8 July 2010
The Climate Policy Network – Published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation
Labour MP Calls For Climategate Re-Assessment
[I should bloody well think so. The Oxburgh whitewash should be "re-assessed" too.]1) Labour MP Calls For Climategate Re-Assessment
Daily Express, 8 July 2010 Donna Bowater[...] But critics described the report as “inadequate” after failing to establish why scientists deleted the emails.
MP Graham Stringer, who sat on the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee which also carried out an inquiry into the row, criticised Sir Muir’s report. He said it fell short because it was unable to access thousands of other emails to establish whether there was a conspiracy among climate scientists at the CRU.
Mr Stringer said: “To make sense of whether there was a conspiracy, whether they really tried to subvert the peer review process, you would have had to look at these emails. It’s an inadequate report that doesn’t do the job. It’s not going to allay anybody’s fears.“I certainly believe the matter should return to the House of Commons to be debated because this is the basis of spending billions of dollars worldwide.”
2) GWPF Announces Investigation Into Climategate Inquiries
The Global Warming Policy Foundation has criticised the Independent Climate Change Email Review for a lack of openness and transparency in its inquiry. In response, the GWPF announced that it has commissioned its own investigation into the way the three Climategate inquiries have been set up, how they were conducted an how they arrived at their conclusions.[...] "There is clearly strong evidence of mishandling of the FOI requests and strong criticism of the university's failure to provide data and information. I don't think the university can just claim that this is a vindication."
Dr Peiser added that the issue of credibility and transparency in climate science would not go away with this report.
3) Editorial: No Closure to Climategate until a Culture of Openness has taken Root
CHANCES are the final review of the "Climategate" affair won’t succeed in cooling the rhetoric about global warming. Nor will it mark a fresh start in relations between skeptics and believers — although that would be the most desirable outcome.That’s because the investigation into the conduct of scientists at the world’s leading climate research body at the University of East Anglia in Britain has produced a report that allows both sides to claim some vindication.
On the positive side, the inquiry by former U.K. civil servant Muir Russell throws an all-important life preserver to the science of man-made climate change, which found itself under growing attack after 1,000 hacked emails from the university were leaked last year. In their correspondence, the Climatic Research Unit scientists hardly appeared objective — slamming their critics, discussing how to blackball them and leaving the impression they were manipulating data.
But Mr. Russell drew an important distinction upon presenting his conclusions: "Ultimately, this has to be about what they did, not what they said."
At a fundamental level, he found that "the honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt." Nor did he find cause to believe the underpinnings of climate science were flawed.On the negative side, the CRU scientists were their own worst enemies. They were "unhelpful and defensive" when dealing with Freedom of Information requests from skeptical scientists who wanted to test their conclusions, and the report suggested there was "evidence that emails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable, should a subsequent request be made for them."
In short, a bunker mentality and a culture of secrecy had burgeoned at the university. (It has since taken steps to correct the problems.
The CRU scientists have been quick to claim complete exoneration, but the truth is they have done their profession a disservice. Making your work and methods available to all, so they can stand up to scrutiny, is integral to sound science — and on that score, the scientists compromised their integrity. There will be no closure to "Climategate" until a culture of openness has demonstrably taken root.
4) Opinion: Climate science's watery reprieve
National Post, 8 July 2010 Terence CorcoranFor all the defence it runs for CRU and the IPCC, the Russell review portrays climate science as a field filled with uncertainty, debate, lack of openness, data hoarding and ill-will. Modern science, especially climate science, it says, deserves better. "There needs to be better communication, as well as greater openness enabling more scientific debate."
The Climategate emails, made public last November, have already rocked the climate science world, and climate science -- even in the wake of this review -- will never be the same.
The popular launch pad for the consensus proof that man-made climate science is a crisis was the famed Michael Mann 1999 hockey stick graphic that purported to show that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere in the last half century were the hottest in 1,000 years. The Russell review, tip-toeing through the landmines in the emails about the "trick" of "hiding the decline," ends up with the watery conclusion that the hockey stick graph was indeed "misleading." In magic, being misleading via sleight of hand to hide something is pretty much the heart of a trick, but the Russell review twists itself around to downplay the trick element. "When used by scientists, [trick] can mean for example a mathematical approach brought to bear to solve a problem."
But in the hockey stick graph, no such math was involved. The creators of the hockey stick took a thousand years worth of tree ring temperature data, eliminated some of the data from 1960 forward that didn't support the 1,000-year claim, and then spliced on actual temperature data, without telling anybody what they had done. Then they magically announced they had found a smoking climate graphic that became a global icon for the climate crusade.
[...] The story behind all this and other issues does not make for comfortable reading for IPCC supporters. On IPCC science, the Russell review takes a side shot at the official risk-rating system. The IPCC typically issues statements such as "the present is likely warmer than in the past." What does this mean? The review has doubts. To issue such assessments "as objectively as possible would require a complex (and difficult) study to perform hypothesis resting in a mathematically rigorous way ... We are not aware that this has been done in the producing of IPCC reports to date." Is it therefore highly likely that the IPCC risk assessments are not based on good science and math?
