed a leak occurred and that it is investigating the matter. On Monday Jones announced via a press release that he would be stepping down as director while the investigations runs its course. He says he still stands by his center's research, though, including his own.

The University's Vice-Chancellor Professor Edward Acton supported Jones' decision to step down. Jones said the move was necessary for the CRU to "[continue] its world leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible."

Supporters of warming have sought to minimize the results. While they have not necessarily questioned the authenticity of the leaked archive, they argue that the leak is a smear campaign. Jones has personally endorsed this theory, writing, "One has to wonder if it is a coincidence that this email correspondence has been stolen and published at this time. This may be a concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks."

The leak indeed offers unfortunate tidings for proponents of climate change legislation. With the U.S. preparing to commit to unprecedented and expensive emissions reductions at the UN Copenhagen global warming talks, members of the U.S. government are now voicing doubts.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, Wisc.-R, is quoted as saying the emails "read more like scientific fascism than scientific process." His colleague Rep. Ed Markey, Mass.-D, however complains that such criticism is merely a distraction from the "catastrophic threat to our planet."

Jones, at the center of the scandal, has made a comment that indicates the emails may be valid. He admitted in a post that the emails "do not read well", but dismisses claims of data alteration and misconduct as mere "confusion".

A close supporter of Jones, Lord Stern, author of the U.K.'s 2006 Stern Report, on Tuesday looked to help the embattled climate change movement by speaking out on his views. He says that the evidence of manmade warming is "overwhelming". He added that all views on the topic should be heard, but that the opinions of warming skeptics might not be valid views in his estimation. He called the skeptics "muddled and confused".

Confusion indeed seems afoot, but perhaps more at the CRU than anyplace else. It should be noted that some researchers appear in the released emails to have not cooperated with Jones' campaign and risked their jobs to preserve their academic integrity. Kevin Trenberth was among those who refused to participate and questioned the certainty of the CRU's conclusions on manmade warming.

The CRU has moved to silence one point of criticism. It has agreed to publish missing land surface temperatures shortly. The research center says that 95 percent of its data has been publicly available for "several years". The center says that its conclusions that man is responsible for warming "correlate well to those of other scientists based on the separate data sets held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)."

It is apt that the CRU's release mentions America's GISS as the CRU warming scandal closely mirrors the controversy over data alterations by Dr. James Hansen director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Dr. Hansen's data was shown to have errors both in 2007 and 2008 which exaggerated warming trends.

[tropical]

#14:
"Who are you going to believe? Scientists, or your lying eyes?"
"But there's a lot more I don't know than I do know, and therein lies the problem. In the absence of legitimate, objective, trustworthy outside sources, I still need to rely on my own common sense to figure things out."



Water will spill on the moon,
when scientists will agree which theory is the right one.

So, in the meantime, it seems better to rely on our own eyes ...

From the #14 above statement, it could be also gained an oposite point of view.

The factual position of the viewer is very important in science.
Example, do you watch a TV siting in a car driving 80mph,
or you watch a TV siting in your bed room.

To clear the picture:
in some world areas the viewers could view/feel cold episodes,
in other areas more hot, as the Aussi or Californian devastating fire periods.

So if one viewer insist that it is colder,
the other elsewhere could insist it is more hot.
The first believe it is a global cooling,
the second that it is a global warming.

If we made a mixture, the common factor could be the appearance of sudden weather changings, from extremely hot to cold, and vv, in a matter of days/hours.

That's the anomaly, the sudden change.

So, our scientists with their previous models couldn't say for sure if something will change at the last moment, because things changed far enaugh.
That's probably why actualy exists pro et contra sci. reports at the same time.

For the ordinary folks point of view,
for example, if the oceans surface layers temps raises as they did;
if various types of fish/.../ changed their usual routes/life/feed areas, as they did,
it is time to take into consideration the obvious eye-spoted life changed facts, not the studies only.
Animals feel more naturaly and behave, so by their behaviour we can suspect a further path on the evaluated area.

Which areas will got mostly a harsh cold stabilization,
and which a hot fire, is to be seen further.

If we added to the pot, as in other human activities, the human tampering factors inducing weather changes,
could we from our unperfect scientific knowledge aspect an univocal answer?

So the mails question could be less relevant, because such scientific human behaviour is sometime historicaly common for both, the pro and the contra field ...

[Snowy Owl]

UN calls for probe into Climategate

http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainabilit...to-climategate

By Andrew Thomas Friday, 04 December 2009 05:58


The Chairman of the UN panel on climate change, the IPCC, says he wants an investigation into claims that scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) manipulated and then destroyed the raw data that forms the basis for nearly all reports into climate change - including those from the IPCC itself.


