The amount of University of East Anglia material made public by an unknown person is pretty overwhelming. Just reading it all takes a lot of time and first you have to know who these people are. Luckily, there is a very good analysis on the web written by John P. Costella. It's on his website at http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/.
He doesn't review all of the e-mails. He concentrates on those that show poor science at work or reflect on the attitudes of the senders. And he does a great job of annotating them and commenting on their significance.
He actually color codes the e-mails by sender for the key players:
* Mike Mann: lead conspirator in the United States
* Phil Jones: lead conspirator in the United Kingdom
* Tom Wigley: older conspirator who becomes increasingly worried about the unfolding scandal
* Keith Briffa: older conspirator whose blunders lead the others to all but abandon him
* Ben Santer: dangerously arrogant and naive young conspirator in the United States
* Other conspirators: of varying degrees of complicity and integrity
* Skeptics and other unrelated parties
Costella's analysis is still underway. It currently stops at May, 2008. (The emails extend into October, 2009.)
Good reading. It's recommended!
Good reading. It's recommended!
3 comments:
I see there is lots of raw data and model code available to the public, gathered together here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/. Now I'd like to see an independent analysis of all of that that comes to some different conclusions. But whoever does it should beware of using sources of funding that have any opinions!
This is an on-going saga.
1) A lot of data exists, but some of it is contradictory. Still, often the papers don't offer links to the data or the portion of it that they used. That makes reproducibility a guessing game.
2) There have even been instances in which data was requested and refused, even one instance in which they claimed to have lost it. Another in China where they couldn't find it because the researcher had retired. Any credible journal requires the data to be archived, but even the best journals do not enforce that rule and very few researchers make it available.
3) The data itself is often extremely questionable. Obvious errors are not removed before publishing the data. Example: Satellite measurements of surface temperature readings of 450F in the Great Lakes! Beyond that, many data sets are not original data, they have been "homogenized" and neither the original data nor the methods used to "homogenize" it are available. When the original data is available, time and again corrections are made to lower early temperatures and raise recent ones with no explanation nor justification. Corrections for Urban Heat Island effects are notoriously just the opposite of what one would expect.
4) Here's a recent example of lousy data. http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/2010/11/problems-with-the-ncdc-global-temperature-data/ Basically, after admitting errors in the original data, they released a corrected set with a large number of simple arithmetic errors.
So it's often not even a matter of finding the "original data." The observer has to vet the data because the collecting agency did not. Then he or she has to decipher the changes made by a researcher and figure out why they were made. The situation is truly untenable. The "scientists" are so sloppy that nothing is believable.
Couple this with the defensive attitude of the warmist community and it begins to look like we need to clean house.
Oh, and on the sources of funding. Where is it going to come from if you can't use funds from sources that have a dog in this hunt? Government has a definite opinion, that's why they fund the warmists. Even big oil gives more to them than to skeptics. Face it, industry doesn't lose, they usually gain. Worst case is they pass on the increased cost of business to the consumer. It's like Obama said - the cost of electricity will go up.
Sorry, the URL in my last comment was truncated. Try http://tinyurl.com/2vq8caa
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