The Policy Lass

One of the submissions is from Peabody Energy — the largest private sector coal producer in the world.

Here is just a brief excerpt from the submission:

The CRU emails, however, reveal that the authors of this material did not present a neutral view of the science. In particular, they downplayed the considerable uncertainty inherent in trying to approximate temperatures from proxy data over a 1000-year period, they suppressed contrary information, and they suppressed dissenting views in ways that made even their own colleagues uncomfortable. Thus, in one representative email written during the preparation of the TAR, Keith Briffa stated that “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.“ He went on to say that “I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.” Similarly, another key researcher, Ed Cook, in a lengthy email bristling at the effort to eliminate the MWP, wrote that “I do find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global event to be grossly premature and probably wrong.“

Science has its uncertainties and its debates about how uncertain data is and how valid methods are. Here, the article claims that the IPCC ignored or brushed aside Briffa’s concerns that the MWP was as warm as the current warm period. That was not the consensus view. Was it really brushed aside? Continue reading →…

In light of some comments of Ron Cram, I would like to make a few points:

1. The opinions I express on this blog are my own and do not represent those of my employer.

2. I am not and have never been a member of the communist party.

Thank you.

Here’s the webpage hosting the “memoranda” submitted to the committee.  I think it would be a good idea to review the contents of the memoranda, don’t you?  Let’s pick a few and review the content.

Here, for example, is one from Steve McIntyre, in which he comes right out and states it — the CRU deliberately and arbitrarily adjusted,  ‘bodged’, deleted, manipulated, cherry picked and withheld data:

Summary

1. Reconstructions of temperature over the past 1000 years have been an highly visible part of IPCC presentations to the public. CRU has been extremely influential in IPCC reconstructions through: coauthorship, the use of CRU chronologies, peer review and IPCC participation. To my knowledge, there are no 1000-year reconstructions which are truly “independent” of CRU influence. In my opinion, CRU has manipulated and/or withheld data with an effect on the research record. The manipulation includes (but is not limited to) arbitrary adjustment (“bodging“), cherry picking and deletion of adverse data. The problem is deeply rooted in the sense that some forms of data manipulation and withholding are so embedded that the practitioners and peer reviewers in the specialty seem either to no longer notice or are unoffended by the practices. Specialists have fiercely resisted efforts by outside statisticians questioning these practices – the resistance being evident in the Climategate letters. These letters are rich in detail of individual incidents. My submission today will not comment on these individual incidents (some of which I’ve commented on already at Climate Audit), but to try to place the incidents into context and show why they matter to the research record. I will not comment in this submission on CRUTEM issues only for space reasons.[my emphasis]

You can read the rest of the submission for yourself, but what really made me throw up in my mouth laugh was this: Continue reading →…

Over at CA, The One is making comparisons between the CRU hack and Enron. Analogies are interesting things. I kinda think of this when I think of denialists and contrarians and their followers…

Zombie Fungus Destroys Brain

I guess BRE-X isn’t enough innuendo for McIntyre when it comes to climate science — he has to go for Enron — perhaps the biggest corporate and political scandal in recent history.

There’s this really interesting thing I’ve noticed over at CA — a tendency to passive-aggressive posts where Mci writes X and then qualifies it so that it doesn’t appear like X, but maybe only kinda like X so that no one can claim he actually wrote X. Meanwhile, his blog readers and aficionados understand quite well the nudge and wink they’ve been given to assume X and so they do. X spreads like a fungal growth that affects the brains of the unsuspecting…

But it’s not always wise to make such analogies because “all too often, one gets drawn into debates about the analogy that are just as complex as the original issue. Or debates about the validity of the analogy.”   Continue reading →…