This is something of an about-turn, as last week, the IPCC's line was very much 'move along, nothing to see here.'

The Climategate scandal threatens to derail the upcoming Copenhagen Climate Conference as a growing number of people are now viewing claims of anthropogenic global warming with suspicion.

The UEA announced an independent investigation into the behaviour of its climate unit yesterday, and earlier today, IPCC Chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri admits that the charges of data manipulation should be investigated.

"We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it. We certainly don't want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail," he told BBC Radio.

The scandal broke in November, when a mole inside the UEA's climate unit sent a Zip file containing a large number of emails to a Russian website. The emails appear to point to a widespread, coordinated conspiracy to massage the raw data held at the University - which is the world's principal repository for base climate data - and to refuse access to it by scientists not considered to be on-side in the climate debate.

Last weekend it was revealed that the CRU had deliberately deleted all its raw data, leaving only its modified statistics available.

See Also
Probe into faked climate stats to begin
Climate boss quits over faked stats
Congress may probe faked global warming data

[tropical]

Probably the comp. forenzics specs have tools to dig out the deleted data from the devices.

Originally Posted by Snowy Owl

UN calls for probe into Climategate

http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainabilit...to-climategate

By Andrew Thomas Friday, 04 December 2009 05:58
...

...

Last weekend it was revealed that the CRU had deliberately deleted all its raw data, leaving only its modified statistics available.

[Snowy Owl]

Probe into faked climate stats


to begin

http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainabilit...stats-to-begin

By Andrew Thomas Thursday, 03 December 2009 11:01
39 Comments
An independent review of the faked climate statistics scandal revealed in leaked emails is set to start. Ex-civil servant Sir Muir Russell will head the probe into the e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK last month.

According to Sir Muir, "Given the nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to either the university or the climate science community looks at the evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find.

"My first task is to scope the project, gather the information I need and source the additional expertise that will be required in order to investigate fully the allegations that have been made."

Professor Phil Jones, formerly boss of the CRU, quit earlier this week after it was revealed that he and his department had apparently systematically faked climate data to ensure it fitted in with the accepted 'truth' of anthropogenic global warming and subsequently deleted the original raw data, making an audit of the figures impossible.

The emails appear to show a global conspiracy between proponents of man-made climate change to over-state the situation in order to receive billions of dollars in research funding. Two separate lawsuits alleging criminal fraud on the part of the CRU have been started by British and Canadian scientists.

The review will concentrate on the 'manipulation or suppression of data at odds with acceptable scientific practice'. In a statement, the University said the review will:

• Examine e-mail exchanges to determine whether there is evidence of suppression or manipulation of data at odds with acceptable scientific practice which 'may therefore call into question any of the research outcomes'.
• Review the CRU's policies and practices for acquiring, assembling, subjecting to peer review and disseminating data and research findings, and 'their compliance or otherwise with best scientific practice'.
• Review the CRU's compliance or otherwise with the UEA's policies and practices regarding requests under the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations for the release of data.
• Review and make recommendations about the management, governance and security structures for the CRU and the security, integrity and release of the data it holds.

In a somewhat ironic coincidence, the CRU's website was today running on an emergency server, carrying the message "Some pages may be out of date. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible."

See Also
Disgraced climate boss quits over faked data




Related Articles

• UN calls for probe into Climategate (Dec 04, 2009)
• Climate boss quits over faked stats (Dec 02, 2009)

[Snowy Owl]

Climategate? What Climategate?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...googlenews_wsj

• OPINION: JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL
• DECEMBER 4, 2009, 1:39 P.M. ET
• Congressional Democrats are Climategate deniers.

The scandal involving leaked or purloined emails from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia finally reached Capitol Hill this week, but not in the way you'd expect.

Democratic committee chairmen ignored the evidence of scientific skullduggery at the influential research unit, even as its head Phil Jones stepped aside this week to make way for an investigation.

Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment Committee, did rouse herself to comment on the emails, saying their release should be treated as a criminal matter. "You call it 'Climategate'; I call it 'Email-theft-gate,'" she said. "Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated."

In the House, the Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing on what Chairman Ed Markey said was "the urgent consensus view . . . that global warming is real, and the science indicates it is getting worse."



But the only witnesses were officials from the Obama administration, who support dramatic action on climate change. Republicans asked to have a global-warming skeptic appear but were denied.


Committee Republicans nonetheless gamely read excerpts from the East Anglia emails and asked the witnesses about them. "These emails show a pattern of suppression, manipulation and secrecy that was inspired by ideology, condescension and profit," claimed Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin.