There are scores of other highlights in the review that point to a science community in need of openness and reform, and as many that point to areas where the Russell review either evaded certain facts or fell into stiff technical treatment of instances where somebody obviously engaged in thuggish suppression of papers, but the evidence pointed no fingers -- despite the emails. "Emails," said the review, "are rarely definitive evidence of what actually happened."
True, in one sense, but tell that to Wall Street bankers who have gone to criminal trial on the basis of a few lines of email.
5) Opinion: Climate email inquiry: bringing democracy to science
The Guardian, 7 July 2010 Richard Horton
Sir Muir Russell has written the final chapter on "climategate". At least, the final official chapter. Bloggers, hackers, and sceptics will pore over his findings to dissect and destroy his carefully weighed conclusions. Already his Independent climate change email review is being branded a whitewash. In fact, the Russell review is nothing of the sort.
6) And Finally: What's It Mean For The Bloke On The Bus?
The Register, 7 July 2010 Andrew OrlowskiThe University of East Anglia's enquiry into the conduct of its own staff at its Climatic Research Unit has highlighted criticisms of the department and staff conduct - but clears the path for the individuals concerned to carry on.
The CRU played an important role in writing the UN's IPCC summaries on climate science, so the issue is far from a parochial one. The most serious charge is poor communication; Sir Muir Russell even calls for "a concerted and sustained campaign to win hearts and minds" to restore confidence in the team's work.
Russell was appointed by the institution to investigate an archive of source code and emails that leaked onto the internet last November. The source code is not addressed at all. His report suggests that the problems were of the academics' own making, stating that they were "united in defence against criticism". Yet the enquiry found that despite emails promising to "redefine" the peer review publication process, and put pressure on journal editors, staff were not guilty of subverting the IPCC process, and their "rigour" and "honesty" were beyond question.
Leading academics were called for written and oral evidence before the Russell enquiry, and in many cases the report accepts their account of events. For example, wearing their IPCC hats, the academics are cleared of excluding critical evidence, and yet bending the rules to include supporting studies. To reach this particular conclusion, for example, the report finds a criterion: a "consistence of view" with earlier work… by the academics in question.
My opinion.
None of the alarmist reviews have been been fair or comprehensive. A judge and jury would have been more appropriate.
Houghton and Maurice Strong's UNEP, IPCC and UNFCCC have been given licence to continue to misinform and demand amputation of a leg for a suspected broken fingernail, to coin a metaphor.
Houghton's CRU has been given licence to continue manipulating data to support the political and financial agenda of false alarmism.
The whitewash of the incompetent or deceptive Mann has a set an all-time low standard of what is acceptable as "scientific" research.
For what? The theory hinges on "back" radiation that defies the law of physics:
This detail of a UN/IPCC chart depicts an impossible process
In short: heat flows from hot to cold but there is no physics corresponding to a flow from cold to hot analogous to "backradiation". Heat can radiate from a hot to a cold body, but not from a cold to a hot. In other words:
#Backradiation corresponds to an unstable unobservable unphysical process.
(Articles here, here and here.)
And on amplification of miniscule warming benefit of CO2 that the weight of evidence from satellites and balloons determines a range between an insignificant positive (warming) and a significant negative (cooling) feedback by clouds and water vapour. (Dr. Spencer, Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data )
[...] the lapse rate is strongly affected by moisture, which, in turn, is strongly affected by sea temperature. What is more important is that the moisture tends to condense into clouds under certain atmospheric/aerosols conditions. The lapse rate ("moisture adiabate") tends to DECREASE with higher moisture content providing a negative feedback. Clouds also provide negative feedback by reducing insolation.
Needless to say that all of listed processes occur under strong non-isotropic turbulent conditions, and are way beyond the reach of any direct computer modeling. As result, either a hand-made parameterizations have to be used, or parameterizations of experimental data. Given the spatio-temporal complexity of atmospheric patterns, data from few weather balloons cannot be seriously considered as a good representation of average atmospheric structure. The reference to HITRAN/MODTRAN serves no purpose for this discussion since the code uses a pre-selected fixed MODEL of atmospheric profile. In MODTRAN, there are 84 different models for atmospheric profiles; each gives different result for amount of OLR and surface temperature. So, what would be your selection of models across the globe to include into a global greenhouse model? How objective or subjective it could be? As you see, the "fundamental physics" of absorption spectra or two-stream Schwarzschild equations are not all the sophistications you need to build a model of GH effect and calculate its amplitude. From here.
Dr. Lindzen: When you substitute the concentration of 560 ppm (parts per million), you obtain something like 1 Celsius degree increase relatively to the pre-industrial era. But even if you plug in the current concentration of 380 ppm, you obtain about 0.76 Celsius degrees of "global warming". Although we have only completed about 40% of the proverbial CO2 doubling, we have already achieved about 75% of the warming effect that is expected from such a doubling: the difference is a result of the exponentially suppressed influence of the growing carbon dioxide concentration.
Dr. Marohasey: Four Reasons Why Carbon Dioxide is Not Driving Global Warming.
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