http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/30-11-2009/110832-climategate-0

In an item dated yesterday, Pravda names the key names, including “James Holdren, US President Barack Obama’s new ‘Science Czar’. ”

“The emails and documents reveal that the scientists at the CRU and their colleagues in the USA not only falsified their data to ‘prove’ Global Warming, they also collaborated to prevent qualified scientists who disagreed with the theory of Global Warming from publishing or participating in the ‘peer reviews’ process. The belief in Global Warming among scientists is not a consensus; it is a dictatorship. ”

Also yesterday, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs — in response to a question from a Fox News reporter said “climate change is happening.” “I don’t think that’s anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore,” he said during Monday’s press briefing.

I got separate confirmation that many scientists beleive that issue over “divergence” means the CRU data is fundamentally suspect.

I keep harping on this issue because it’s important and Warren has an interest in it.

Mann & Co’s temperature history is based at least in part at looking at tree ring density as a proxy to measure long ago temperatures. But their own papers acknowledge that their tree ring proxies diverged from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960 … and they can’t explain why.

Now some of us might have drawn the inference that maybe the tree rings weren’t such good proxies for temperatures after all. Things like rainfall that year, etc. might have been a contributing factor. Or that it’s just too clever by half.

Instead these guys felt pressed to massage the data to correct for this phenomenon. So they blended data to smoooth the transition. They actually use this as their innocent explanation for “hide the decline.”

What am I missing? Your tree rings don’t work for recent years when we had good instrumentation, so you you massage the data to smooth a fit? I’d have thrown out the tree ring proxy theory as disproved. It’s the only validated experimental conclusion they have — and they ignored it!

They say it’s OK because it was peer-reviewed. What am I missing?

Here are two selections from their literature:

The “decline” refers to the “divergence problem”. This is where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed as early as 1998, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone’s email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the decadal-scale trends in wood density and summer temperatures have increasingly diverged as wood density has progressively fallen. The cause of this increasing insensitivity of wood density to temperature changes is not known, but if it is not taken into account in dendroclimatic reconstructions, past temperatures could be overestimated. Moreover, the recent reduction in the response of trees to air-temperature changes would mean that estimates of future atmospheric CO2 concentrations, based on carbon-cycle models that are uniformly sensitive to high-latitude warming, could be too low.

The lack of coverage by MSM is the dog that didn’t bark.

1. Confusing sentences, paragraphs, or paper organization; difficult to interpret figures; unclear figure captions; etc, etc, etc
2. Dodging talking about the controversial decisions or passing too lightly over hard questions. Note that these are the things that CRU didn’t (apparently) want to do.
3. Failing to cite some important reference (Hat tip to Larry. But, I’d found three of the four important references. That last one did not change my conclusions.)

As a highly competitive academic, I have written and published peer reviewed articles with the expressed purpose of refuting other previously published, peer reviewed papers. We can’t both be right! I rather enjoyed it because the folks I was shooting at were from such a “high brow” institution, Cambridge University. In their reply, they grumpily admitted that I was correct, but their paper is still out there, ready to mislead the unwary.

Peer review simply means that a few other folks have looked at the paper and said OK. Sometimes that look is fairly in depth, and other times it is startlingly shallow.

The business of “getting published” (aka “getting tenured”, or, later, “getting funded”) is simple this:

Write required number of words, with lots of footnotes affirming that every thing you said has been said before by a Relevant Authourity.

Send it in, where an Editor will be assigned who will send it out to Reviewers who will check your footnotes to be sure they were accurately transcribed.

One or two reviewers my actually read what you wrote, with a view of trying to detect attempts to slip unfootnoted items by.

This process will iterate for months or years, depending on the reviewer’s need to copy you footnotes into their work.

Eventually, depending on filler requirements at the Respected Journal, you will be Published.

James Hansen is a big name in AGW. He’s director of NASA’s Goddard Institute.

He’s quoted today as saying that the “Copenhagen approach” is a fraud. He says that offsets and cap-and-trade must be exposed. Funny thing, I say the same thing.
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/29/copenhagen-summit-climate-change

Where we disagree is the implications of this. Like Hansen, I see the politics as a sham that won’t solve the purported problem. So I conclude that Al Gore is full of shit and work backwards from there.

Hansen is instead a true AGW believer: “It is a dead certainty that continued high emissions will create a chaotic dynamic situation for young people, with deteriorating climate conditions out of their control.” So his answer is for the World to stop using coal totally in 20 years. No new synfuels either. He wants big carbon taxes across the board. He alludes to Lincoln and the slaves, and Churchill and the Nazis. It’s for the kids.

Copenhagen could be very entertaining.