John Holdren, President Obama's science adviser, held firm, saying the disputed scientific research mentioned in the emails is a small fraction of the total research on climate change. He defended a 2003 email he wrote to one of the East Anglia scientists in which he had ridiculed global warming skeptics.

Rep. Jay Inslee, a Washington Democrat, tried to make light of the emails by saying they weren't stopping the Arctic from shrinking, oceans from getting more acidic, and glaciers from melting. He sarcastically asked Mr. Holdren if he was part of a giant worldwide conspiracy that included fictional movie villain organizations bent on dominating the planet. Mr. Holdren, playing along, denied being part of such a conspiracy.


After the hearing, Rep. Sensenbrenner said the refusal of committee Democrats or President Obama's representatives to take the leaked emails seriously indicated that the "the President's science advisers are at the bottom of the whole climate change debate," and just as intent as the East Anglia scientists in not having a full and open airing of the issue.
To read more stories like this one, please subscribe to Political Diary.

[Snowy Owl]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000...993737848.html

Climategate: Science Is Dying

[/CENTER]Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science.
The nature of that risk has been twofold:

First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity.

Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science.

Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event.

As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences.

Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.

This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally.

Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons.

But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.

The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims—plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish—evokes the attempt to silence Galileo.

The exchanges between Penn State's Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.

For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton's Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.

Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as "the precautionary principle." As defined by one official version: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." The global-warming establishment says we know "enough" to impose new rules on the world's use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science's traditional standards of evidence.

The Environmental Protection Agency's dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant—with implications for a vast new regulatory regime—used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues." Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory.

The Obama administration's new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled "Law and Economics for a Warming World," Ms. Heinzerling wrote, "Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . ."

If the new ethos is that "close-enough" science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas.

Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.

[tropical]

No problem.

The global warming is only one part of the story.

The other is the effect of few hundreds years of human contamination of the planet, which affects everybody's health.

And thus, health of life is the main reason for technology processes change, or rigorous filtering/stocking new laws, if health is promoted.

And health, apart the warming, was mentioned also:
"When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken"

Could we agree that the worldwide chimneys released many other health polutant chems in the air (PCB/diox./...), not only greenhouse gases?
Such streams of air scam circuventing the world, and many of, contaminated even the Arctic pole zones, etc., places without any local possible polution sources (but the subdrills sites).

Time to change, or time to go swimming deeper into the waste?

Maybe the contamination confuters like to insert the contaminant low filtered chimneys at BoraBora, or some of the usual "vip hollidays nests", to demonstrate by a new study how the life/enviro quality will be there after few years/decades ...

More cleaner the technological processes, more cleaner the health, no studies needed.

BTW, the previous arsenic/radionuclides/pesticides soil contaminations related health studies results, are few examples of inconfutable health facts.

___
#21:
"Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as "the precautionary principle." As defined by one official version: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." The global-warming establishment says we know "enough" to impose new rules on the world's use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science's traditional standards of evidence.

The Environmental Protection Agency's dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant—with implications for a vast new regulatory regime—used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues." Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough."

[Snowy Owl]

Climategate: The Backstory

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8CVh2deXTI

[Snowy Owl]

Hide The Decline - Climategate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk

[tropical]

#24: the decline

Maybe the Muppets can play it also ...


I will put one simple grassroot question to be answered without scientific graphs, only plain logic because objective naked eye natural evidence scientificaly is above the later rationalizations, from the coldmans:

Why the poles, and the glaciers, abruptly melts,
if the earth main summed process is freezing instead of warming?


If the answer is that scientific data stil points to freezing,
maybe it is time to change the actual scientific calculations function protocols which process the raw data in a sense of correcting the previous imposted atmo/... fluids/... models, and insert additional new imputs variables.
The above scientific dumping process was a ciclic one during human history ...

Or maybe going on is an willing man made warming producing process superposed on the natural freezing earth cycles raw data state of the matter results, some new man made ongoing tamperings ...

Once, the at the time science, thinked that the earth is flat,
are the actual science so perfect, or of omega knowledge?

If exist a raw or cooked study about precisely how a freezing planet produces warming melting poles and glaciers,
and all without human made tamperings, could it be produced to see it?

[Snowy Owl]

Tropical,

Last Winter has seen hundreds if not thousands of cold temperature records.

We are used to see the temperature with static geographic references.

The Artic melting is slowing down clearly since two years, trends take times to notice and accumulate.

But globally I am deeply convinced, after denying it with virulence that researches leads to a Konstat, that is the global temperature is indeed going down.

[tropical]

Originally Posted by Snowy Owl

Tropical,

Last Winter has seen hundreds if not thousands of cold temperature records.

We are used to see the temperature with static geographic references.

