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Science Climategate, Issues and Consequences

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bgeh
post Dec 2 2009, 02:00 AM

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Some new developments:

Apparently, 95% of raw data is available

QUOTE
“It is well known within the scientific community and particularly those who are sceptical of climate change that over 95% of the raw station data has been accessible through the Global Historical Climatology Network for several years.  We are quite clearly not hiding information which seems to be the speculation on some blogs and by some media commentators,” commented the University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research Enterprise and Engagement Professor Trevor Davies.

The University will make all the data accessible as soon as they are released from a range of non-publication agreements.  Publication will be carried out in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre.

The procedure for releasing these data, which are mainly owned by National Meteorological Services (NMSs) around the globe, is by direct contact between the permanent representatives of NMSs (in the UK the Met Office).

“We are grateful for the necessary support of the Met Office in requesting the permissions for releasing the information but understand that responses may take several months and that some countries may refuse permission due to the economic value of the data,” continued Professor Davies.

The remaining data, to be published when permissions are given, generally cover areas of the world where there are fewer data collection stations.

“CRU’s full data will be published in the interests of research transparency when we have the necessary agreements. It is worth reiterating that our conclusions 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),” concluded Professor Davies.

So yes, the data is coming
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/...enews/CRUupdate

Also, as for missing data, see this:

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SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.


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Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/envi...icle6936328.ece

This however, does not justify what he states in his emails about rather destroying the data than letting it reach the hands of sceptics. But I can see the plausibility of why so, because the data is generally going to be extremely messy, and depending on the weighting given, you could get almost any kind of cooling/warming. The methodology is the most important factor in discriminating what's just a load of crock, vs. what's an acceptable statistical fit, weighting out less reliable data, etc, etc.

Also, for one of your quotes above:

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Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.


- About that, they actually redid the graph, this time with more datasets instead, available here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13252.full.pdf+html

I haven't followed the press on critiques on it though, but it's probably wait and see now. They might have fixed the flaws pointed out by McIntyre in this new paper

You'll notice Jones', CRU's datasets being used, but there are others too, so you can probably safely ignore those tongue.gif

This post has been edited by bgeh: Dec 2 2009, 02:24 AM
bgeh
post Dec 24 2009, 12:03 AM

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QUOTE
Climategate and the recent IPCC conference in Denmark highlighted some major points - that there isn't a uniform consensus on AGW, and that the developed nations are using this as an excuse to strangle the developing nations by using fear-mongering to subdue less-developed nations.

Yup, if you define consensus in terms of 100% agreement. But a significant majority of scientists, 80% or more, do agree that AGW is occurring. As to using it as an excuse, I disagree - developed countries do recognise that they hold a greater share of the burden, having been the biggest emitters of the current CO2 in our atmosphere.

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Carbon-capping will prevent the industrialization of the less-developed nations. Carbon taxes, carbon trading etc. will some day be just like energy futures and become something that's market-driven rather than being based on real science.
The idea of carbon trading was to provide a flexibility that carbon taxes do not allow - carbon taxes are also not a market based mechanism btw, and it is envisioned that these carbon taxes will have a higher cost in developed countries than developing ones. And there's real science behind these carbon markets - there is an explicit limit for carbon emissions for the whole market.

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Somehow, there are humans who are so stupid as to think that puny humans can change the world's climate with our doing, when a majority of the planet's surface in terms of volume and area are the oceans (which has hardly any human presence). A single volcano eruption is more powerful than a 1000 hiroshima nukes. A single underwater earthquake is more energetic than a few hundred thousand of the world's most powerful nuclear warheads.
False, take a look at CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere for the past 500 thousand years or so, and try to link the increase in these concentrations to natural events, and especially, try to explain the rise since the 1800s in CO2 concentrations using only natural events. That 1 human, or a thousand cannot change the Earth in a large scale way, I may agree, that 6 billion humans cannot change the Earth in a large scale way, that I disagree.

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And we think our industrialization will bring about the end of the world?
No one who is quite reasonable is saying the world will end. It will just change, quite a lot, in a very short timeframe, and this will have significant effects (e.g. a local climate change might cause droughts in previously fertile agricultural land, etc. etc.)

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Our industrialization did bring about changes to the environment but when the Earth's climate changes naturally, it'll be much more than what humans are capable of. Look at the 70s, when there was a global cooling and everyone's afraid of a new "Little Ice Age". From WW2 until the 70s, for more than 3 decades, we were on a crazy industrialization drive.
Yup, there are plenty of natural events that can outweigh all the effects of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The thing is, they're exceedingly rare - e.g. massive volcano erupting, cooling the atmosphere overall, solar flux changes at a rate large enough to significantly change the atmospheric temperature, etc. etc. Thing is, this crazy industrialisation drive has only increased further in the past 30 years.

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How do we also explain the fact that the atmospheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn recorded an average increase of 0.5 degrees in the past 20 years or so? Human colonies spewing CO2 and greenhouse gases into their atmospheres?
Evidence please? Also, please show that this is a global thing, not a local change.

This post has been edited by bgeh: Dec 24 2009, 12:08 AM

 

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