The Artic melting is slowing down clearly since two years, trends take times to notice and accumulate.

But globally I am deeply convinced, after denying it with virulence that researches leads to a Konstat, that is the global temperature is indeed going down.

Hi Snowy,

I have no doubts that there are plenty of abrupt temperature freezing throughout the world, even areas experiencing to be now more colder than previously, but at the same time many other areas experiencing an much more hotter weather during all the year, tested on the inhabitants skins there.
Such more hot regions experiencing also from times to times insurgences of freezing weather, but for short time, and not as was always naturaly, but totaly inpredictable.

Obviously we both couldn't say white to black, but the factual experiences change from region to region.
I remember the once suggested theory of first going global warming, than producing new elements to curb to global cooling.
Also, there were speculated other reasons which could made such abrupt changes.

I can't nor wan't to enter any of them, but one well known to anybody who wants to testify the truth related to health:
heavy chemical/radionuclide pollution impacted human health for decades, and now also impacts our human health, our immune system, and the health of all living species on earth, water, air and ground species.

So the main point of why to cut the emissions (not only greenhouse particles, but all harming; now thousends "dozens") must not be only the possibility of an earth warming, but because of cutting their detrimental influx on live species health.

It is obvious that as once existed some kinds of energy commuter technology, after other kinds, now it could be inserted new kinds.
That's progress if the new kinds will be less pollutant producing.

For the remaining old energy tech., new more stringent factual depuration laws must be inserted to gain a more clean environment, at least what remained of it ...

So I see it as catching 2 flies at once,
clean the heavy polluting (now arising more and more from new world areas) to preserve more the health,
and additionaly influx onto a possible global warming effect if it exist,
if it will be clearly demonstrated that it goes to global freeze, nothing harming would be if the technology will be changed to more clean.
The profits will always be secured, because new tech. means new profits.
As the factories could be made without stringent depurators, could be made with, especialy if get incentives to do that.

The sun will shine if there will be both warm, or cold, in some areas where the sun is more shining, it will produce directly converted el. energy.

In the case of global cooling, at. energy facilities could be builted as fusion type, not fision, if neccessary.
Fantasies?
Maybe not, if the estabs decides so.
As they start to digit now about new electric energy cars serial productions.

So, without entering the dispute if finaly it goes to freeze or to warm,
cutting the now worldwide overwhelming pollution emissions is to be done.

[Snowy Owl]

I totally agree with you that our pollution is directly impacting the environment, fish, animals and humans, NO doubt about this.

Poison dropped in ocean, poisons shuffle under the earth, chemicals use in mining, asbestos, CO2 and all Volitile compound, all these polluants should be stop right in the bud, in the production line.

But naming this whole issue glibal warming is again making the worst polluters in the shade, monsanto, dupont and alikes.

I hope some countries really raise the debate not on the spacegoat of global climate warning but on global health, this is the case indirectly, but the real Health killers are not even consider with this spacegoat path of global warming, that is what is making me mad.

Maybe it is just the first step and I hope so, but this is an astuce to keep on protecting the biggest health polluters and presented with the climate.

This is not a scientific approach determining the priorities this is a political agenda to wich Money and reputation systemic sciences curbs their datas for a political agaenda, now this is clear for me.

This Global Warming spacegoat is killing the sciences because science is now bending its own logics.

But we have to start somewhere but certainly not a scientific properties because a lot of products would have been named and made illegal right away for humanity health before even talking about global warming or even global cooling.

Science has become a service that anybody who can afford it can buy and use to promote their agendas.

[Missouriwatcher]

IPCC chairman talks to CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science...=ib_topstories

[Snowy Owl]

Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak

Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol

• Read the 'Danish text'
• In pictures: Copenhagen day two

• Comments (425)
• Buzz up!
• Digg it (243)

• John Vidal in Copenhagen
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 December 2009 14.09 GMT
• Article history

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.

The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.


The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment" – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.


The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act.



The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.


The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as "a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks".

A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:
• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;
• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called "the most vulnerable";
• Weaken the UN's role in handling climate finance;
• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.

Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.

"It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process," said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.

Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: "This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed."

Hill continued: "It proposes a green fund to be run by a board but the big risk is that it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN. That would be a step backwards, and it tries to put constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks."


The text was intended by Denmark and rich countries to be a working framework, which would be adapted by countries over the next week. It is particularly inflammatory because it sidelines the UN negotiating process and suggests that rich countries are desperate for world leaders to have a text to work from when they arrive next week.


Few numbers or figures are included in the text because these would be filled in later by world leaders. However, it seeks to hold temperature rises to 2C and mentions the sum of $10bn a year to help poor countries adapt to climate change from 2012-15.